An astronomer who says his heart stopped for seven minutes has offered a rare, shape-by-shape account of what he perceived while doctors fought to revive him.
The man, who posted anonymously on Reddit, was 47 when he landed in the hospital with shortness of breath and learned he had suffered a severe lung hemorrhage. He lost so much blood that his heart had nothing left to pump, triggering a code blue. Medical staff spent seven minutes trying to restart it, and the lack of oxygen to his brain caused a stroke.
He woke up intubated and only semi-conscious, drifting in that state for two days before fully coming to and asking, “What happened?”
What stayed with him were three distinct oval forms that appeared one after another in total darkness. Each shape hung upright from an invisible point, with a thickness like a ring. The first contained mountains, streams, forests and clouds across its inner and outer surfaces. He found it beautiful at first, but its colors gradually yellowed before it vanished.
A second ellipse followed, resembling red-hot iron. Pieces crumbled away as it cooled, and he caught the smell of iron as it disintegrated into blackness. Later, he asked a nurse about the smell. She told him blood has a distinctive odor.
“I now take it that this is when I was in cardiac arrest,” he said.
The scene brightened for the third ellipse, covered in light pink and blue clouds like a sunrise or sunset. He believes this final vision coincided with his heart beginning to beat again.
The astronomer traced the source of these shapes to something that had occupied his mind for weeks before the emergency. He had been studying Johannes Kepler’s Astronomia Nova, struggling to grasp how Kepler proved planetary orbits were ellipses rather than circles.
“It had been on my mind for weeks, and when I haemorrhaged, my dying brain latched onto that shape,” he said.
He interpreted the first and final ellipses as reflections of what he valued—the planet, the outdoors, the sky. The yellowing of the first, he believed, mirrored his dying brain. The second connected to his brain’s processing of the smell of blood.
“When I regained consciousness, those three ellipses remained firmly fixed in my memory,” he said. “When I was told days later about my cardiac arrest and stroke, it all began to make sense to me.”
His account arrived in response to a Reddit thread asking people who had “died” and returned what they experienced. His stood apart for what it lacked.
“That’s all I saw. No tunnel of light or happy deceased family members welcoming me.”
He described himself throughout as a “dispassionate observer,” never afraid. The experience left him with a slightly reduced capacity for short-term memory and a transformed relationship with death itself.
“I learned something from all of this,” he said. “But inside, all was calm. No pain, no discomfort, no worries.”
He drew a sharp distinction between the suffering that precedes death and the act itself.
“Accidents and disease may be terribly painful, but dying is easy. I’m not scared of dying, not in the least. Afraid of what comes before, sure, but nature makes dying easy.”