My NDE Story

My near-death experience happened when I was still a small child, kindergarten age.

I was living in a small town and at that time it was unusual for someone to have a pool in their backyard. I had been invited to a fellow kindergartener’s birthday pool party.

The party went like most parties do with cake and celebrations. The party favors were outside and we were supposed to get them after having some cake. I went into the backyard and discovered the party favors were little boats and the boats were already floating in the pool.

I got into the pool and was standing on the bottom of the pool, or so I thought.

The water of the pool was somewhat cloudy, you couldn’t see the bottom.

I saw the boat that I wanted so I took a step to reach for it. That step turned out to be a fateful one. That first step that I took, I already was sinking.

I didn’t know that I had been standing on a ledge of the pool, not the bottom. I didn’t know how to swim.

When I found myself sinking I kicked out as much as possible, struggled and struggled to try to reach the surface of the water again to take a breath, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t make it.

After this happened for some little while, my little body gave my brain the message that it couldn’t struggle anymore – it had done all it could. In that moment that I got the message that nothing more could be done, it was like flicking a switch, like you flick a switch to turn a light on.

Except when this switch was flicked, everything went in an instant from horrible struggle to incredible beauty and joy.

I found myself laying on the bottom of the pool looking up and suddenly the sun shining through the water was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

There was a shadow of a tree limb over the water also that represented nature to me and that also was indescribably gorgeous, conveying the beauty and order and power of the universe.

There was uplifting music along with the uplifting light – all was bliss.

The next instant was like the cut from one scene to another in a film.

One moment I was having this transcendent experience, and the next moment I found myself sitting on the edge of the pool. I have absolutely no memory of how I got there.

I suppose someone rescued me. I still to this day do not know how I got from the bottom of the pool to sitting on its edge again. Nevertheless, the next thing my little child mind thought was: “Great, I’m in the land of air again, now I can breathe. I can take a breath.”

But I couldn’t! I tried to take a breath but I couldn’t take any air in, and I didn’t know why! My lungs were so full of water that I couldn’t breathe.

Somehow there was no one helping me, and I had an enormous struggle hacking and coughing, coughing and hacking until finally I could take a little bit of a breath, cough some more, breathe a little bit more than before, until finally I could breathe somewhat normally.

Needless to say that just like drowning, this also was extremely stressful and traumatic for me.

My immediate response afterwards to this experience was to try to block it out as much as possible.

I tried not to think about it, it was too painful of a memory, too stressful to bring up again.

I never even told anybody about it until several years later.

But over the years the memory would come back up again just by itself, and as the years went by the beautiful part came to be the most important part by far.

I came to realize that this was an extremely valuable experience and that maybe telling the story and sharing this experience the best way I could could be very helpful to other people.

So I decided to write a song about it.

At first it was going to be about the painful parts too, but I decided my NDE song should be about the joyful parts because those are the parts that could give people hope when they are facing crossing over to the other side in their own lives.

There are very many elements in the song both lyrically and musically – all of them have meaning and are meant to help people understand the nde experience for themselves or to understand what it’s like to be making the transition from this world from this life into the next.

The last bit of the story is it’s still a mystery, that of who how I got out from the bottom of the pool. If there’s someone who rescued me I would love to be able to thank them.

Thank you for reading this and thank you for listening to my nde song.

My most sincere wish is that it will be of help to you.

Matthew Shelton