A man who ‘died’ for six minutes as a child has detailed the haunting scenes he claims he saw in heaven.
The unidentified social media user told how they were just 15 years old when, in 2003, they suddenly collapsed in the road.
Despite feeling ‘just fine all day’, the boy ‘broke out in a cold sweat’, became breathless and suffered ventricular fibrillation — a dangerous abnormal heart rhythm and most frequent cause of sudden cardiac death.
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.
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.
In a post shared to a social media thread, the unidentified user told how they were just 15 years old when, in 2003, they suddenly collapsed in the road
‘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.
‘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 Reddit users have been fascinated by the man’s perspective, with the post garnering more than 400 comments from posters sharing their shock and horror.
Amber Cavanagh previously told MailOnline she was 43 when she suffered two strokes and entered the ‘meeting point’ of heaven.
Mrs Cavanagh, from Canada, said she could see her husband ‘weeping over’ her body.
Amber Cavanagh previously told MailOnline she was 43 when she suffered two strokes and entered the ‘meeting point’ of heaven
Mrs Cavanagh, from Canada, said she could see her husband (pictured above) ‘weeping over’ her body
Experiences of seeing and hearing things whilst clinically dead do have some scientific basis.
For years studies have shown the human brain still functions normally for a very brief time after the heart stops, although it appears to have ceased activity on regular scans.
Research has also revealed that the brain can still experience sporadic bursts of activity even after an hour without oxygen, during resuscitation.
Such discoveries have led to some medics calling for an overhaul of the standard practice that rules people should be declared dead after three-to-five minutes of oxygen deprivation to the brain, as these patients could still in theory be resuscitated.
People have previously told MailOnline of out of body experiences such as seeing bright lights at the end of a tunnel or meeting deceased relatives.
Others, meanwhile, have also recalled seeing a heavenly afterlife.
While evidence on something happening in brains after clinical death is still being explored, exactly why so many people have similar experiences remains an issue of contention among experts.
Some theorise that as the brain is undergoing these changes essentially the ‘brakes’ come off the system and this opens our perception to incredibly lucid and vivid experiences of stored memories from our lives.
However, this is only a theory and other experts dispute this.
Clinical death also differs from brain death.
Brain death is when a person on an artificial life support machine no longer has any brain function, which means they will not regain consciousness.
Such patients have no chance of recovery because their body is unable to survive without artificial life support.
In the UK this means a person who has suffered brain death is legally dead.
This can be difficult to comprehend for families of the deceased as they can see their loved one’s chest rise and fall with every breath from the ventilator as well as their heart continuing to beat.
Brain death can be caused by both illness and injury when blood and/or oxygen supplies are cut off to the vital organ.
The condition is different from a vegetative state where a patient’s brain function remains.
