by Paul Elder
Time seemed to slow. I drifted at the edge of consciousness, lost in my fading thoughts. Finally, too tired to even think, I let go, surrendering to the inevitable. Darkness engulfed me. How long I remained unconscious I could not be sure, but the next thing I knew, from deep within, came the abrupt sound of a loud, pinging bell. Crashing into my awareness, it jolted me to the core. Then, to my surprise, I started to move.
Slowly, like a feather wafting on a breeze, I lifted off the stretcher and into the air. It was a peculiar feeling. Although the movement felt similar to my previous out-of-body experiences, I knew that this time I was definitely not in control. Strangely, the pain, so excruciating only moments earlier, simply evaporated.
From a deep darkness, my vision began to open around me as I felt myself bumping up against the roof of the ambulance. I watched the paramedic below as she adjusted the oxygen mask on my face and checked the time on her wristwatch.
Having experienced a touch of fear moments earlier, I now wondered why I had been so worried. Although realizing this might be the last time I would be leaving my body, I remained calm and collected. There was no doubt in my mind that I was dying, and I began to consider the consequences.
“Jesus,” I thought, “Candace is going to be pissed off.” I remembered that just a couple of weeks earlier she had been giving me hell for thinking that I could just run off and play hockey without first getting into proper shape. In all the years that we'd been married, she had never brought up that concern. But she had her reasons. A few months earlier, a friend of ours had died of a heart attack after an evening of floor hockey. Several weeks later, another friend barely survived a heart attack at the age of 39. “You're not 20 anymore,” she warned. “You're 41. Do you want to kill yourself?”
I had, of course, just laughed her off. “What are you talking about?” I argued. “I've never been in better shape.” Now I wondered if this would be my contribution to the collection of “famous last words.”
The thought of leaving her and the kids behind weighed heavily on my mind, and an intense sadness came over me. Then suddenly I found myself floating in the living room of my home. Candace and David scurried about, getting ready for church service. I remembered it was Sunday morning.
I loved my family intensely, but I knew that even though my death would be tough on them for a while, they would survive. They understood that we don't really die; we just move on to a different realm. I was confident that they would be fine and someday we'd be together again. Whispering a sad goodbye, I felt another shift in perception, and a moment later, I was back near my body.
As I floated again inside the ambulance, I began to feel a tug, something pulling at me. Then, slowly, as if being drawn by an unknown force, I started to move upwards. Within moments I was pushing through the roof of the ambulance. I felt the various layers of materials, the fabric, the insulation, and finally the metal, as I slowly emerged out the top into the crisp morning air.
Rising to about 20 feet, I flew alongside the ambulance as it roared through the streets. After a few blocks, the tugging became stronger. Somehow I knew it was time to go. So without concern or apprehension, I simply gave in, accepting my fate. In a moment the streets, the houses, and finally, the ambulance faded into a gray mist. Euphoria overcame me. My body may have been dying, but I had never felt better.
The mist around me grew steadily thicker, turning to black. I was floating in a dark void. Remarkably, I wasn't afraid—instead I became increasingly energized with delight and anticipation. Powerful vibrations coursed through me, and then, like a jet accelerating down a runway, I started to move through the darkness. Before long it felt like I was traveling at a tremendous rate. I was drawn toward a pinpoint of light in the distance ahead and could barely contain my excitement. The urgency and yearning to reach the light became consuming. It seemed I had waited so long for this moment. I was finally going home, and there was nothing I wanted more.
Oblivious to everything else, I became absorbed in my goal when, suddenly, a huge spasm virtually exploded through my awareness, jarring every particle of my being. The next instant, I was back inside my body.
I couldn't believe the assault on my senses as I opened my eyes in the emergency room at the hospital. The pain had returned, flooding through my body in waves. In shock, I knew only one thing for sure: I didn't want to be back.
A nurse struggled to insert an IV needle into a vein in my left wrist while a doctor barked his instructions. Everything around me seemed too bright, too harsh. My jacket and shirt were pulled back, exposing my chest, and I found myself screaming, “No, please, this is a mistake. Let me go. Please let me go!” The words, however, seemed caught up in my mind; there was no sound.
In a surreal haze I could see and hear everything around me, but I had lost control of my body. I felt like a rag doll as a doctor pulled off my shirt and flopped me back down onto the table. While one of the physicians injected me with drugs, another put his face in front of mine. Slowly, but firmly, he spoke to get my attention. “Paul,” he said, “you're having a heart attack. You've got to relax.”
His words sounded bizarre and incomprehensible. Me, having a heart attack? Ridiculous! And if it was true, how in hell did he expect me to relax?
The pain was more than I could handle. It felt like there was a huge weight on my chest squeezing the life out of me, but it was nothing compared to the pain in my left elbow. If I could have spoken, I would have begged them to cut it off. I would rather go through the remainder of my life missing an arm than have to endure another minute of that pain.
IV bottles flying, they rushed me out of the emergency room and into the intensive care unit. For more than an hour, the doctors worked frantically to clear the blockage from my heart. The pain, somewhat lessened by morphine, continued to be excruciating. In my horrified state, time dragged agonizingly slowly.
The most mind-bending part of the whole experience came about while watching the drama unfold around me. It was intriguing. If I hadn't been feeling so lousy, I'm sure I would have enjoyed watching all the action even more.
Especially spellbinding was the minidrama of the EGG machine as it displayed a continuous graph of my heart rhythm. It would show a steady rhythm of heartbeats, and then it would go crazy. There might be as many as five rapid beats in a row as my heart fibrillated, and then it would stop and miss several beats. Continuing this way for almost an hour, the erratic display was more than a little scary and surreal. Often when my heart stopped beating or began missing beats, I wondered if this would be the time when it wouldn't start up again.
As time wore on, the doctors became increasingly concerned I would not survive. They decided they had better allow my wife in to see me. Candace appeared shaken, but not as badly as I thought she might be. To her credit, not once did she say, “I told you so,” although she later confided that she had certainly thought about it.
The situation was becoming critical in more ways than one. If I were to survive, the longer the blood-flow was blocked, the more damage there would be to my heart muscle. Too much permanent damage wouldn't leave me with great prospects for a future.
Finally, after an eternity and an arsenal of drugs, the blockage dissolved. I became nauseated for about 30 seconds, and then, like someone had thrown a switch, the pain disappeared and I felt instantly better. My heart rhythm returned to normal and so did my thought processes. When it was all over, exhausted, I fell into a deep, deep sleep.
Later, when I awoke, the episode seemed like a bad dream. I couldn't believe it had happened to me. Several days would pass before the totality of the experience settled in. My recollection of the pain was all too real, but the memory of the near-death experience was wonderful.
Such a paradox: one of the most wonderful experiences in my entire life had been dying. For the first time in years, I recalled my previous encounter with death at the bottom of the murky dugout when I was 12. All the details flooded back into my mind, releasing with it
countless long-forgotten childhood memories and emotions. It was too much to bear. Tears welled up in my eyes, and I cried.
Death, I realized, would be a glorious event. Rather than something to fear, it was something to look forward to. The physical pain of a heart attack I wouldn't want to repeat, but the dying part was beautiful. Strangely, although thankful for the spiritual experience, I was somewhat disappointed. I had read numerous accounts of other people's near-death experiences. Some of them had had fabulous encounters with light-beings who guided them through life reviews. This hadn't happened to me. I hadn't received the full deal, and I felt gypped.
In the weeks following the heart attack, I went through a range of emotions. In the beginning, I didn't want to believe that it had happened to me, but when it was confirmed that 25 percent of my heart muscle had been permanently damaged, self-pity often overwhelmed me. I had been physically active through most of my life. When it became apparent that I could hardly walk up a flight of stairs without becoming winded, it shook me to the core.
My family seemed to handle everything in stride, but they were at times perplexed by my emotional swings. One moment I would be fine and the next practically reduced to tears. The doctors explained that this gamut of emotions was normal for most heart attack victims, but to me it didn't matter. For the first time, I didn't seem to be in control of my own body. The possibility that I could, at any moment, drop dead in front of my children was greatly distressing. Over the next year, there was hardly a day when I didn't consider how vulnerable I'd become.
Following the heart attack, I came to realize the degree to which my children had been affected by my previous out-of-body experiences. Prior to the incident, I had shared many of the stories with them, and they had been accepting of the spiritual changes taking place in my life. Candace told me that after receiving a call from the emergency room that Sunday morning, she had bundled the kids into the car, apprising them of the seriousness of my situation. During their long stay in the waiting-room, our daughter Stacey became teary-eyed and said, “But Mom, Daddy likes it on the Other Side so much, what if he doesn't come back?” To this day, I cannot think about that without a lump in my throat.
A month after I was released from hospital, my sister Evalina finally made the transition to the Other Side. Along with the rest of our family, I was relieved she would no longer suffer. Her six-month coma had been hard on the family. Everyone was emotionally and physically exhausted. The funeral seemed anticlimactic as most of us had all but completed our grieving. I, however, had a different perspective on her death from the others. I knew that she was in good hands and that I would be seeing her again.
In the first few months following my second near-death experience, I found out-of-body travel virtually impossible. Try as I might, I couldn't free my mind enough to relax. Whenever I tried, the vivid images of my dying would play over and over in my mind. I was haunted by strong emotions. The experience itself had been extraordinary, and even though I had been initially upset at being brought back to this painful physical world, I wasn't ready to leave. I still had a lot to learn, and there were so many things I needed to do. Time, however, heals all things, and although it took more than a year, my life, along with my spiritual quest, slowly returned to normal.
Reading in bed one night, I became so droopy-eyed I set the book aside and turned off the lights. After tossing and turning for several minutes, it was becoming apparent I wasn't ready to sleep, so I decided to try to move into an altered state. Within a short time, a high-pitched tone began in the center of my head and I thought it might be possible to do some exploring.
Just as the familiar vibrations started, I felt an annoying itch in the calf muscle of my right leg. I didn't want to ruin the altered state by scratching, but it was driving me crazy. So, while lying on my back, I thought that perhaps if I moved my arm very slowly I could reach the itch and still maintain my level of consciousness. Slowly I inched my fingers forward, but it soon became obvious that I might have to either twist my body to the side or lift my legs in order to reach the spot. Concentrating, I continued to stretch, reaching farther and farther until I realized that my fingertips were already well below my knee. This was impossible.
There was no way my physical arm could stretch that far. My body, however, felt completely normal, and I began to wonder how far I might be able to reach.
Again I stretched with ease and I soon felt the tips of my fingers moving down my calf to the bottom of my leg. What a bizarre feeling! An image of a monkey popped into my mind and I almost laughed out loud. Regaining control, I pushed on. In no time, my hand was reaching past my ankle and making its way through the blanket at the bottom of the bed. The absurdity of it was too much to believe, and I had to giggle at the strangeness of it all.
Committed, I was having too much fun to stop. As I continued to reach out into the darkness, I thought, “Jeez, I sure hope Candi doesn't wake up. She'd be in for a hell of a surprise.”
My arm, or at least my perception of it, continued to stretch until the tips of my fingers bumped into a solid object. Feeling around, I discerned a smooth, raised wooden surface. It had to be the dresser, but that was at least 12 feet away from the foot of the bed. For this to be possible, my arm would have to be at least 18 feet long. The whole thing struck me as terribly funny, and I struggled to maintain control.
Slowly but firmly I pushed against the smooth surface of the dresser. After a slight resistance, my fingers slid easily through the cabinet door and into the sweaters stacked on a small inner shelf. I kept going. Soon I was through the thin panel at the back of the dresser and into the wall behind it. As I continued on through the drywall and into the wall cavity, my hand brushed lightly along the side of a two-by-four-inch stud where I felt something sharp. Sticking out of the edge of the stud was a drywall nail. Poorly aimed, it had almost missed the stud entirely. I'm not sure why this stood out in my mind, but it occurred to me that perhaps some day I could cut into the wall to check it out, if for no other reason than to verify for myself that what I felt inside the wall was really there.
I had just begun to consider what to do next, when something pulled at my awareness. A cough was building in my throat. I tried to resist for a while, but the urge finally overcame me. In an instant my consciousness was back to normal, and so was my arm.
Over the next several months I occasionally thought about the bent nail I had found in the wall. Although my curiosity had been piqued, the prospect of all of the work involved in cutting open the wall and repairing it kept me from checking it out. Almost a year later, however, I ended up doing some renovations in an adjoining bathroom and my curiosity got the best of me. The work involved some drywall patching on another part of the room, so I thought if I have to patch and paint anyway, why shouldn't I just cut a hole in the other wall too?
In no time I had finished cutting a sizeable hole through the wall where I calculated the bent nail might be. With my heart pounding, I slowly removed the piece of drywall, looked inside, and there it was, exactly as I believed it to be. Running my fingers along the stud, I grasped the nail. You can't imagine how delighted I was with the confirmation. Astral and physical realities had blended perfectly.
Even though my out-of-body successes had been few and far between, I continued my crusade. One night, while Candace was away for the weekend, I tuned our bedroom television to an easy-listening music channel and got into bed with a book.
At some point, I must have drifted off while reading. Later, through the fog of sleep, I slowly became aware of my surroundings. For some reason, the music playing on the TV began to cause a similar vibration in my body. The sensations became more and more jarring, until I felt like a huge tuning fork. Finally I could stand it no longer. I had to get up and turn off the television.
Sitting up, I swung my feet over the edge of the bed and stood up. An odd feeling came over me. Something didn't feel right. A chill ran up my spine. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a gli
mpse of someone in the bed behind me. In a rush of adrenaline I spun around to face the intruder and stopped dead in my tracks. There was no one in the bed but me. It was my own body that I had just left behind.
Relieved, I turned away from the bed, intending to take advantage of my out-of-body state. I had only taken a couple of steps when I felt a pull near the back of my neck. Something was holding me back. Again I looked behind but saw nothing, felt nothing. It occurred to me that it might be the so-called silver cord. (I had read accounts of people who reported noticing, while out-of-body, a thin silvery cord connecting their energy bodies to their physical bodies. Even the Bible contains references to a “silver cord.”)
Whatever it was, there was no way I was going to let it stop me. Straining like a horse in harness, I pulled with all my might. Suddenly, as if someone had let go of the other end of a rope, the resistance released and I cartwheeled across the room. Half expecting a burst of laughter from some hidden audience, I spun around. There was nobody there but my sleeping body. A little chagrined but more determined than ever, I headed across the room towards the TV.
The small television sat on the left side of a long dresser. At the center of the dresser was a large mirror. As I passed in front of it, it occurred to me that this would be an opportunity to examine myself in a mirror while out-of-body. But to my surprise, there was nothing there, only the reflection of the room behind me. It was so weird to be looking directly into a mirror from less than two feet away and not see myself.
In the mirror, I could clearly see my sleeping body on the bed behind me. Looking for some rational explanation, it occurred to me that maybe my eyes weren't open. Concentrating, I made an effort to open my vision and instantly found myself looking through my physical eyes. All I could see was my hand draped across the open book splayed across the bed covers. Well, that didn't seem to help, so I let my eyes fall shut and immediately I was back in front of the mirror, which again reflected only the room behind me.