Divine Encounters Episode 001 | Near-Death Experience Story
Nanci L. Danison was a health lawyer raised Catholic when, she says, she left her body twice around a breast procedure and found herself in a light, a mossy tunnel and a home she had never known as a human. In this Divine Encounters episode she tells Alex Ferrari what she says she saw, what she was told about religion, and the choice she says she was given about coming back.
Key Takeaways
- Nanci says she left her body twice during one medical visit, the first time while the radiology staff stepped out to develop films.
- She describes a tunnel with a dirt floor and moss on stone walls, and says she tested it and found that simply thinking a word created the surroundings.
- She says five lights became five beings she recognized as her deepest friends from all eternity, none of whom she had known in human life.
- She describes a life review in which she experienced events from inside the other people involved and felt the ripple effects of her choices.
- She says she was shown a documentary-style history of how religions developed, and understood it as an honest attempt by souls who sensed there was something more.
- She says a council that was monitoring her mission told her she could come home or go back, and that going back would be hard.
- She says she chose to return, partly because she felt strongly that she had people to tell.
| Guest | Nanci L. Danison |
| Episode | Divine Encounters 001 |
| Background | A health lawyer, raised Catholic and educated in Catholic school |
| What Nanci says happened | She left her body twice around a breast procedure, first as radiology staff stepped out of the room |
| Where she says she went | Darkness, then a light, a tunnel like an old railroad trestle, and a place she calls home |
| Who she met | Five beloved beings from all eternity, and a council monitoring her mission |
| The message | Religions were an honest human attempt to describe something larger; the soul has lived far more than one lifetime |
| The choice | Come home, or return to her body knowing it would be hard |
Who Is Nanci L. Danison?
Nanci describes herself in this conversation as a health lawyer. That detail matters to her story, because she says her training shaped how she handled what happened. She was raised Catholic, went to Catholic school, and was taught that her church held the one true religion.
Her account is a little different from many you may have heard. Nanci speaks of her human life as “Nanci’s life,” as though she were also someone watching it from a wider place. If you are new to this subject, the glossary entry on the near-death experience is a gentle place to start before you listen.
A Breast Procedure and a Quiet Room
The first experience, Nanci says, came right before surgery to remove three lumps in her right breast. They turned out not to be cancer. Part of the preparation was a mammogram-guided step in which a radiologist placed a large needle with a wire inside it. After about eight squeezes of the machine and two injections of the needle, she says, the radiologist and the technician left the room to get the last set of films developed.
That is when she left. As best she can reconstruct it, she says, she had a seizure-like reaction to the local anesthetic combined with very low blood sugar. She says she slid out of her body very slowly, and then she was standing in front of it. “I didn’t know you could do this,” she remembers thinking.
Nanci also uses the moment to share something she feels strongly about: that not every cancer forms a lump, and that screening matters. She offers that as her own view, not as medical advice, and the episode does not go further than that.
Comforting Darkness, a Pinpoint of Light, and Waves of Bliss
What came first was blackness. She was not afraid. She describes it as a comforting darkness. Then she saw a pinpoint of light, and she says she knew what to do. She was supposed to go into it. She did not think, I have died. She simply recognized what she was meant to be doing.
She says she spent a long time alone in the light, feeling “wave after wave after wave of bliss, unconditional love and acceptance and joy.” She compares it to love moving through her and boomeranging back out, as if she were being sent back to wherever she came from.
Then came what she calls downloads. Information arrived directly in her mind, on many subjects, and a lot of it was about things she had always been curious about while living Nanci’s life. She calls these knowings, and she is careful to say a knowing is different from knowing in human life. A knowing, she says, is complete. It holds every piece of data on a topic, along with the sense that you have personally lived it firsthand, with the feelings and sensations included, all at once. Alex offers a comparison to The Matrix, and Nanci says that when she saw that film, she thought, oh my God. In comparison to the afterlife, she says, human life looks a bit like that.
A Tunnel That Smelled of Moss and Dirt
Here Nanci’s lawyer brain kicks in. She says she began gathering facts the way a physician would assess a patient. No breathing, no heartbeat, she tallied, and yet she could still breathe and still see. She also noticed she could see in every direction at once. She did not have a head so much as a 360 degree view, and through it she saw her body in the mammography room, down on the earth, while she knew she was in the light.
She had always heard there is a tunnel, so she expected one, and one appeared. It was not the glorious tunnel of colors she had read about. She says she got a dirt floor and stone walls with moss growing on them. To her it looked like an old railroad trestle, perhaps from the 1920s, with a passenger train overhead and a narrow passage wide enough for a Model T Ford. She could smell the moss and the dirt, feel the humidity on her skin and hear the insects. “It’s absolutely completely real,” she says. But she was not fooled.
So she ran a few experiments. She found that just thinking a word created that environment, and after doing it three times she received a download about manifesting. She says very few English words were used in her whole experience, and manifesting was one of them. What she says she was shown is that souls inside human bodies create what the body experiences as physical reality, because “it’s all thoughts projected into physical matter.” If this idea interests you, our glossary has a short entry on manifestation. After the third experiment, she says, she finally accepted that she had died.
Five Lights, Five Friends, and Home
Past the tunnel, Nanci says she saw five beautifully colored lights. She knew their names while she was there, she says, but they would all look white to humans, because our range of color is so narrow. She wondered if she was meant to choose the right one, almost like a five-alarm test. A voice that was not her own answered in her head: “It doesn’t matter. Just pick one.”
Then the five lights turned into five beings. She recognized them as her deepest, most beloved friends and loved ones from all eternity. She had never known any of them in human life, or in any incarnated life, she says. They were her eternal friends. It was the first time, she says, that she ever truly felt home. She spent time with them before moving on.
A Life Review From Inside Everyone Else
Next, Nanci describes a life review. She says it is not like the one most people describe, and she believes that is because she went further into the afterlife than most do. In her account, you see everything from the life you just lived, and you also get inside the other people in those events. You see it from your view and theirs and a third person’s, all at once. You feel their feelings and hear their thoughts.
She says you also feel the ripple effect. You said something, and here is how it touched these people, and here is how they changed their lives, and how that reached people further down the street. You get answers to the questions you carried: why did that person do this, why did I do that, what would have happened if I had chosen differently. You can see how it would have turned out. When Alex asks whether that means alternative timelines, Nanci says no. She describes them as projections of thought about what would have happened.
She admits her own attention wandered. As she puts it, “been there done that,” and what pulled her in was something larger. She says she started receiving hundreds, maybe thousands, of other lifetimes she had lived throughout the universe, as all kinds of creatures and things, and she remembered every moment of every one. “My memory lane was the entire universe,” she says. She felt flabbergasted that she had ever thought she was just one small human being. If you want to read more about how people describe life reviews, see the glossary entry on life review.
The Big Questions, the Anger, and a History of Religion
Once she realized she could focus her attention on a topic and receive a knowing about it, Nanci says she used the time well. She did not know how long she would be there, so she asked the biggest questions she could think of. What is God? What am I? What is the purpose of life? What does God expect of me? Where is heaven, and where is hell? And what is the one true religion? She asked the last one because of her Catholic upbringing, and she says she had never believed the church’s claim to be the one true religion could possibly be right. Alex jokes that every religion says that, and Nanci agrees.
She received answers to all of it. Then, she says, she got angry. She did not expect anger to be possible there, but she felt betrayed. She wondered why her parents, her church and her Catholic school had not told her any of this. Did they think she was stupid? Did they think she could not handle it? She could not understand why anyone would teach such an intricate religion when no part of it was true, and she had just received the truth directly from the source.
What calmed her, she says, was being shown something like a documentary history of the Earth: how religions developed, how they got to be the way they are, and what they would be like in the future. She came away seeing them as “a good faith attempt by souls that knew there was something more,” who could not work out what it was. So they projected human life, human thought and human speculation onto God and the afterlife, assuming it must all be the same. Her message is not an attack on faith. It is a softening of the anger she says she felt.
Back in the Room, and a Choice From the Council
As she came back into her body enough to see through her own eyes, Nanci says, she saw the radiologist at the back of the room drawing a little map on the envelope for the films. It felt, she says, like speaking through a megaphone from deep inside her body out to her lips. She said she had passed out. The radiologist and the technician came over, the technician went into the hall and called for a nurse, and the radiologist asked, “Do you know who you are?” They gave her medicines to try to steady her blood pressure and heart rate.
Then, she says, she died again. This time she met a different group of beings, a council that was monitoring her mission. She says they told her, “You’re not working your mission.” They also told her, “We won’t hold it against you.” She could come home, or she could go back into her body. If she went back, they said, she would suffer for the rest of that life.
She felt several things at once. She did not want to be a failure. Source gives you a mission, she says, and she felt she needed to do it. She felt strongly that she wanted to tell people what she had learned. Part of her wanted to see how much of the future she had been shown would happen. And part of her felt rotten for leaving her body so many times. She came back knowing it would be hard. She says she made a promise to her body that she would not leave again until it was ready. This part of the conversation ends there.
How Nanci’s Account Sits Beside Other Near-Death Experiences
People who report near-death experiences often mention leaving the body, a tunnel, a light, peace, loved ones, a review of life and a sense of being sent back. Nanci’s account includes nearly all of these, and then adds details that are rarely described: a tunnel that looks and smells earthly, a test of thought and creation, and a council that speaks about a mission.
Researchers have studied these reports for decades. Psychiatrist Bruce Greyson published the 16-item NDE Scale in 1983 as a way to describe how deep or complete an experience is. In 2001, a study in The Lancet by Pim van Lommel and colleagues reported that 62 of 344 cardiac arrest survivors, about 18 percent, said they had a near-death experience. What these accounts mean is still debated. Here we share them as the person’s own experience, without medical claims. For a wider view, start with our complete guide to near-death experiences.
Bringing It Down to Earth
You do not have to agree with every part of Nanci’s story to find something useful in it. She describes anger as part of her path, and then a softer view of the people who taught her. She describes moments of fear being met with a voice that says it does not matter, just pick one. And she describes a choice to come back because she felt she had something to share.
If you are carrying questions about the faith you grew up with, you may find room in her framing. She does not tell the listener what to believe. She says what she was shown and how it landed in her heart. You can hold that lightly, the way you would hold any story told by someone who was there.
Questions to Sit With
- Nanci says a voice told her it did not matter which light she chose. Where in your life are you waiting for the “right” choice when any honest step would do?
- She felt angry at the people who taught her, then softened when she saw their good faith. Is there someone whose limits you could view that way?
- She says she came back partly because she felt she needed to tell people. What would you want to tell people if you knew you could not stay quiet?
This week, write down one belief you were given as a child that you still carry. Ask yourself, kindly, whether it still fits, and keep what does.
Spiritual Takeaways
- Nanci says the soul has lived far more lifetimes than one, and that she remembered every moment of them.
- She says thought creates the surroundings she experienced, and that souls inside bodies create what the body experiences as reality.
- She describes a life review that lets you feel what others felt and see the ripple effect of your choices.
- She says religions were a good faith attempt to describe something more, shaped by human thinking.
- She says she was met with love, bliss and a sense of home, and was given a choice about returning.
Please enjoy my conversation with Nanci L. Danison.
Guest Links: Connect With Nanci L. Danison
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Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Nanci L. Danison?
Nanci L. Danison is a near-death experiencer who describes herself in this Divine Encounters episode as a health lawyer. She was raised Catholic and says she left her body twice during a medical visit, which is the story she shares with Alex Ferrari.
What happened to Nanci L. Danison during her near-death experience?
Nanci says she was waiting for a mammogram-guided step before surgery when the radiology staff left the room. As best she can reconstruct, she says she had a seizure-like reaction to the local anesthetic combined with very low blood sugar, slid out of her body and found herself in darkness and then light.
What does Nanci mean by “knowings”?
Nanci says a knowing is an afterlife download that arrives complete. It holds every piece of data on a topic along with the feeling of having personally lived it, all at once, so there is nothing to study or learn step by step.
What was the tunnel Nanci describes?
She says it had a dirt floor and stone walls with moss growing on them, and looked like an old railroad trestle. She could smell the moss and dirt and feel humidity on her skin. She tested it by thinking a word and found that the thought created the surroundings.
Who were the five beings Nanci met?
Nanci says five lights she was given a choice between turned into five beings she recognized as her deepest and most beloved friends and loved ones from all eternity. She had not known any of them in human life, and she says it was the first time she felt home.
How is Nanci’s life review different?
She says she did not only see her own life. She says she also went inside the other people in each event, felt their emotions, heard their thoughts and felt the ripple effects of what she had said or done, and could see how things might have gone with different choices.
Did Nanci see alternative timelines?
Alex asks about alternative timelines, and Nanci says no. She describes them as projections of thought about what would have happened if she had done something different.
What did Nanci say about religion?
She says she asked which religion was the one true religion and did not believe it could be the Catholic faith she was raised in. She then felt angry and betrayed, and says she was shown how religions developed as a good faith attempt by souls who sensed there was something more.
Why did Nanci come back?
Nanci says a council monitoring her mission told her she could come home or return to her body, and that returning would be hard. She says she did not want to be a failure, felt strongly that she needed to tell people, and wanted to see whether the future she was shown would unfold.
Is a near-death experience proof of an afterlife?
Next Level Soul shares near-death experiences as lived experiences told in the person’s own words. Researchers continue to study and debate what they mean. Nothing here is medical advice or a medical claim.
Keep Exploring
- The complete guide to near-death experiences
- What a life review is
- What a soul group is
- Betty Eadie on what she was shown about the Bible and church
- Nancy Rynes on love without dogma or religion
- John J. Davis on a Catholic upbringing and a tour of heaven
- Wendy Rose Williams on her soul group and past lives
- Mark Hodges on other dimensions and past lives
- Browse more free masterclasses and the Divine Encounters podcast.
Follow Along with the Transcript
Alex Ferrari 0:00
Tell me what happened to you when you died.
Nanci L. Danison 0:08
I had the first one, right before the surgery to take out the three lumps in the right breast, the ones that turned out not to be cancer. You know, a lot of women don't understand that not all cancers form lumps. So you can always feel, you know, when you've got cancer, some of them leave calcium deposits behind when the cells die, and the calcium deposits can be picked up on mammogram. So it's really, really important to have a mammogram when there's no lump for the surgeon to feel a radiologist sticks a large bore needle with a wire inside of it into the breast using mammogram machine squishes after about eight squishes and two injections of the needle with a wire inside of it, the radiologist and the technician and left the room to go get the last set of films developed. And I left to
Alex Ferrari 1:01
You just pass right there. What happened?
Nanci L. Danison 1:05
As best we can reconstruct, I had an epileptic shock from the local anesthesia that had been injected into my skin combined with very, very low blood sugar. And so I very, very, very slowly got out on my body. And then I popped out and I'm standing in front of it going I didn't know you could do this. And then I saw blackness. But I wasn't afraid it was this comforting. It's comforting darkness. And then I saw a pinpoint of light. And I said myself Oh, I know what this is I'm supposed to go into the light did not have thought that I died. I just recognized but are supposed to be doing. So I went into the light and I spent a lot of time alone in the light feeling those wave after wave after wave of bliss, unconditional love and acceptance and joy. And it was like going through me and boomeranging back out and being sent back to wherever was coming from. And while I was in the light by myself, I was there for a long time, I started getting downloads, at the computer download directly into my mind of everything there was to know or could ever be No, on lots of different topics. A lot of them were things that I've always been curious about while I was living Nanci's life. And they were just there, I'm just like, bouncing back and forth, back and forth between all these when I call knowings. And knowing is different than knowing and human life. Knowing is that you receive in the afterlife, are complete with every single piece of data that could possibly exist about the topic, along with the sense that you have personally lived it firsthand. So it's got all the feelings and the emotions and experience and sensations and everything all in one bundle. And it's all at once. You don't have to learn. It's just who was there? I spent all the time doing that.
Alex Ferrari 3:02
So similar to the matrix, like you were literally downloading, they were downloading you.
Nanci L. Danison 3:06
And I saw that movie, I was like, Oh my God, you know. And it's kind of similar because, you know, in comparison to the afterlife, human life does kind of look like that, you know, planet Earth that they showed in the matrix. I mean, it doesn't really look like that. But it's the differences.
Alex Ferrari 3:21
It's Stark. It's Stark the differences. Okay, so, at this point, have you figured out that you're, you're dead?
Nanci L. Danison 3:29
Not yet. I was doing because I was health lawyer I did a the way a physician would analyze a patient you know, I started gathering the facts. And I did a review of systems you know, no breathing, no heartbeat. No, this no that I'm going but I can still breathe and I could still see and and so then I was like looking. And I realized I could see through the back of my anocracy 360 degrees. I didn't really have a head like it had 360 vision. And while I was looking through the back of my head, I saw Nancy's body down to the mammography room, and I saw that she was on earth. But I knew I was in the light. And that's when I started kind of suspecting and I said to myself, nah, I couldn't have died. I always heard you go through a tunnel, you know, under the light and I'm already in the line. I go through the tunnel and then boom, I'm in a tunnel. And you know how near death experiences get these glorious tunnels of beautiful colors and lights and you travel through the universe and their friends and loved ones are there to welcome them. Are they bad angels, I get dirt. I get a dirt floor with stone walls with moss growing on them. And it looked to me like it was a railroad trestle from like maybe the 1920s Because there's you know, there was a passenger overhead which I think was the railroad tracks. And it was a very narrow passage but I got the sense it was wide enough for like a Model T Ford to go through. I could smell the moss. I could smell the dirt. I could feel them humidity on my skin. Here, the insects. I mean, it's absolutely completely real. But I wasn't fooled by it. So I said to myself, fooled by it when you fall, because I fall by Earth. And so I did a couple more experiments to see, and to prove to myself that just thinking a word manifested that environment. And it's true, I learned, after doing it three times, I got a download of information about manifesting, there were very, very few English words used in my whole experience manifesting was one of them. And it was explained to me that wave souls inside human bodies manifest what the body experiences as physical reality, it's all thoughts projected into physical matter. After that I, you know, I realized I had died. And then that seemed to be kind of a gateway, I saw five beautiful colored lights that I knew the names of while I was there, but they would all look white to humans, because we have very narrow Color Range. And as I was looking at the spotlights, I'm thinking, Oh, this is a typical day I was in the moment, I'm supposed to go into the light, like a five alarm, I'm supposed to pick the right one. And a voice not my own comes into my head and says, It doesn't matter. Just pick one. And the five lights turned into five blowing beings that I recognized as my dears, deepest, most beloved friends, and loved ones from all eternity. None of whom I've ever known in human life, or in any incarnated life, but they were my eternal friends, I was home is the first, first time in answers I ever really felt home. And those remind people. So I spent some time with them. And I had a life review. And unlike the life review that most near death experiencers describe, when you go farther into the afterlife than 99% of nders go, you get a life review, that includes not only saying everything from the life that you just lived, but also you get inside the other people who were in those various events, and you get to watch it, and feel their emotions and hear their thoughts and be them participating in the same event. So that you're saying your perspective and their perspective and somebody else's perspective, it's all at once. And you get to feel the ripple effect of you know, like you said something, and here's how it impacted these people. And here's how they change their lives and how it impacted other people, you know, way down the street. And you also get the answers to your questions. And like all those times you ask yourself, well, why did so many? So do this? Why did I do that? And you know, what would have happened had? Well, you get the answers to those questions, you get to see why so and so did something because you get inside their heads, and you get to hear their thinking. And then you also get to see if you'd made different choices, how they would have turned out.
Alex Ferrari 8:06
Also you do get like alternative, you know, timelines, if you will.
Nanci L. Danison 8:10
No they're not really alternative timelines. They're just projections of thought about what would have happened, had you done something different. But while that was going on, I'm saying to myself, been there done that. So I wasn't really interested in watching that other than to see that every single bit of sensory data that Nancy had ever taken in was all there, every sky, every sound, every thought, every hope, every dream there, everything was all there. But I started getting a download of all these hundreds and hundreds or maybe even 1000s of other lifetimes, I had lived throughout the universe as all kinds of creatures and things. That was a lot more interesting than Nanci's. As they were downloading, I remembered every single moment of every single one of them. I was just flabbergasted that I could possibly have ever thought I was dancing. I mean, it was just ridiculous that I could conceive of an idea that I'm just this little human being. Well, I have lived these eons and eons of other lifetimes. And I remember every single moment of every single one. It sounds like sampling them Yeah, remembering all the data is like trip down memory lane. It was my memory lane was the entire universe. After that, I realized that I could get knowings on particular topics like if I focused my attention and intention to know the answer. I could get specific topics instead of just random things dropping in my head. So and I didn't know how long I was going to be there. So I thought what better ask the big questions. So I asked, what is god what am I What's the purpose of life? What does God expect me? Where's heaven? Where's hell? And what's the one true religion? I asked the last one because I was reared as a Catholic. And I don't even tell him that was the one true religion, which I do couldn't possibly be true.
Alex Ferrari 10:14
As all of them do.
Nanci L. Danison 10:16
Yes, yes. So I got the answers to all these questions downloaded, you know, in the form of knowings. And after getting all those nice, I was angry. I'm surprised that you can be angry actually, that I was angry. I am. I felt betrayed. You know, I felt like everybody knew this. But me. I must be stupid on dirt. If I didn't know this, everybody's got to know this. And they wouldn't tell me. My parents wouldn't tell me the truth. My Church wouldn't tell them the truth. My school would Catholic school wouldn't tell me the truth. Why weren't they telling me this stuff? Did they think are stupid? Did they think I couldn't handle? Yeah, I mean, I just I couldn't imagine why anybody would have taught me this intricate religion, when there wasn't a part of it. That was true. And I had just gotten the truths directly from the source. Literally, the source. I think kind of calmed me down from that. I was shown like a documentary history of planet Earth, and how religions developed, and how they got to be the way they were, when I died, and what they were going to be like in the future, so that I could see it was a good faith attempt by souls that knew there was something more, but they couldn't figure out what it was. So they were like, projecting human life and human thoughts and human speculation and what they knew about humans as a species, onto God and onto the afterlife, assuming must be the same. And so that that did come. When I came back into the body enough that I could see through Nancy's eyes. I saw the radiologists and radiology technician at the back of the room and radiologists was drawing a little map on the envelope that the mammogram films went in. It felt like I was talking through a megaphone from way inside the body out to the lips. And I said, I passed out. And then the doctor turned around and came over to me and so did the red tech. And the Rad Tech went out in the hall and yelled for a nurse to come in. And the radiologist looks at me, she goes, Do you know who you are? Do you know who I am, you know, gave me medicines to try to get my blood pressure stable and keep my heart rate stable. I went through a whole bunch of stuff. Then I died again. This time, I went back I met a different group of beings that they were the council that were monitoring my mission. And they said, You're not working your mission. We won't hold it against you, you can come home or you can go back into Nancy, if you choose to go back, you will suffer for the rest of her life. And I felt a lot of different things. One was I didn't want to be a failure. And source gives you a mission. I got to do it. And I also real still felt really strongly seminar tell those people then I was somebody and then part of me just wanted to see what was gonna happen because he had seen the future. And I wanted to see how much of it was going to happen. And part of me just felt rotten for leaving Nancy so many times. So I came back in the body knowing we were going to suffer which we have made her promise I will not leave her again until she's ready.
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