I was five months into a bereavement where I had felt a tremendous amount of guilt. I had lost my friend that I had been very close to and who I met when I was around 5. I felt that the way I had not made time for this person in the months leading up to his death made me a terrible person. I couldn't accept what I had done because it was so unlike me. I had chosen to focus on my university deadlines for a few weeks and then worry about him afterwards. It felt like people always held me back and ruined things for me and all I wanted was to put myself first for a change, but I misjudged the situation and it couldn't wait a few weeks.

Around five months after his death, I woke one morning and tried to get on with my day, but I was feeling worse and worse emotionally. I stood at my kitchen sink, about to wash dishes to start lunch, but I just couldn't carry on. My husband was asleep in bed due to night work but I just needed to hold someone. It takes me many hours to fall to sleep and I can’t sleep during the day, so I was there for the feeling of closeness rather than a nap. I silently laid on the bed and put my arm around him, without waking him. I knew I had reached the end of the line in that I was so emotionally damaged by what had happened that I would never ever recover.

It was then that I decided that taking my own life was the best option and I felt a sense of happiness and relief that I had a solution and felt better than I had in months. I lay slightly sitting up and propped up over the side of my sleeping husband and was adding things to my online shopping basket that I would need to end my life without causing a stir. As I was adding plastic sheets to my basket, to buy as I wanted to not cause any mess, before I could click to confirm the order, suddenly everything in my vision turned a translucent red.

The red began to get darker and darker until I completely lost my vision. I didn't have time to wake my husband to tell him I needed an ambulance or that something was happening. By the time I realised that this was something serious, it was too late and I had found myself in a state of unconsciousness, but yet I had full awareness. I laid there for a short time in complete calm, wondering what had happened. I thought that I perhaps had had a massive brain hemorrhage and that I was either in the dying process or had died and was waiting for brain activity to stop. I thought it was great that I didn't have to take my own life because it had happened anyway and I thought it was great that I would finally find out how long brain activity continued for after death as working in hospitals, I had always wondered this. I was in complete acceptance and was amazed and found the experience of dying so fascinating...well I at least thought I was dying at the time.

Suddenly I felt a sensation as though I were getting off of the bed and I panicked a little because I didn't understand how I was getting up. There was a strange sensation in my back as if I had been lifted up. Suddenly the red became different colours, all blurred, and those colours eventually turned out to be my own body that gradually came into focus as I rose further away from it. It was like putting an object in front of your eyes and then gradually moving it away until everything was in focus. I was on the ceiling in the corner of my bedroom and I was looking down on my body alongside my husband.

I was in a state of awe as I looked at my body on the bed as I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life. I was completely blown away by the beauty of the life I had lived. It wasn't the outside of the body that I was witnessing the beauty of, but the strength of how that body had endured and kept on getting back up again every time life had knocked it down. What added to its beauty was how it had always remained kind throughout all its trauma. I experienced a sense of feeling sadness and feeling sorry for the person. 'She never stood a chance in life' I thought. I thought she had so much potential but was born into the wrong environment where everyone tried to drag her down. Her strength was just so astonishingly beautiful.

I at no point felt like the body was me. It was like my soul was separate and had merely been inhabiting the body. I was fond of her but my life as her had been really hard and I was relieved to be done with it and had learnt from being her. I had no sense of my name after leaving my body either. I felt that my name was just belonging to the body that I had left behind.

I suddenly felt a sense of something on the back of me and in the blink of an eye I had been zipped away to another place. I was stood in a dark place that was black but I could see perfectly. It was like space. I was stood in front of a huge grey stone arch that emitted light. I couldn’t see through it, as it was like water inside it. It was like in TV shows like Stargate Universe (which I only saw after this experience when my husband, who is much older than me, said what I had described reminded him of the stargates in that show).

I was aware of a person to my left but slightly behind me, and a person 2 or 3 metres away from me stood to my right, diagonal between me and the arch. The person in front of me was invisible but I felt them there. I felt I was familiar somehow with the person behind me but not the person in front of me so I never turned around to look at the person behind me as I felt wary of the person in front of me due to not feeling familiar with them. The person to my front told me that I could go through the arch and see my friend. There was no speech like we know it on earth, it was like telepathy or speaking with energy.

I stepped forward to go through the arch without hesitation but suddenly stopped as I felt that this was reckless. It occurred to me that I didn't know where I was or who these beings were and I was just going to step through some weird portal on their say so. I was thinking that I didn't know what was happening or what was really through the arch. The being tried to reassure me (I hadn't realised that my thoughts were no longer private). I stood with my mind racing on what to do, thinking I wanted to see my friend, but I was so confused about what was happening and how I got there and nobody was explaining anything to me. I felt a sense of frustration from the being and there was this overwhelming sense of them communicating with each other that this was taking too long. There was a focus on needing this whole thing done really quickly and that remained throughout. They must have decided to force me through, due to time restraints, in the same way that I got from the bedroom to the black place, so they zipped me through the arch before I even knew what was happening.

In the blink of an eye, everything changed. I was in the most beyond-my-wildest-dreams place anyone could ever imagine. It was what I can only describe as heaven. It was the most beautiful fields of green grass that all shone golden light. There is nowhere on this planet earth quite like it.

My friend who had passed away stood in front of me and I could see him. He also radiated golden light. He put his hands on me to try to get my attention because all I could do was stand open-mouthed, looking around me at the environment in a state of complete shock. It was clear he didn't have much time and had to condense things down. The first thing he said to me was to warn me not to look back, otherwise I would go back to my body, although I’m not sure if he said this or this was communicated in some other way. He said to me to look how beautiful this place is and that no matter what happened in my life on earth, none of it mattered because I will come there in the end. He said it would be just like when we were children.

There was nobody else there that I saw; however, I became aware of a young male who stood a distance away from us overlooking things. He seemed to view me and my friend together in a negative light and I’m not sure if it was because he was concerned about the time everything was taking or because he wanted to speak to me himself or both. There was the constant sense from him that me being there was not allowed and shouldn't really be happening and I needed to get back to my body as quickly as possible. The young man struck me as looking just like my mother and father and I felt that this was my brother and that he had always been with me in my life without me knowing. This was confusing as I didn't have a sibling from my mother and father’s marriage.

I very much got the impression from what my friend was saying, that something bad would be happening to me in my life and that as a result I would be coming to heaven soon, so not to end my own life. I needed to pass away, not by my own hand. I didn't want to go back to my body. I would have done anything to have stayed. I was walked to a place very close-by that felt like a border. There was increasing encouragement to leave but my friend kept his hands on the sides of my shoulders and kept looking into my eyes as if he wanted me to keep looking at him and not turn around. I couldn't help myself and kept looking around because I was still so amazed by the heaven-like place. I turned too far around and, as I did, in the blink of an eye I zipped back to my body in a blur. I opened my eyes and saw red and the red quickly left and my normal vision was restored.

I was left in no doubt that I had had a spiritual experience and decided not to call an ambulance because I felt absolutely fine. I also felt too embarrassed to go to hospital as I had worked in the accident and emergency department there. How could I tell this to doctors I had worked alongside without looking like I had lost my mind?

In the weeks that followed, I had dreams that didn't feel normal. I would be having normal dreams, then an invisible being would arrive, same as the ones in the dark place, and they would tell me that I was asleep and they were using that dream state to communicate and that I was going to die and they would show me how it was going to happen.

I informed my family that I would be dying soon and what month it would take place. I even planned my own funeral. They all thought I needed mental health input and were concerned but they hoped it would pass. Six months later, when the month finally came, I waited for it to happen. Eventually the symptoms began. I had been told that I would have a clot in my leg and this would go undetected by doctors’ tests and as a result it would break off and travel to major organs and kill me. My leg had begun to show strange symptoms that were not usual for a leg clot.

I didn't know whether I was supposed to get help or not because the beings never told me if I was supposed to or not. They never said if they were informing me so that I may avoid death or if they were telling me to prepare me. I eventually went to the hospital and had such an awful experience with every doctor I spoke to. Every doctor told me that I didn't have a clot because my symptoms were not typical and my blood results were negative. I finally found a doctor who had worked around me for a long time and knew that this was not my usual behaviour and that I was usually a quiet, no fuss, stable person. This was enough for her to have doubts and order scans.

The scans showed I had an extremely big clot at a junction that led up to my major organs. I was told that if I had not have come then, I would have died or been in a very serious condition when it broke away. They were a mixture of amazed and suspicious at how I knew and how I was able to point out its exact location. Being science-based people, I felt they erred on the side of suspicion and were wondering if I had been diagnosed at another hospital. There were various details in my dream about hospital departments that did not exist at the time of my dreams but did exist when I had my blood clot. Various other bits of information lined up, such as the staff on shift looking after me including a doctor I had never met before, apart from seeing them in my dreams, and the cubicle numbers I was in. My blood results also matched what I had been told in my dreams.

I still don't really know if I was supposed to survive or not, and since then I have felt like my life is at a stand-still, with no purpose. I think that perhaps I was supposed to die and I have done something wrong in getting medical intervention. I will never know, I guess, as I have had no follow-up on this matter from any such beings or spirits since. I isolate myself away from everyone and no longer work or have any aspirations at all. I don't understand why I have been spared. It has been nearly four years and I still don't know why all this happened to me and what the purpose of me living is. I feel very alone in the world and struggle to maintain relationships with family and friends. It is like I am awake and everyone else is asleep. It is like living in the Truman show and expecting someone to be happy, knowingly living in that way.

It has been the most amazing experience, but in many ways, it has destroyed my life. In many ways, I died that day. In the moments before my experience, I had a plan. I was going to end my life and everything would be okay, but now in my experience it showed me I was absolutely not to do that. My life now is like waiting for a bus that never comes. I just spend my life in this state of apathy, waiting for my life to end naturally so that I can return to heaven. I can be on the sofa relaxing or I can be busy in the supermarket buying food, no matter what I am doing there is always the feeling that I am passing the time whilst waiting to go back to heaven. The experience cured me of my suicidal thoughts but it left me with this eternal clock-watching and I’m not sure that the latter is much less unpleasant. 

One comfort I take from all this is the feeling that I may be alone here, but the young man I saw in heaven is always around me. I told my aunt about my experience and that I met my brother. She told me that my mother and father did in fact conceive another child after me, but the baby did not make it to full term. I like to think that this was him and hopefully one day I will be able to ask him myself. I am becoming more and more interested in Christianity now, whereas I was a non-believer before. Hopefully through religion I can finally feel a little less alone around people who, like me, know that there is more to life than what we see on this earth.

It has been nearly four years since my experience and I am sharing it now as I feel it is my duty to add to the catalogue of experiences of many others. If I can help science in any way or give some reassurance to grieving people reading my story, then I have done my duty as a fellow human...well, human for now anyway.