Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what your life was like before you died.

David Ditchfield 0:08
I was jumping around from day to day, just picking up manual laboring work, you know, on construction sites and that kind of thing. And I wasn't actually that good at that kind of work, you know. So I wasn't really fitting. I was also the square peg in the round hole. So it was a bit of a struggle. I'd moved to London. I'd moved there because I figured, you know, that I might get some breaks there, and I might sort of meet people and try and, you know, develop my life. But that never really happened. And in a sense, it was hard, because I was hanging out with people who were successful, working in the music industry and things like that, and in media, and I just wanted to be part of that that whole sort of game, you know. But they weren't letting me in. They were already established, and it really wasn't for me. So I'd gone to stay with my sister and her family, who were out in Cambridge, and I was, well, they're out in the countryside, actually. And I was hanging out there for a while just to try and get my my feet back on the ground, you know. Because things were going bad, I was running out of money, you know. I was just about to lose my apartment, and, you know, it was that bad. So while I was there, I'd met somebody. I'd met this girl called Anna, who we got on really well. We got this connection, and we just kind of hit it off. And she said, I want to come and stay with you for a few days. So we did do and then she had to get back to London, so I was seeing her off at the track the rail station, and she got on to the car. I was helping her on with the bags and stuff, you know. I gave her a hug, a last minute hug, goodbye, and the emergency buzzers went for the doors to close the automatic doors, and as they did, my coat got trapped in the bottom. Part of my coat was like a three quarter length dry coat, you know, and it wasn't going to come out. It was like a sheepskin thick coat. I thought, this is not going to pull free. The engine started to rev up, and I thought, what can I was banging on the doors. I screamed for help, you know, calling the top of my voice, but nobody turned up. There was no guard on the platform or anything. And the engine started to rev up. And I just kind of figured, this is it. I thought I'm just gonna I'm not gonna survive this. I thought I'm gonna die. This is a moment of death. And I stopped and decided to run alongside the train. The train pulled out at great speed. I felt every gear shift, and then I lost my footing, and I was dragged along the platform. And then before I knew it, I was pulled between the platform edge and the speeding train and under the wheels, and I was tossed around, basically like a ragdoll just thrown, literally, from side to side, pillar to post. And I was fully conscious throughout the whole of this, and it was a terrifying, terrifying experience. So I suddenly found myself thrown to the ground, and I was in between the tracks, if you like, you know. So I just it wasn't over yet. The train was still going on. It was a long train, so I thought, you know, I could get hit by part of the undercarriage, or what have you, you know, and that would be it. So I just kept my face into the gravel, kept my face in there. And it's interesting, because I had time to think it through in my own mind. Even though it took only a matter of seconds for the whole episode, it felt like minutes, you know, it was like my mind had given me chance to actually think it through a survival I went to fight, all flights, obviously, you know, and I decided to fight. And I remember thinking of double Oh, seven and all those movies, you know, and Indiana Jones. What would they do now? They'd stick their head right in the gravel, so that's all they did. And the train moved off, and I was there. I was lying there, and I couldn't believe I'd survived. I was alive. It was a terrific shock. And I just looked up at the sky. I remember it was like a February date. It's a beautiful blue sky, and I just looked at the sky, and I thought, wow, look at that sky. I just felt so in touch with nature at that moment in time, because I've just been through such a few moments of absolute horror. I got to the hospital, and then the guys, paramedics arrived really quick. They got me somehow. They got me off that track and onto a trailer and into the ambulance. And then it was just when I got into the actual emergency departments that my left arm had been severed. So I was losing, like, an awful lot of blood, lots of blood, you know. And they I could hear panic in their voices. I thought, This isn't sounding good, you know. This is like I could hear fear and a thought, you know, I wasn't sure I was going to even survive at that point. Then it was at that I actually left my body. I left all the trauma of the pain that I was in and just the kind of the tense atmosphere of that hospital to what appeared to be a very calm and darkened place. Nothing foreboding about this darkness. It just felt very comforting. And I just kind of went, What's what's going on? You know, it was literally that quick, and I just kind of got my bearings. I looked around me. I remember just lifting my head, and all I could see were these beautiful colors of orbs of light that was slowly pulsating all around me. And as I looked at these orbs, I just knew at this point, I just thought, I'm dead. I've passed on. This is the next stage. I didn't fight it. I didn't want to die, but, yeah, that's what I'd just been through. This just felt so beautiful that I just decided to go with it. And I then realized I was no longer laid on the hospital trolley. I kind of put my arms down. I realized I was laid on what was like a huge slate rock. It was like a medieval altar, but it felt incredibly comfortable to lie on. So I. Laid my head back, and I looked up my body to see how everything was looking. And I realized then I was no longer clothed. I just covered in this blue sheet. It was like a satin, silk, sort of texture of material that was covering my body. And there was lost this white lie that was just reflecting off the sheet. So I looked up, and as I looked up, there were like three grids of white light that were just closing in on me, very intense, bright light. And I laid my head back, and I looked into the light, and I couldn't take my gaze away from the light, because it was just it was just so calming. And I felt that bright that normally, you know, you would not be able to look with the human eye into it, but in this sphere, you could do in this realm, it was okay. And I did, I felt that healing energy was coming from this light. So I just kind of bathed in the light as it were, you know. And I was there for some time, and I suddenly felt the presence of somebody. I thought that somebody's just arrived at the scene as it were. So I lifted my head again, and there, there was. I was this an androgynous person, you know, neither male nor female, just stood at my feet with this kind of very white blonde hair and a skin that was like illuminating light. That light was just shining from within, very, very bright. And this person was just wearing, like a very contemporary black T shirt, which was, I remember that st me at the time, was expecting something more ethereal. You know, I seen too many movies, I think, you know, this is a very simple guy, simple t shirt. And this person was just smiling at me, and I said, I know you don't. I knew this face. You know, I felt this familiarity coming from this person. You know, sometimes you get, you might go to a party or what have, you meet somebody for the first time there, and you think, Hey, I feel like I've known you for years. Yeah, we just, you know, you connect with someone. You know, even if it's just us French, and it was like that. And I thought I'd known this person for the whole of my life and beyond, you know, so but I felt safe in the presence of this person. I felt like this person was my keeper. You know, that was, that was like guarding me, guarding my soul. And I laid back and continued. And then I felt but suddenly there was more people at the right, and there was, there was two more. There was two females either side of me. There was a there was a girl to my right who was wearing, like a contemporary brown dress, and she was quite European looking, with long brown hair. And the girl to my left was more sort of, she was more like Native American or Brazilian or Asian Indian looking. And she was wearing wearing more of a traditional dress. It was like a sort of a creamy, sort of textured, beautiful cloth. And they had their hands just slowly hovering over my body, you know, and I felt the energy coming from the hands was just so intense. It was just like a beautiful vibration. And I felt healing, you know, the trauma that the body had just been through. But not only that, because I looked and everything was fixed. Every there was not even a single scratch, you know, my whole body was back in place. But they continued to heal me. And I figured that as time went on, that basically, they weren't just healing like my physical body, but they were healing all the personal trauma that I'd carried throughout my whole life that we all do. You know, the baggage as we call it. They were peeling off all those layers and taking them off one by one, and getting right down to the essence of my pure soul. It was a wonderful experience. It was, it was like having, like, a very like a therapy session. You know, my whole life just unveiled. It was, but in a beautiful way, you know, in a physical sense, it was interesting, because I carried a lot of guilt and shame throughout my life, which I realized didn't belong to me anymore. I'd spent a lot of my time in the past, concerning myself with the past or the future. I was worried about the future, where my life was going, because it was in such a mess. But I was also kind of haunted by all the mistakes I've made, or all the opportunities that I felt, that I'd missed, and all those different things that a lot of us do, and suddenly all those are dispersed. They didn't belong to me anymore, you know. And it was just I sort of thought, This is great. I feel complete all at once, you know. And I figured my family had arrived at the hospital just before this had happened, before I left my body, and I thought they were pretty distraught. My mother was in tears. I remember at the time, and I thought they're going to be looking over my dead bodies literally, you know. So I was concerned, but not overly concerned. I didn't feel the sense of, oh my goodness, my my family, I just, I was very relaxed about it, so I tried to lean over the edge of this huge slate alter thing that I was on, and looked down to hope to see them in hospital. But I didn't actually see them. But what I did see was this incredible sight. It was just like a it was a waterfall of stars. It was like, but it was very vast. It was like, sort of the size of Niagara Falls, if you like. But instead of millions of tons of water cascading over, it was just millions of beautiful, sparkling stars that were just cascading over the over the over the top. And I looked down, and I just looked into what seemed like infinity. You know, the more that my eyes adjusted, I was looking further and further. It felt like into one galaxy into another. And I was looking and I could see all these beautiful sort of colors, you know, all these in these galaxies that I'd never seen before. To me, space itself. I'd not even looked at it. I looked up at the sky once in a lifetime, but to me, it was just stars against a black backdrop. All these colors were just so really powerful. So I pulled myself. Back over, and I thought, Wow, I'm not in a small duck in space at all. I'm actually in the universe itself, you know. And I felt very at one with the universe. I suddenly felt that this is it all makes sense, that we are all part of it, you know. And it was pretty much at that point that I had the most fun moments, which was I remember lying back and still bathing in all this kind of healing process I was going through that I felt a sensation of I felt like my body was starting to almost vibrate, but in a very beautiful way, I thought, what's going on? And I looked up, and just ahead of the initial being that I'd seen, it was still stood there. Was that behind he or she? Was this a tunnel of white light that was closing in on me, and that tunnel of white light was just so bright it was surrounded by flames. There were, like, all these beautiful, powerful flames that were like, slowly circulating around. And normally something like this, you'd be kind of like, Oh, my goodness. What's going on. This is so awe inspiring that it could be frightening, but in this realm, there was no sense of fear. I just only felt absolute joy and thought, wow. And there's a lot of telepathy going on throughout this whole experience. And one of the biggest things I was told was what I was looking at here was, was the source of all creation, you know, this was God. This was not like God as I always figured God would look like. Not that I thought about it that much. I thought that God would be like the guy on the ceiling of the Vatican in Rome, you know, with a long gray beard reaching out to Adam. But no, this was huge tunnel of white light, and the energy coming off it, as it got closer, was just causing every single molecule of my body to vibrate with love. And it was just so it was pretty much at that point when I got this information, that I came crashing back into my body, you know. And I remember I was still smiling, you know, and I just come back into the hospital, back into the sort of, it seemed like, almost, it seemed really noisy all at once, you know, they just all the acoustics in that in that place, were just too much to deal with. And suddenly it was fluorescent strip that was in my eyes. I was just, Oh, there I was. I think that what I my big sort of lesson that I was learning on other side that the main person that I was doing any harm to was me. You know, it was me I was beating myself throughout the whole of my life. So instead of having a life review, I was having as this kind of session from these beautiful angels that were just like slowly taking away all the negative stuff, you know, that didn't belong to me as well. Why I thought? Why they send me back? That was great, you know. But you know what? It's interesting because a lot of people say, Oh, you must have felt really disappointed, but I wasn't, because I was just so full with all this beautiful energy and knowledge of love that I'd just been given, that I thought, right, you know, let's go. I was just about to be wheeled into theater at that point, so I knew I was going to go and have the huge operation. And then it was like, when I came around after eight and a half hours, I think it was, and I remember I was in on my own. They've given me a room on my own, which is great. And I was just now got this little machine just bleeping in the dark at 2am and it was like a little r2, d2, thing, you know? It's like, okay, there's my friend, you know? And part of me was obviously sort of dealing with the trauma of what had happened. Obviously, as you would do, you just been under a train, you know. But the main part of me was thinking, wow, what about that? How am I going to tell the world about this? Because at that stage, I'd never even heard of a near death experience, you know, spirituality didn't even come into my life. I was really scared I was going to forget about the whole thing as well, you know. So I remember my sister came to visit me. And she said to me, Look, she said, very quietly, Look, is there anything I can get you that I can bring in for you tomorrow? And I said, Yeah, can you get me a small sketch pad at a five, you know, and a pencil? And she went, Okay. I thought I've got to sketch out what I'd seen. I thought that's good. The best way I'm going to be able to tell people about this is I'm going to do some paintings. I'm going to and I've never done anything like this before, but I thought this is the best way to put it across. We're all here because we've got an incredible opportunity with me being part of the universe, and we are an important part of it, you know, because we live on one thing I felt about when I came back was that the planet Earth is just like that's heaven in itself. It's such a beautiful place. It's a beautiful planet. We've given a golden opportunity to live on this wonderful place. And I was very interested in watching stories on astronauts, but see what their take on was going out to space. You know, see what their take on was going out to space. You know, you stand on the moon and it's just murky, sort of white dust, and you look at the planet Earth, and it's like, wow, look at all those beautiful colors. So our mission is just to really try and enjoy what we've got. You know, not destroy it.