Birth NDE.
Hi!I am glad that you courageously took that first step of putting your pages on the web! I have bookmarked your site for myself today. I was feeling a little down and lost today, and reading some of the stuff you have in your site has helped me feel much better.
I had a NDE when I was being born. To accept my story, not only does the listener have to accept the possibility of NDE, one also has to believe that remembering one's birth is possible! I didn't remember it consciously until I was about 5, when I started having recurring dreams about it. They were always identical, very clear and intense.
I would see/feel myself swimming around in lovely warm water when suddenly I knew I had to get to the surface, because I was running out of air. I started to frog kick towards the surface, a vaguely lit surface above me. I kicked hard for a minute or so, and then realized that it wasn't getting any closer. It was like I was tied to the bottom somehow. The surface was maddeningly close, but I could make no progress towards it. I relaxed then, realizing that I was about to die. I felt sad about that, because my life had been so brief, but I felt inclined to embrace death with courage and hope, as it seemed to be inevitable at that point.
When I felt that I could not resist the urge to inhale anymore, I prepared myself to breathe in the water that I knew would drown me. Just as I started to do that, the Light enveloped me, Peace and Joyful Love filled my world, I felt buoyed by warmth and Perfect Harmony. There was a sense of a powerful Presence, which welcomed me with overwhelming joy and love. I was enthralled, delighted beyond words, for maybe a few moments. And then suddenly, it was all gone, and the surface of the "water" broke apart and fresh air came down to me.
At the time when I first started having the dreams, I didn't know that I had been born cynanotic (blue from lack of oxygen) by emergency cesarean section.
At that point in the dream, I would always awaken, gasping, shaking and sweating.
The dream persisted at regular intervals, about once per year until I was 27 when I entered therapy and received validation about the dream being a birth memory. At that same time, around 1982, I began to see the similarity between that dream and the NDE's that I was beginning to hear people talking about publically.
That recurrent dream stopped quite suddenly at that point, and I began to work with it consciously. One of the first things I came to realize was that the newly-born me was royally ANGRY about being born after having had the NDE. Until the NDE, I had been keen to be born, but after the NDE, all the eagerness, plans and zest I had had to live was gone. After the NDE, life seemed like a miserable second best, a chore rather than the Grand Adventure it had seemed to me before the NDE!
I still struggle with that at times. Many times and in many different ways, I have been given the opportunity to learn how to accept graciously being given what I was wanting, after I ceased to want it.
Maybe it is like the Buddhists say, "Desire is what causes suffering. Cease to desire, and you get Nirvanna." I think that may be true, that as long as we want anything in this life, we create the energy which keeps us here, because ALL of our wishes ARE fulfilled, ASAP.
Anyway, thanks again for doing your site.
DP
