Randy L Possible NDEs

Experience Description

A 65 mph motorcycle collision. A 35-foot fall onto a riverbank. A narrow escape so improbable it could only be explained by true Divine Intervention. That was the moment when pain stopped being a lesson and became a reckoning. The world made it clear that the stakes had changed, and so had I.

Late September 1964. Prairie Creek Bridge, Nebraska State Highway 14. I was a farm kid with calloused hands and a burning dream, shaped by summers spent hauling sixty-pound hay bales under a merciless sun and dragging muddy irrigation tubes from ditch to ditch at two in the morning. The heat could sear your tongue, the dust could choke your lungs, and the humidity wrapped around you like wet wool. Still, the work paid seventy-five cents an hour, enough to chase my father’s unfulfilled dream of owning a real motorcycle.

With $460 scraped together, I bought a brand-new white 1964 Honda 150 Dream. Its clean lines promised freedom. Gasoline was never an issue because our farm’s 300-gallon fuel barrel stood ready like a silent accomplice. But freedom always charges a fee, and on a windy, overcast Sunday afternoon, I nearly paid with my life.

I was fifteen when I should have died. Not metaphorically. Not in the dramatic way teenagers talk about danger. I mean the kind of moment when physics, timing, and luck all agree that your story ends there. It was an unplanned flight into the mystic, and nothing before or after would compare.

As a boy, I could operate a 30,000-pound D-4 Caterpillar, propane John Deere and Ford tractors, a three-wheeler, the Ford F-100 flatbed, and the family car. Now it was the hum of the Honda beneath me, the wind pressing against my shirt, and the intoxicating sense that I was finally in command of something powerful. But the highway was a different creature. Fast, unforgiving, and indifferent to inexperience.

My bike, barely two weeks old, was my pride, and I was eager to show it off. The Gangwish kids, visiting family friends, begged for rides. One by one, I ferried them to the Prairie Creek bridge a mile north of our farmhouse. Each trip was careful. Cross the bridge, turn around in the meadow, check for traffic.

But on my final solo run, impatience and inexperience teamed up against me. The nut on the single rearview mirror had vibrated loose. The mirror spun uselessly in the wind. I tried to steady it with one hand. I had checked behind me, but youth and time blur judgment. In a reckless moment, without rechecking, I slowed and swung into a U-turn in the middle of that two-lane bridge, never imagining someone might be overtaking me on that lazy, overcast Sunday.

A late-model black Chrysler New Yorker, a massive gleaming beast, came at me at 65 miles an hour or more. It appeared out of nowhere, filling my vision as I crossed the center line and turned in front of it. In that instant, the fate of two intersecting lives hung in the balance.

Time split open. The world slowed to a syrup-thick crawl. My mind rebelled, insisting it had to be a joke or a trick of perception. I had never entered such a brief, impossible debate between disbelief and reality. There was no fear. No regret. Only a strange, steady acceptance. It felt as though my whole life had been a rehearsal for this singular, deadly impact.

But the impact did not come. Not yet.

The Chrysler’s grille loomed like crosshairs, a steel predator closing in at nearly one hundred feet per second. I was caught mid-turn on a 150cc motorcycle facing nearly 4,800 pounds of Detroit iron only ten feet away. The entire argument between disbelief and reality lasted one tenth of a second. There was no time to brace. No way out. I had already lived my entire life in a single instant, and the ending seemed certain.

No one could possibly live through a collision like that.

Tires screamed, one sharp wail on dry pavement, and then everything went silent. A blinding white light enveloped me, as if the universe had hit pause. It felt like a glitch in reality. I floated in the soft, comforting brightness, weightless, as though time itself had stopped. Then the world snapped back.

The big black car struck with the force of a freight train, but instead of crushing me, it launched me. I became a human projectile hurled off the bridge. Unconscious and weightless, I spun through the air like a rag doll. The riverbank rose to meet me. A slab of concrete half buried in sand caught my skull with surgical precision. My only protection was a thin foam Pioneer Seed Corn cap, laughably inadequate against the violence of the moment.

By every law of physics, that should have been the end.

Yet I landed face-up on the sandy bank, just as I had years earlier in the corral with Silver. Somehow, impossibly, I survived the first impact, the second, and the painful climb back from the real trauma that followed.

Heavenly intervention seemed the only plausible explanation.

My consciousness returned to me just as strangely as it had disappeared. There was no pain and no memory of impact. One moment I was riding the motorcycle. The next, I was standing over my mangled Honda as though I had been teleported there. There was no sign of the car.

It felt as though time had skipped a beat, as though I had been granted a brief exemption from mortality. Somehow, I seemed to have leaped from the bike through time and space to avoid the collision, untouched and protected by an invisible hand.

The engine still sputtered dutifully in first gear, the rear wheel spinning in the air like a toy far from the asphalt. The motorcycle lay on its right side, crumpled and contorted as though a titan had kicked it over and stomped it flat.

In reality, the Chrysler had performed a violent but perfect high-speed pirouette around the wreckage. The car now rested fifty-five yards past the bridge, twisted counterclockwise 160 degrees, its left front fender crushed into the immobilized wheel. Because the driver had been in the passing lane, he tried to steer around me and slammed into the bridge’s concrete guardrail.

The skid marks vanished into silence and disbelief. The Chrysler’s attempted pit maneuver on the white Honda had failed spectacularly. It only deepened my feeling of invincibility and mystery. Someone had been praying for me.

The driver, an elderly retired banker, shuffled toward me, pale and shaken. His eyes conveyed the question his mouth could not form. How are you still breathing?

He had watched me launched fifteen feet above the bridge and soaring thirty-five feet over the riverbank in an unintentional high dive. To demonstrate, he raised his arm at a forty-five-degree angle, tracing the arc of my flight.

Still stunned, he finally asked, “Are you OK?”

I nodded slowly. “I think so.”

The universe had just rewritten the laws of survival.

Background Information:

Gender: Male

Date of NDE: 09/00/1964

NDE Elements:

At the time of your experience, was there an associated life-threatening event? Yes
Riding on my new Honda 150, I made a U-turn on a bridge when a car was passing me.

How do you consider the content of your experience? Entirely pleasant

Did you feel separated from your body? I lost awareness of my body

How did your highest level of consciousness and alertness during the experience compare to your normal everyday consciousness and alertness? 16 years following the event.
see story

At what time during the experience were you at your highest level of consciousness? More consciousness and alertness than normal

Were your thoughts speeded up? Incredibly fast

Did time seem to speed up or slow down? Time seemed to go faster or slower than usual
see story

Were your senses more vivid than usual? Incredibly more vivid

Please compare your vision during the experience to your everyday vision that you had immediately prior to the time of the experience Incredibly more vivid

Please compare your hearing during the experience to your everyday hearing that you had immediately prior to the time of the experience The same

Did you seem to be aware of things going on elsewhere? No

Did you pass into or through a tunnel? No

Did you see any beings in your experience? No

Did you encounter or become aware of any deceased beings? No

Did you see or feel surrounded by a brilliant light? A light clearly of mystical or other-worldly origin

Did you see an unearthly light? Yes
See my story.

Did you seem to enter another world? No

What emotions did you feel during the experience? Disbelief

Did you have a feeling of peace or pleasantness? Incredible peace or pleasantness

Did you have a feeling of joy? No

Did you feel a sense of harmony or unity with the universe? No

Did you suddenly understand everything? No

Did scenes from your past come back? No

Did you reach a boundary or limiting physical structure? Yes
see story

Did you come to a border or point of no return? No

God, Spiritual and Religion:

What was your religion prior to your experience? Christian - Protestant
Baptized, lifelong churchgoer.

Have your religious practices changed? No

What is your religion now? Christian - Protestant
At 15, this was a born-again event.

Did your experience include features consistent with your earthly beliefs? Content that was entirely consistent with the beliefs you had at the time of your experience
see story

Did you have a change in your values and beliefs because of your experience? Yes
See my story

Did you seem to encounter a mystical being or presence, or hear an unidentifiable voice? No

Did you encounter or become aware of any beings who previously lived on earth who are described by name in religions (for example: Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, etc.)? No

During your experience, did you gain information about premortal existence? No

During your experience, did you gain information about universal connection or oneness? Uncertain
see story

During your experience, did you gain information about the existence of God? Yes
see story

Concerning our Earthly lives other than Religion:

During your experience, did you gain special knowledge or information about your purpose? Uncertain
see story

During your experience, did you gain information about the meaning of life? No

During your experience, did you gain information about an afterlife? Uncertain
see story

Did you gain information about how to live our lives? Yes
The white light was special, comforting, and wrapped around me. I knew everything was OK.

During your experience, did you gain information about life's difficulties, challenges and hardships? No

During your experience, did you gain information about love? Yes
see story

What life changes occurred in your life after your experience? Unknown
See my story.

Have your relationships changed specifically because of your experience? No

After the NDE:

Was the experience difficult to express in words? No

How accurately do you remember the experience in comparison to other life events that occurred around the time of the experience? I remember the experience more accurately than other life events that occurred around the time of the experience
see detailed story

Do you have any psychic, non-ordinary or other special gifts after your experience that you did not have before the experience? Uncertain
A single time-loss event.

Are there one or several parts of your experience that are especially meaningful or significant to you? I had déjà vu 16 years following the actual event. Have you ever?

Have you ever shared this experience with others? Yes
Common knowledge at the time.

Did you have any knowledge of near death experience (NDE) prior to your experience? No

What did you believe about the reality of your experience shortly (days to weeks) after it happened? Experience was definitely real
See my story

What do you believe about the reality of your experience now? Experience was definitely real
See my story

At any time in your life, has anything ever reproduced any part of the experience? No

Did the questions asked and information that you provided accurately and comprehensively describe your experience? Yes

Anything else to add? No