'I died for 7 minutes – what I saw on the 'other side' brought me peace'

A man who was clinically dead for seven minutes has recounted his extraordinary visions from 'the other side'.

The astronomer was hospitalised in March due to breathing difficulties. It was there he suffered a lung haemorrhage, leading to cardiac arrest and the urgent 'code blue' call signalling a life-threatening medical crisis.

Sharing his story on Reddit, he said: "It took the doctors seven minutes to get my heart started again. During that time, I had a stroke due to the lack of oxygen in my brain.

"I woke up intubated and only semi-conscious for two days, then fully regained consciousness and asked, 'What happened?' It is hard to correlate inner time to what was happening outside, but I can make some sense of it."

However, it's his experiences during those critical seven minutes that have profoundly impacted his view on mortality. He confessed: "I'm not scared of dying, not in the least. Afraid of what comes before, sure, but nature makes dying easy."

Delving into his vision, he described: "I saw a series of three oval ellipses, one at a time, just suspended in a black space. The ellipses were all upright, as though they were suspended by a string (but they weren't), and they all had a thickness to them, like a ring.

"On the inner and outer surfaces of the first ellipse, I saw mountains, streams, forests, and clouds. They were beautiful at first, but then they began to sour as their colours took on a yellow tinge."

He remembered the smell of iron, which he later realised could have come from the scent of blood – suggesting his physical surroundings influenced his visions.

He continued: "I now take it that this is when I was in cardiac arrest. Suddenly the scene brightened to reveal the third ellipse that was covered with beautiful clouds that were light pink and blue, like from the most beautiful sunrise or sunset.

"That, I believe, is when my heart started beating again. When I regained consciousness, those three ellipses remained firmly fixed in my memory. When I was told days later about my cardiac arrest and stroke, it all began to make sense to me."

In an attempt to understand his visions, he revealed that he had been studying German astronomer Johannes Kepler's Astronomica Nova and trying to comprehend how Kepler determined that the orbits of the planets are ellipses rather than circles. He believes that during his cardiac arrest, his mind unconsciously "latched onto that shape".

He added: "That's all I saw. No tunnel of light or happy deceased family members welcoming me. I think that's dreaming, and dying reflect what happens to be most accessible in your mind during that time. Your mind tells you a story about it. I was never afraid during my ordeal, I was just a dispassionate observer. Amazingly, the only lasting effect of my seven minutes of code blue is a slightly diminished capacity of my short-term memory."