FAQ: Why Did I Only See Darkness During My Near Death Experience? Was I in Hell?

Q: I had an NDE but only experienced darkness. I didn’t see the light, no one came to greet me. Was I in Hell? Is there something wrong with me that no light appeared?
A: Experiencing darkness as the only aspect of a near death experience simply means that the event was brief and only the initial stages were experienced. This is a good thing! The longer one is in the near-death state, the more likely it is that irreversible brain death will follow.
         The only essential characteristic of the near-death experience is that consciousness persists while the brain dies. In the case of comatose patients, consciousness awakens as the brain dies. This has been well documented in experimental studies of near-death states done by the US Military. They exposed fighter pilots to tremendous G forces to see at what point blood would stop flowing in the pilot’s brains. As the centrifuges they used accelerated, the pilots would lose consciousness, often have seizures and lose all muscle tone. Then, just as they are at the point of near death,, their consciousness returns and they become awake with an expanded sense of consciousness that extends beyond the body.
       As the brain dies, our mental model of reality dies with it. We no longer have sensory input from our eyes, ears, and other sensory organs. But we are still conscious. As one child told me, “I wasn’t dead, I wasn’t dead at all. Some part of me was still alive”.
So the first stages of the near death experience, which is the dying experience, is darkness. Those who only experience darkness are fortunate as their near fatal event was brief and quickly resolved.
         We can see this sequence by the following child’s drawing of his experience. As he was dying, he said that “hands lifted him out of his body and plunged him into darkness. This darkness became a light, and then he enters into heaven which for him was a pup tent in a golden field and a world filled with rainbows.