This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/DrTerrifying on 2024-12-27 04:06:16+00:00.

With apologies to the religious, I feel my story must be shared.

In 2003, when I was fifteen years old, my heart stopped for six minutes. It happened on an ordinary afternoon, at the point in my daily routine when I walked home from the bus stop. In the four blocks between the corner where I hopped off the bus and my front door, I started to feel nauseous.

It came on suddenly, without warning. I’d felt just fine all day, ate a lunch of bosco sticks and marinara sauce, something I’d eaten hundreds of times throughout high school. Before I had an opportunity to consider alternative causes, I broke out in a cold sweat.

Then I felt the curious flutter in my chest.

My heart slipped into what I later learned was an episode of ventricular fibrillation.

I became breathless and collapsed. What happened next has been told to me after the fact. I apparently sprawled in the road, where a woman driving a hatchback nearly crushed my skull beneath her tires. Instead, she screeched to a halt, tried to rouse me, then dialled emergency services when she failed to do so.

EMS arrived to discover my heart had stopped beating. I was dead, technically. They transported my body to the hospital, and somewhere along the way managed to shock my ticker back to life. Thus began a harrowing weeks-long journey through the American healthcare system that led eventually to an ablation, pacemaker, and mountains of debt my family’s still dealing with.

But my heart’s alright.

And thank f**k it is, because what I learned that day has taught me never to thank God for anything.

Because for those six minutes, as my lifeless body traveled across the city accompanied by two paramedics working tirelessly to revive me, my soul transcended our world to visit the hereafter. During my visit, I learned things about our universe that I wish I hadn’t. Perhaps in sharing my story, I might help our species prepare for what comes after we expire.

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. Upon reflection, I don’t believe they were physical in any sense, and yet I recall the feeling of admittance, as if they might’ve prevented me from rising had they remained closed.

In any event, I arrived in a place without dimension, a place beyond reality. It only made sense while I occupied it. I don’t believe a corporeal being can make sense of the astral plane, something about its intangible existence defies translation.

So what I came away with were more impressions than images. I was not alone. Several life forces enclosed me upon my arrival. 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. These were cruel, unsympathetic overlords by whom I was fettered.

Why? I thought, my soul wailing like a petulant child.

Something like laughter returned, but it was cold, mocking. Thoughts floated into my consciousness like birds winging in and out of sight. They delivered some horrifying truths about existence that I’ll do my best to relay to you now:

Our universe, like many others running parallel to it, contains a pittance of the total energy in existence. It is a farm, used to produce souls, which only arise in the precise conditions found in our cosmos. When you hear scientists talk about the improbability of the existence of our goldilocks universe, it’s because they don’t actually come into being spontaneously.

They’re designed. And the hands that craft them are not benevolent gods, but rapacious beings with little care for the creatures they create.

Our ultimate purpose, I learned in the custody of the spirits that shackled me, was to ripen until we were ready to serve them on their higher plane.

The Big Bang gave birth to the universe to give rise to life to eventuate in humanity, a sufficiently conscious organism that may be harvested for use as slaves on a higher plane, where time and space dissolve into an eternity we spend in servitude.

Six minutes in “heaven” felt like a lifetime, which I spent amusing what I perceived to be a childlike spirit with a penchant for psychologically distressing manipulation. It batted me around like a cat with a caught mouse, reveling in the pain it produced. Physical discomforts we imagine hell inflicting upon us pale in comparison to the torture of soul pain. Loss of a loved one comes closest, that piercing, emotional damage resulting from trauma.

When it became clear my time had not yet expired on Earth and I was to return, I was told not to reveal their existence to the rest of my kind. My reward, they communicated to me, would be a marginally improved station among the slave population. Alternatively, if I managed to convince others of their existence, new horrors would await me when I returned.

I can’t imagine anything worse than what I experienced, subsumed beneath an ineffable grief and torment.

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.

I gave up trying to convince them.

I slowly began to convince myself that what they’d told me was true. I’d simply imagined it. A death dream, as it were. The mind reckoning with its own imminent demise, trying to make sense of the experience.

Then I met someone who claimed to have met God.

This was a few years later, when the author of a nonfiction book recounting their near death experience visited my hometown. (I won’t reveal the author’s name as I don’t want to invite a lawsuit, which I’m sure he’d launch against me if he read that I’d besmirched him.) I attended a reading and afterward confronted him about his tale. 

I looked him in the eye and asked if he really met God – something I’m sure he’s dealt with hundreds of times. He smiled and nodded, assuring me that yes, God is real and is filled with love. On a lark, I decided to tell him that I knew the truth, that slavery awaits us all.

A flicker in his gaze betrayed his knowledge of the fact. He really had died and visited the afterlife, but lied about it in his book.

Because he knew.

He knew the truth of heaven, the horrible place our souls are bound for.