After paramedics arrived, the individual claimed they discovered their heart had stopped beating and it was only after ‘working tirelessly to revive me’ in an ambulance that their heart began working again after six minutes.
The person claimed to have miraculously avoided any long-term damage, and said they are one of the handful of people to experience near-death experiences by temporarily ‘transcending our world’.
These phenomena, which have been a source of fascination for medics and the public alike for decades, are believed to occur when people are clinically ‘dead’, and extremely unlikely to survive.
Many of those who’ve had such an experience claim to have seen the afterlife.
‘Six minutes in “heaven” felt like a lifetime.’
Once the minutes came to an abrupt end, they returned to their body ‘on Earth’.
However, they also claimed the creature-like figures told them ‘not to reveal their existence to the rest of my kind’.
‘I can’t imagine anything worse than what I experienced, subsumed beneath an ineffable grief and torment.’
They added: ‘For weeks, I tried to explain to anyone who would listen what I experienced.
‘Everyone told me I’d suffered a very serious and traumatic experience for a young man, that the event left scars on my psyche as well as my heart.’
The tale, posted on social media, is based on just one unverified experience.
But, recalling the experience on a Reddit thread garnering more than 12,000 likes, the user said: ‘During my visit, I learned things about our universe that I wish I hadn’t.
‘It began with light. Blinding, white, pervasive. It bathed me, calmed me. It was everything they tell you about. Beatific, welcoming, the stuff of spiritual experiences.
‘I had the distinct feeling of ascent, like the light was lifting me skyward. I passed through several sets of gates, which my dizzied consciousness hardly registered.
‘I arrived in a place without dimension, a place beyond reality. It only made sense while I occupied it.’
But they also claimed they were faced with several ‘cold’ and ‘mocking’ creature-like figures that delivered ‘horrifying truths about existence’.
They added: ‘At first, because of my Christian upbringing, I believed them to be angels.
‘In my incorporeal form, I made the spiritually-equivalent gesture of opening my arms, anticipating their embrace.
‘Instead, I felt myself shackled by their powers, like a collared dog.
‘Humiliation and terror came over me. These were not the ethereal beings I’d been led to believe await us.
