How close to death have YOU been...

Neuroscience really isn't my thing (but then, what is?) so take this with a grain of salt, but:Drugs and neurotransmitters can also alter our perception of time. If we were to release neurotransmitters with an emotionally neutral event (e.g. electrically), then time would slow down or speed up without life becoming "poorer" or "richer".I've actually forgotten why I'm writing this. It's 3AM. Goodnight.

Very well written; I cringed when I imagined being on that slanted ledge!Compared to your story and Omni's, mine is much less dramatic, but here goes.
One day when I was 11 or 12, I walked down to the country store. I lived in a rural area, and the second nearest store was 5 miles away, but farms were plentiful. As I was crossing the road, A tractor was trying to make a left hand turn, but since they move so slowly I didn't feel in danger at all.
The look on the farmers face was that of terror; he was looking behind me, and so I looked. As I turned, I heard the shrill scream of the brakes as a car was speeding right toward us.
I jumped into the ditch on the opposite side and felt the collision just a few feet to my right. The farmer stayed in the tractor throughout the whole ordeal and the lady in the car was seriously injured.As far as I know, that's the closest I came to death.

I was probably closest to death a month or so before christmas in 2005. I managed to drive my car off the motorway at ~70 mph, the car turned and went into a sign by the side of the road. The impact with the sign caused my car to start rolling and it rolled 4 or 5 times, across a side road, until it came to rest upside-down after impacting with another road sign.I walked away with a nasty cut on my finger and a ringing head, but that was the worst of it, the car was of course a write off.I don't know if I was actually close to death, the car protected me very well, certainly if any other vehicle had been involved this could have been much more serious.TTFN,WK

Great stories, Omni! Glad you are safe and with us!

I once tried to make a left turn across a small bridge going too fast while it was raining. It didn't help that there was gravel all over the road. Needless to say, my car went out of control and when I awoke my two front tires were hanging off the bridge, about 45 feet above some train tracks.I still occasionally have nightmares about it, but I put it behind me almost immediately. My attitude was, "I could of died, but I didn't. I'm not going to dwell on it." I didn't have any euphoria afterwards.

Maybe there is a purpose yet for you to fulfill ...someone's been looking out after you.This message has been edited by randman, 01-25-2006 12:44 PM

And to think you can fall over, crack your head against the ground and die. Just like that

When I was a toddler, one day my mother told me to wait in the car while she went inside a drugstore on the other side of the road. Being three, I wasn't very good at being compliant, so as soon as she was out of sight, I got out of the car and went after her. My mother later told me she'd heard the screeching of tires and the clonking of a little wooden shoe on the street. She'd instantly known it was me. I had been run over by a VW van. I broke a leg, my collarbone and had a severe concussion. In return, I had broken the van's headlight with my elbow - hence the broken collarbone, probably. I don't know what the chances of a three-year-old against a van are, but I reckon I could have met an untimely end that day. I have hardly any memory of the accident, so I cannot say what went through me at the time.Later, when I was a student, I took up motorcycle lessons because I reckoned I couldn't afford a car, but a secondhand motorcycle might be within my reach. During the first few lessons, the instructor would sit behind me, but soon I was on my own and he drove behind me in a car. We used headsets for contact. We, the instructor, another student and me, drove to a city nearby, with me up front because I was supposed to be the more experienced.It soon became painfully clear how completely INexperienced I was. We were in a long curve and I was driving too close behind a military jeep. I could hardly see through it, but I had seen that something big was coming from the opposite direction. So I steered slightly to the centre of the road, in order to be able to look past the jeep. What I hadn't seen was that the big thing approaching - a giant truck used for hauling army tanks - was preceded by a policeman on a motorcycle who was driving just on our side of the line, with warning lights flashing, to get the traffic on our side to move to the right.He was already very near when I first saw him and in a reflex I braked rather abruptly with the front brake. Because I was hanging to the left a bit (to look around the jeep), the braking caused my front wheel to slip from under me and the bike and I parted company. The bike slid to a safe position to the right side of the road, while I tumbled forward in the middle of the road, straight into the path of that enormous truck, which had sixteen wheels, giving me an equal number of opportunities to become a sticky streak of jelly on the tarmac.Luckily, the man behind the wheel managed to miss me by a metre or so, stripping about fifty metres of grass from the soft shoulder on his side of the road. My instructor later told me that when he saw me rolling towards that truck, he'd thought that I was done for. Because everything went so quickly, I don't remember thinking anything while tumbling on that road. The policeman advised me to take another lesson the next day, otherwise I might never dare to ride a motorcycle again. I did as I he told me.

Hi Iano,My mind focused on the shock wave of the exploding shell. In real time, it couldn't have taken more than a second or two for the shock wave to reach me, but my brain had a tremendous amount of data to process. I distinctly remember...
* a flashback to newsreel footage of bombs exploding from a WWII bomber and the expanding shock wave from the explosions.
* a flaskback to a TV documentary about WWI and some poor infantryman flying head over heels when a shell exploded in the trench he was in.
* a flashback to the movie clip of the U.S.S. Arizona exploding in the Pearl Harbor attack.
* the realization that this was going to hurt.
* a command to my bladder to "abandon ship".
* a command to my mouth to say something appropriate. (:raig

My bowels held. My bladder didn't. I was in partial shock. So my brain went into "auto-pilot" while the rest of my body slowly checked in to Command Central. Some men were bleeding from the ears and nose from the shock, but didn't realize it until someone else pointed it out. Thank you brennakimi,I wouldn't wish war on my worst enemy. As a footnote, after the war, I tracked down the North Vietnamese artillary captain who tried to blow me out of the water. He survived also, and wrote me that he was just as scared as I was."You Navy Yankees shoot very good."(:raig

Good for you, Mespo. I feel the same way, and I wish more of our civilian leaders had personal experience of hell on earth. I enjoyed your initial account--you can see how it provoked my own memories--and your comment above even more.Your discussion of what ran through your brain at the instant reminded me of a black box recovered from an airplane that flew into a mountainside a few years ago, the mountain becoming apparent to the pilot just moments before the collision.His last words?"Oh shit."

Well, I hope there's no heavy lifting involved, rand, because I don't have much of that left, now that the spine is patched with titanium and bone grafts.No extended sprints, either, though I can limp along gamely for quite a while on my roto-rootered knees.Still, I like to be useful.

Stand-up comic, perhaps? Intellectual comedy like that guy--I forget his name.Oh, excuse me, sit-down comic.

...and ramped up to Pentium 8 by the sounds of it.Looking back on being certain I was going to die, I remember:- the..er... certainty of it. Not like the multitude of badly calculated risks I took at other times. They were only risks - which always involve an element of (at least to my own thinking) "I can, in theory, survive this". Memories:- this was really going to be it - I was sure to die right now- that death was awful. Not simply in the sense that I was the one who was going to do the dying, more a sense that death itself, as an abstract concept about to become real, was awful. A magnification on the kind of "uugh" feeling you get with roadkill: head thrown back, teeth eternally fixed in a silent scream. I kind of recoiled from it- a sense of me as an individual. Okay we all have that...but in a very accentuated way. I saw the 'value' of a person then. Not in a selfish way, just that everyone, beyond for example, the cut and thrust of places like EvC, is hugely valuable....and then I was past it. Vroooooooooooom. Time to smoke another jointThis message has been edited by iano, 25-Jan-2006 09:08 PM

We also serve who sit and cackle.One of those "floating Chinese sages" would make a great sit-down comic.But there would probably be trouble when it was discovered that their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.