You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures, an iHeart podcast.

In two thousand and six, I had a freak accident.

I was pulled under the wheels of a speeding train, and as the surgeon's thought to save me, I had a profound out of body experience.

I take myself back to that realm where time did not exist.

For the first time in my life, I was complete, and I was in the present moment.

Something more powerful than me.

Was at force that was at save me, that take and all I could think was, I've got to share this with everybody.

Everyone needs to know about this.

Welcome to Alive Again, a podcast that showcases miraculous account of human fragility and resilience from people whose lives were forever altered after having almost died.

These are first hand accounts of near death experiences and more broadly, brushes with death.

Our mission is simple, find, explore, and share these stories to remind us all of our shared human condition.

Please keep in mind these stories are true and maybe triggering for some listener, and discretion is advised.

I grew up well in the Midlands of the UK and I had a very happy upbringing.

Them.

I was in a really good place, to be honest with you.

My family was good, and I felt really good about the world, and all that was about to change when I started at the state school.

We call it comprehensive school over here.

And that's really because I'd got learning difficulties inasmuch as I'm dyslexic, and I was never actually diagnosed with dyslexia, and so once I got into that system within the school, I was immediately sort of seen as being sort of like a not only a slow learner, but like I wasn't interested, you know, that I got no interested in learning, which is completely untrue.

You know, I wanted to learn as much as I could about life.

So that was kind of like a blueprint really for the rest of well for a long time, you know, into my adult years that I felt like a failure and I felt like trouble, and it hit me hard throughout my teens and so into my late teens, I suddenly decided that I wanted to go out and enjoy myself and party dislike everyone else, I'm sure, but I kind of took it slightly to the next degree, you know, and that carried on throughout my twenties, so I moved to London.

You know, I figured that London was going to be the land of opportunity.

So I thought, it's not working for me here where I'd grown up.

And I did fall into some really interesting circles of friends, which was great, but that became tougher for me in a sense because most of those friends, well pretty much all of them were successful in whatever they were doing, and quite a few of them happened to be working in the music industry and photography and things like that, and I really wanted to get in.

I tried to keep pushing that door open, as it were, but nothing ever happened.

It just wasn't working for me either.

It was a bit of a double edged sword because as much as they were a brilliant bunch of friends to have around me, it was also like having this mirror again in front of me, saying, David, you are still a failure.

You were still not even able to succeed at this and these people are why not.

I was picking up work, you know, sort of like working on construction sites, working in kitchens, washing up anything I could do to make money, and I also discovered I wasn't really that good, that kind of stuff, especially construction work.

Anyhow, I started to think a lot about the past.

I started to think about opportunities that I messed up on, and all I could feel was absolute despair.

I was struggling, and so I would say, I started to drink to try and quash this feeling of inadequacy and fear of running out of money.

I was about to lose my apartment.

I remember getting a viction notice coming through the post, and I spoke to my sister on the phone and she said, come on stay with us for a few weeks.

She lived out in the countryside with her young family.

So I went up there for a couple of weeks just to try and get my head around what I was going to do to be able to live in and fit into life.

This was in two thousand and six.

I don't think I could could have sunk any load than I had at that point.

It was pretty pretty depressing and frightening as well.

There's an interesting story when I was just going up for a weekend and I was on the train and there was an elderly couple sat opposite me, and I remember that particular day, I was not feeling in a great place, and I didn't really feel like firing up conversation, but she was really keen to open up this conversation about the fact that they were going to see this medium in the town where my sister lived.

And I said, okay.

She said, look, take this flyer.

She's really good, and I went, okay.

So I just put it in this flyer in my pocket.

And I remember turning up at my sister's house and there was a lot of mayhem.

The kids were running around stuff like this.

So I said, look, I'm just going to go and have a drink at the local bar.

So I went down.

I went and I sat there and I bought myself a beer and I opened up this flyer and looked at it and I thought, do you know what I'm going to go?

And I walked in and it was packed.

And then it got towards the end of the session and she started pacing around, I remember, and she was very animated.

She was walking backwards and forward.

And then she turned around and she said, gentleman in the blue sweater, which was me.

She said, your life is about to change.

And I thought, you know again, me back then it was all about you know, I need the money, you know, I said, it was fantastic.

Am I going to win the lottery?

What?

What is it going to change?

She said, oh, they're they're not telling me.

She said, just be prepared for it.

It's going to be a very big change, but you will be protected.

And that's what she told me.

I met up with somebody actually, and this was just a few weeks prior to me going up and staying with my sister and her family, and I've got this connection with her.

It was just like one of those She had a grounding effect on me.

And when I went to stay with my family, with my sister's family, that is, she said, well, I come and hang out with you for a few days.

This is my friend Anna who i'd met, and I said that, yeah, that'd be great.

So she came up.

To see me and we hung out for a few days and we had a brilliant time.

Then she had to get back to London.

She got an appointment to get back for so I took her down to the rail station to see her off.

That was the day that my whole life was about to change.

It was a cold February day in two thousand and six, it's a bright blue sky that was hardly a claud in the sky.

And we stood there.

The train came down the track.

I remember seeing it coming down, and then I helped her onto the car with her bags and I gave her her going to kiss say goodbye to her.

We both heard the automatic doors buzzers going, so she said you'd better get off.

I said, yeah, sure, I better, and I stepped back and it was at that point that those automatic doors closed on my coat.

So I was wearing like this three quarter length sheepskin coat which is quite thick in quality, so it jammed right in there and I just couldn't pull it free, and I thought this is not good.

I yelled out for help, hoping there would be a guy, and I didn't realize there was no god working on this actual network.

So I started banging on the windows and carried on corning, hoping that the driver may be able to see me through the window or something, you know, But this just didn't happen.

There was only one other guy on the platform that day, and he was also seeing off his girlfriend, and I remember he actually turned around to me and shouted at me, take your coat off, mate, take your coat off, but it was just too tight.

I started to feel pretty scared.

At this point, I could see my friend Anna.

I could see her through the glass of the car.

The look of horror in her eyes filled me with absolute inevitability that this could be the end for me.

I suddenly felt well.

I felt like I was staring death in the eyes.

At that point, It's like time had stretched.

It didn't slow down, it wasn't like slow emotion, but at times stretched, and I I thought, how am I going to cope with this?

The train's engine started to rev up and started pulling out the station, and I heard and felt every gear shift, and I suddenly lost my footing.

Then I was dragged at great speed along the platform, and then I was sucked between the edge of the platform.

Then I under the train itself, and I still got this sense of time stretched, and I just remember saying to myself, relax.

I'd seen this news article a couple of weeks back, and it came into my thoughts, and it's where a young infant had been thrown from a burning apartment block from the third floor, and they said that that infant survived because because children don't tense up like we do as adults.

So that's what I did.

I relaxed my whole body, and suddenly the train became more like this mechanical beast as I got sucked down between this gap, and I'd gone from that moment into what felt like absolute hell.

It was like being thrown into a washing machine at full spin.

But it was violent, and it was dark, and there was just the smell of oil, and you know, the sensation the feel of the metal was really terrifying.

And then I was finally thrown down to the ground in between the tracks.

I was in absolute agony.

The train was still continuing on, and I thought to myself, it's not over yet.

You know, part of the undercarriage of that train could hit me because it was a long training.

It was still continuing on, and I still got this sense of time slowly expanding, and I thought to myself, remember all the double O seven James Bond movies, or the Indiana Jones movies.

What would they do now?

They would put their face right down into the gravel.

So that's what I did.

So my face was in that gravel, and the train eventually moved on, and there I was in complete agony.

I remember seeing my arm completely ripped it right open as well, and ah, the pain was just really intense, but I was just so glad to be alive because I didn't think I was going to survive this.

It still amazes me to this day that I was so calm at the point of this whole thing unfolding.

It really is.

I understand the whole phrase now of ftal flight, but not only that.

I saw a documentary only recently of this neuroscientist called Dr David Eagleman.

Basically, the mine goes from if you like, the best way he described it was being if we view day to day life through a VHS old video camera, then it's like going from that to super cinematic wide angle film.

And that's what it is.

So it's not only visually do you take everything in, but you're able to hear more, you're able to think more, and you're able to process exactly.

How you're going to deal with this situation.

So me as a person, I'm no superhero and I'm not you know, when things do go wrong in all fense, I'm not that kind of cool collective person.

Normally I'm like, oh well, no, wow, yeah.

Within minutes it felt like the paramedics arrived, and I remember the doctor in the back of the ambulance turned around to me and he said, look, we've just come from a war hospital around the corner.

That's how we were able to get here so quick.

But the hospital is going to save your life is a twenty five minute drive.

And so the sirens went on and we took off like a rocket down the highway.

We arrived at the hospital and I remember there was a whole.

Team of nurses and medics and doctors are waiting there.

They got to work on me, and I knew that I was losing a lot of blood.

I'd see just how much blood I'd lost on the track.

And the surgeon he was a lovely guy, you know, and he said, look, your family are here.

Would you like to see them before we wheel you into theater?

And I said yeah.

So they came in and obviously all of.

Them were completely shocked and in distressed.

And I was saying to my mom, Mom, I'm so sorry.

It's always me bringing the dramas to this family, isn't it.

It's always me messing up.

So there you go.

Still got that sensation and have been that person and of course she put her hand out of my mouth.

She said, it's not your fault, it's not your fault, which it wasn't, of course.

Well, then I was keen to speak to my friend Anna, who I could see, who were sat at the back, and she came over and I remember she was just shaking her head from side to side, and she was saying, I can't believe.

You were alive.

They actually announced that you were, that you were dead.

I also saw you go under the train.

It was at this point, just before I got whirled into theater, that I left all the agony that I was in.

I left the drama of the hospital and all the noise and the Fruessian light in my eyes, and I was suddenly in a much calmer place.

I'd left my body.

I was in a different realm altogether.

I was.

It felt like a small, darkened space, not like a foreboding sort of darkness, but a very comforting sort of darkness.

And I felt safe instantly, and I figured that I was dead.

I thought, well, this is it.

I didn't make it, so this is death.

I was made to feel calm in.

This realm, you know.

I was like suddenly greeted by all these beautiful, pulsating colors of light all around me, yellows and ambers and golds and green, and I tried to get my bearings because I realized I was no longer laid on the hospital trolley.

I was laid on this huge granite rock.

It felt so comfortable to lay on, even though it was just it was a hard rock.

And I realized by this point I was no longer clothed either.

I was just covered in this really lovely sort of material.

And I felt comforted by this beautiful material that was covering my body, and there was light reflecting off it, and it was just like a beautiful light blue.

It's strange, but I.

Just felt great to be suddenly calm and comfortable.

I laid there for a while, and then I started to see light coming through my eyelids.

There were three symmetrical grids of white light slowly closing in on me, and I just couldn't take my gaze away from it.

I mean, normally, in this realm that we live in there, I wouldn't be able to look into that kind of intense white light, but I could hear.

And the reason I kept looking into that light.

I realized there was a healing energy coming from this light.

There was healing the trauma that my body had just been through, you know, this horrific accident, and I felt like it was just slowly calming or the.

Trauma of it all.

Then I felt the presence of somebody near and just there stood at my feet was a beautiful sort of androdging this person.

I had never seen somebody filled with such purity and light as this person.

But I knew this person and I couldn't figure where from.

And I actually said that, lad, I said, I know you don't where do I know you from?

And this person just.

Kept smiling back at me and didn't say a word.

But that was fine because I felt that this person was my keeper, if you like.

This person was here to protect me and guide me.

And then I felt the presence of more people either side of me.

There were two female forms and they had their hands slowly hovering over the contools of my body.

They weren't actually touching my skin, but they would going over the whole of my contour.

The energy that was coming from their hands was so powerful.

It was very very intense, and it was an energy of love.

It was like unconditional love.

They were healing all those years of feeling like a failure.

They were healing all the years of feeling hurt and fearful about my life.

They were taking off one layer at a time, and they were just getting right down.

And the closer they got to that puristence of my soul, the lighter I felt.

And I'd never felt so complete ever.

I'd always looked for other ways of finding happiness in my life, but here was happiness in its completeness.

I started to think about my family at this point, because I thought, well, clearly I didn't make it and I am dead, so they're going to be even more upset now.

And I wanted to try and see if I could see them.

So I edged my way over the side of this huge rock and look down.

I was hoping to be.

Able to see them.

I didn't see them at all.

What I did see was a waterfall, a waterfall of stars the size of Victoria Falls on Niagara Force.

It was like absolutely vast billions of sparkling stars.

It felt like I was looking through one galaxy into another.

I was there in this universe, our universe, and that connection I felt with the universe was so powerful, something I'd never felt throughout the whole of my life.

But the most profound moment of the whole of this experience was about to happen.

That was I felt as I laid there, this energy of love had suddenly turned like somebody had turned the dial up, and I felt this energy was like causing every single molecule of my body to vibray with love.

And I lifted my head slowly, and just beyond the being of Light who stood there at my feet still was this huge tunnel of white light that was slowly closing in on me.

It was coming through the universe, It was coming.

Through the stars.

It was white, it was intense, and it was surrounded by all these dramatic flames that were slowly circulating around the edge of that white light.

I was then being told that what I'm looking at here is the source of all creation.

This is God, not God as I'd believe God would look like, in some kind of human form.

No matter what faith we follow, there's usually some kind of human form.

For me.

From my school books and stuff, it was always the image of Michaelangelo's God on the Sistine Chapel.

But this wasn't the guy with a long gray beard a tour.

This was just intense white light and the power of the love that was coming from it just made me feel so complete and joyful.

My head went back once more, and I remember I was actually laughing with joy.

I had never laughed in the hole of my life.

And it was at this point that I came crashing back into my body.

I was back in the hospital.

All the pain came rushing through every single vein of my body and muscle and bone.

The noise level was like it fell he was screaming into my ears.

Yeah, it was quite sort of shocked.

I was wheeled into the theater that at that point.

So I was under anesthetic for eight and a half hours with the first operation, and I woke up in the middle of the night, and of course a huge part of me was dealing with with the with the horror of the accident, which is completely natural, but the main part of me was more absolutely trying to process this incredible experience that had happened to me.

Because I knew nothing about neo death experiences.

I'd never heard anything about this, and all I could think was I've got to share this with everybody, everyone needs to know about this.

So I thought, because I'm dyslexic, I thought that I'm never going to be able to write about this.

I thought, I'm going to paint it.

I'm going to do the painting like the ones the Renaissance artists did, those big dramatic biblical scenes.

That's how it's got to be, even though I'd done nothing like this before in my life.

The British rail Police had to do an inquiry on't it because of the nature of the accidents, and the head of the rail police said, David, we're still scratching our heads because we don't get it, because by all our figures, you should be dead, you should not have survived.

That we don't understand it.

We see these kind of these kind of accidents happen and people never ever survive, and if they do survive, they come off a heck of a lot worse.

So something more powerful than me was at force that that was out to save me that take.

It took me a week to tell my parents about it, because them both being Christian, I thought it's just gonna jar with their teachings.

And when I told them about it, my mom turned around at the end, and she said, David, we know and I said, you know, you know you know about this?

I said, how He.

Said, well, every time we come in to see you, you've got all these tubes and wires coming out of you.

You know, you're laid there with all the nurses constantly caring for you, and you're glowing like we've never seen you glow before, and you're just so positive, and you're caring for everyone around you, whereas everyone should be caring for you.

And so I said, well, that's amazing.

So I was really pleased anyway that they got it, you know, because it was important for me.

There was no stopping me from that point onwards, and I was out to tell as many people as they could.

A lot of synchronicity started to come into my life.

And one of these moments of synchronisty was that a friend of my sisters.

Because I recuperated out my sister's home, you know, they give me my own room, and so she came in and saw me and she said, when are you going to start this painting?

And I said, well, you know, there's not enough space in here, there's not enough light and all things like this, and she said well, well, we run a yoga Plartis center and we've got a spare studio.

You can come and do your painting there.

So I said, oh great.

I became known as the artist in the attic and people would come up and they'd want to see what I was doing.

And one personal that came in, she was a cello player, and she said, there is a spiritualist church.

So I thought right, and I'd just gone in and it was one of their church meetings, and at the end of that meeting got chatting with them and they said, oh, you had a near death experience.

And they said to me at that very first meeting, they said, look, we do spiritual healing.

And I said great, went kind of come, so I said on Thursday, So off I went.

And in those healing sessions, a couple of the healers are Claire Warrington, and they give very small brief messages at the end sometimes, and each one of them started to say I was picking up Wagner and Beethoven and Chopin wrote why would that be?

And I said, I have no idea.

And then one of them turned around and she said, they were telling me that you're going to write a piece of music about your experience.

You're near that experience.

I started working on what I thought was going to be a song about this experience.

Nothing was coming, nothing was happening.

Then one afternoon, I was just watching an old movie on the TV, and then this core progression suddenly came.

And I thought, wow, that's really lovely, you know.

So I got it down onto this cassette recorder, you know, went off and made a coffee, came back, played it back.

I thought, this is really beautiful.

And I thought, this's not a song that they're asking me to write.

It needs to be played by an orchestra.

So I met with my friend, the cellist, and we were having coffee and I told her about what I was up to, and she said, oh, maybe our orchestra could form it one day, and laughed, you know, and I thought, yeah, that would be great.

I was self taught, like a lot of teenagers, you know, I needed to express myself.

Thought what am I going to do in my life?

So I thought, I'm going to join a punk band.

I could probably like a lot of kids that bang out three corps, but that's all you needed to join these kind of bands, And those really were my grounding days for later writing music, which is crazy because I remember when I met with a conductor with the final score.

He said, David, you don't understand the enormity of writing a symphony, which is what you've done, even if you've been to the university and you'd studied it.

It's a huge task and you've done it.

He didn't even know.

I can't read or write music.

I still can't read or write music to this day.

But you know, I was thinking, wow, is this is this gonna work?

I have no idea.

I didn't know whether it's going to work or not.

I remember the conductor lifting his button as it came down.

Those opening chords came, and they were the opening chords that I'd written that one afternoon on that cheap little synthesizer.

You know, it was like three dimensional sand.

It was wah.

And after that first rehearsal, they said to me, oh, look, would you mind saying a few words to the local press about your piece?

I said yeah, sure.

So I spoke to the local press on the phone and they said, hang on, you're the guy who went under the train, aren't you?

And I said yeah.

And then the BBC so we'd like to interview you at a rehearsal.

I said sure.

So the concerts sold out two weeks in advance because of the BBC basically turning it.

And it was amazing because there was no sense of me feeling like the great I am like, it's like, wow, this is my big moment.

I'm going to be like a huge star.

There's nothing to do with that.

All I could think was Great, We're going to have a full house and I'm going to everyone's going to be able to and I'm going to get this.

Story across to even more people.

I remember, just as they started the opening bars, I saw a dove landed on the stone window sill outside and I thought, wow, that's that's really beautiful.

And I thought it was just me saw it, but so many other people in the audience saw it as well.

I very rarely think about where my life would have gone if I had not had this accident or of this near death experience.

I hardly ever think about the past.

I hardly ever think about the future.

Before the accident, that's all I ever did.

I realized when I came back from that experience that I'd spent so much of my life, concerned with past mistakes or opportunities, doorways that I could have gone through that I've messed up on.

I was concerned with the future, especially the point before the accident, because I was about to be evicted from my home, from my apartments, I was about to lose everything.

So I was concerned about the future and where my life was going to go.

But I very ay think about either now.

Yes, of course, like I said, I'm not superhuman, there are times when anxiety get to grip, But I take myself back to that realm where time did not exist.

For the first time in my life, I was complete and I was in the present moment, and I realized that being in the present moment is the best place to be.

So every time that fear starts to happen, now, you know, especially the world is you know, is not in a great place at the moment.

So there's there's fear that comes into all of us, all of us and anxiety.

But I just try and say to myself, look, stop, you're okay where you're sat at the moment.

You're not under threat as it were at this moment in time, and this is the present moment.

We don't I mean, we don't talk about death.

That's the other thing that I found I now find astonishing.

You know that death does not come into our we don't plan for it.

We plan for everything else, birth, marriage, driving tests, but not death.

And I don't think that we should be sitting around talking about it all the time.

But you know, it's going to happen to us all it's going to come, and we may as well address it and then at least take away that fear element of death, because I firmly believe that death is not the end for us, that it's only the next stage of the journey.

And that's not me being romantic, it's absolutely true.

Welcome back to This is Alive again, joining me for a conversation about today's story or my other Alive against story producers Kate Sweeney, Nicholas Takowski, and Brent Day, and I'm your host, Dan Bush.

So, Kate, that story is harrowing and almost unimaginable, but what comes out of it with his art and his creating a symphony without any formal training and just sort of all of the events surrounding this that point at not only his the precursor, which is somebody warning him that his life's about to change a few weeks before this incident, but also afterwards.

What are some of your takeaways from this?

I mean, yeah, right, like similar to Rodney White, I'm struck again by the sense of confidence that this experience opens up with David to take on these new enterprises painting and composing with no formal training of either.

And I kind of wanted to like even like throw this back to you, Dan, because you have done extensive reading about near death experiences.

Is this a common thing?

Is this something that happens to folks with these spiritual experiences?

I mean all of the experiences that in the classic experiences that are noted in some of the more famous books about near death experiences, where you actually flat line, there's a consistency across the stories with certain experiences like a feeling of complete warmth and a and a and a feeling of of and sometimes they describe a white light, which we all know about.

And then there's other experiences where they experience, you know, a life review, but there's there's there's there's consistencies in these stories, which is fascinating.

That and just sort of you know, as I was saying, before.

I love how the story sort of marries the mystical and sort of the everyday life experience because we see here right like earlier in the story, before this happens, he feels like a failure in life, and he doesn't realize yet that that's due to the fact that he has this neurodivergence.

In his case, he has a which by the way, we will see again dun dun duh later this season when a completely different kind of story.

But in his case, this near death experience sort of sets off this series of events that helps his perspective to shift.

He sort of takes on these new talents.

And one thing that I love about that is how he refuses to take the credit for this work that he produces, or really for anything that happens in his life.

He says, Oh, it's not me, it's me plus my guides, it's me plus the universe.

And I find that really compelling because I think it's really easy to feel alone, and I think, especially these days, right it's really easy for us to live our lives in lots and lots of solitude, and I think that can put a lot of pressure on creative endeavors.

So to believe in something you know, whether it's your guides or muses, as artists have sort of traditionally done for eons, whatever it is, can be really helpful to kind of take the pressure off.

And in David, I think we kind of see a really strong example of that, like, oh, it's not me, it's the universe and who That just feels like a breath of fresh air.

Next time on a Live Again, we meet Rodney White, an artist and musician who survived a life altering car crash in two thousand and eight.

He flatlined twice and required a medically induced coma, during which he had a near death experience that transformed his life.

The car that hit me was a Honda City, So to hit a jeep Cherokee and flip it and then push it, those are spring speeds.

I wouldn't change anything, because the other side.

Of all of those experiences is.

This life I'm living right now, and it is.

Our story.

Producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent die Nicholas Dakoski, and Lauren Vogelbaum.

Music by Ben Lovett, additional music by Alexander Rodriguez.

Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Trevor Young.

Special thanks to Alexander Williams for additional production support.

Our studio engineers are Rima L.

K Ali and Noames Griffin.

Our editors are Dan Bush, Gerhartslovitchka, Brent Die and Alexander Rodriguez.

Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez.

I'm your host, Dan Bush.

Thanks to David Ditchfield for sharing his story.

For more about David, visit Shine on Thestory dot com.

Alive Again is a production of iHeartRadio and Psychopia Pictures.

If you have a transformative near death experience to share, we'd love to hear your story.

Please email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.

That's a l I v E A g A I N p R O j E C T at gmail dot com.