You're listening to a Live Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts.

My name is Nate Dorn.

When I was twenty three years old, I was shipwrecked in Cuba.

I had this premonition happening my entire life.

It knows exactly what it meant until it actually happened.

And then it happened, and then I recognized it in hindsight, and and everything changed or shifted after that.

I have always enjoyed starting with death.

It makes me feel alive to feel like I almost died.

The the whole very double thing is I always about taking chances.

It's always about almost dying.

But did you die?

Not that any always have a death wish, but it is about suffering.

It is about, like, you know, pushing yourself and know your limits if there are any.

You know, if you didn't come close to dying, did you really live?

Welcome to a Live Again, A podcast that showcases miraculous accounts 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 am a freelance photographer, videographer, editor, writer.

I love woodwork.

I love getting outside and doing things.

Basically, I can describe myself as a problem solver, like anything that I can edit, like meaning my own life, anything I can take a part in my brain and put it back together in some sort of way.

So troubleshooting is always really fun to me.

It's almost like a hobby.

I've always been a bit of a free spirit, so and outdoors has always been huge to me.

My parents would take me camping growing up, and then to me off from these outward bound type adventures going through high school, and then I would do it myself.

I would also just take all my friends camping during high school, sometimes every weekend for months and most of their time.

So I was always the person who would introduce people into camping.

I would be the first person.

Yeah, most of my friends had ever gone camping with, and so I'd show them how to set of tents or how to sleep unders the stars, or how to survive when it's raining or hurricanes or whatever.

And I was never afraid of any kind of weather.

It was always flept in rain and snow and ice and desert.

And I was definitely a drilline junkie.

I never drank or did any drugs or anything.

In high school.

It was very not necessarily straight edge, but more of a drilline seeker.

So we would, you know, jump off train tracks and trestles and jumped from car to car and drag behind cars and anything that was mildly dangerous.

I was jumping off of it or under it, or dragging behind it or something.

I just I find I was a job.

When I was growing up, I would have been that.

I always wanted to travel.

I always enjoyed just adventure of road trips, and I guess nothing really deterred me or scared me from that.

And sailboats, I guess, for some reason, always called to me, like being on the ocean.

I was a beach lifeguard out of high school, so I kind of that.

A lot of sailing with little hoopy cats and catamarans and stuff on the beach is there.

So it was very attuned to the water, a very strong swimmer, and that was always kind of gave me life, just the ocean.

Also, there was a surfing a lot like them too, and we chase hurricanes.

We'd watched the Weather channel, you know, and this is before cell phones, and we would try to get in front of a hurricane or behind a hurricane.

So I forgot in front of the hurricane.

All the cars were leaving the city and we would run in and get all those storms well that would come push in and so it could be amazing, server it could be just disastrous, not real choppy.

And then we do there just stay in front of the hurricane, keep there too, ahead of it, or we'd loop around and get behind it and get the storms well from the back.

Maybe I guess I feeled a bit invincible in a way, like I was like I can't die.

I'm invincible, you know, and several times like I could have died.

That that was dangerous, that was stupid.

So I met this chunnamed Mark Giltro who's Canadian dude, and he's a really really cool guy.

He's a psychiatrist, so he was very calm, but he retired.

He was not much older than me, about twenty three years he's talking about going from Florida down to the islands to like South America, and he had a boat.

It was twenty eight foot yanmar Cell boat and he's like, well, I'm looking for somebody to go with me.

I'm like, that sounds awesome, I'll do that.

So I went down to Saint Petersburg a couple of times and met with him and saw his boat and one of the plans and just kind of figured out this condition I could I could do work with him to do it.

And I guess he drew up on the lake and up in Ontario or something where he had this lot of seller's license or a captain's license, and so it's not like a really cool idea.

The idea is go sail from Saint Pete down around the Tratrotugas and down to Key West, around Cuba, then the islands and in South America.

That was our plan.

So it's like a twenty eight foot boat sail boat.

So it's like the captain's birth upfront and that's where he would sleep and I would have the middle bunk.

I guess where I could have a long sort of couch area where you put in like a side rail so you wouldn't fall out again before cell phone.

So we're definitely working with a lot of naval coordinate gears and whatnot.

And he basically kind of helped me mostly head of sale.

I mean I always kind of fascinated with him, but he was, you know, kind of monumental and just kind of telling me what goes where and you basically he was a captain that was first mate.

He's like, pull in this cell, pull the main, the jenny, all that, and kind of taught me how to do all the commands correctly.

Pretty much just watching the wind and being aware of your surroundings and you know everything.

Yeah, definitely want to be over aware of your surroundings because things could hit you, or you could hit your head, or you could slip, or the wind could pick up, or the rain could pick up or different things would definitely happen.

And I guess at the night we would take turns like come, somebody sleep for a couple hours, somebody would look up for a couple of hours and just go on shifts, or we would just park it and I'm more and sleep at night and get going early in the morning.

Depending on where we're at, there's like a dinghy boat.

So like say when Key West, we'd parked the boat out by a moor or a boy and we take the ding n get our supplies and go back.

So it's very much like camping out in the ocean.

Oh, there's also a dog.

He brought us dog with him.

It's a little golden retriever.

I think one of the coolest things I saw was on the way to Cuba after we left Key West.

That's like obviously ninety miles from one point to that point.

But we sailed at night and we sell this bioluminescence behind us.

After the sun went down.

It was like pitch black and no light pollution, and you could just see this trail of bi illumin acids behind the boat for as far as you can see.

It was just like almost like a peter Pan pixie dust kind of yeah, trail behind us.

This is kind of black ocean.

This sparkly dust behind our boat's recorded.

No, it's magical.

I guess the sailboat is the moments of magic where everyone wants to be a sailor, you know, for those first started moments when you turn the engine off and you go in full sail and the wind picks you up and you're actually flying over the water, or you see these by illuminations behind you, or the dolphins come out to visit you, or you had these just really special magic moments that are hypnotic and you know, strike you.

We sailed through the night after Key West, we got to uh we could see Cuba off in the distance, and we kind of went, I guess, to the east and there's this I think it's called Marina Aqua.

It's like a big bay area in Cuba.

So we were going to pop into Cuba and then get some food and supplies and kind of see the sites a little bit.

So we went into Marina Aqua area, which is this giant bay whis so big you can't really see the ends of it.

This is in nineteen ninety eight.

Yeah, so it's the communist country.

And this is one of the reasons I was traveling with Mark because he was Canadian, so we flew his Canadian flag, which you know, they're they're welcome there.

Europeans are welcome there.

Americans were not welcome there.

So I just kind of hit my passport and just said I was Canadian too, which that worked, I guess So we went into Marina Aqua and there's this point where, like off in the distance, we saw this kind of storm swell kind of like getting dark out there in the family.

You see way off in the elf in the ocean, you see it's kind of dark.

You can see the storms passing.

And this storm we saw like kind of coming.

The claim was getting closer and we're like, okay, well, storm's gonna probably hit us.

We probaly need to figure this out and uh, you know, kind of button down the hatch, get you know, get ready for it.

I think within eight minutes of us seeing the storm, the wind picked up, you know, and started raining.

So we were out I guess the middle this big bay area.

We had not docked yet.

We couldn't even see land.

We could just kind of tell where we were through the GPS.

We knew the land was closed, there were some boys out there.

We also knew there was a big coral reef in the area, so we had to be kind of careful where we were at because there's this giant reef around that could kind of tear your boat up.

So we're trying to figureut the best way to navigate that.

When we saw this storm coming.

So we started like the tying down on the patches, bringing all the sails, tying everything down, and the wind started picking up.

It went from like almost dead calm to almost fifty miles an hour to sixty miles an hour.

You could just feel it picking up, camping up.

It starting to rain, and the rain start coming down on us, and then it started flying sideways and then I'm start coming up, so the rain kind of shifted from falling on us still actually flying up into our face.

At that point you realize it's going about ninety miles an hour.

It's like hitting you like pellets.

Mark the guy was driveling with like told me to run out, throw out the big anchor against the bruce.

We just wrapped up all our sails, put everything tied down, batting all the hatches, all the things.

So I ran to the front of the boat, pulled out the anchor from the hatch, and I threw the bruce overboard, and you know, the chain started coming out and it was going down and immediately caught like on something.

I've probably hit a reef and the anchor caught.

By this time, the waves picked up to like you know, four to eight feet and our boat was going of going up and down, up and down, up and down, and the waves started coming over the crest of the boat.

So as I'm looking trying to hold this chain in and clean it away, would come over in the front of the boat and hit me and I'll just get pushed off the boat.

So I'm grabbing the boat and holding the chain, and every time a wave would hit the boat, it would push the boat back a fifteen twenty feet, so like the chain would start flying out, and I think we had one hundred and eighty feet of it.

So every time the boat would get hit like now, the twenty feet would fly out, and I'm holding it on and it's like going through my hands and I'm, you know, all the way of the boat's kind of in my hands, and I realized I can't hold it.

And so I see this other wave coming up and I'm not panicking as a team.

He's flying out and I kind of time the wave to the front of the boat.

As soon as the boat hits the wave and tips down, there's a small pause and I cleated the chain on this, you know, the cleat right there and as fast as I could, and the water hit me and it caught two of my fingers between the chain and the cleat.

So now the whole wave of the boat is crushing my fingers.

I could just feel like the fiber of my bones like coming apart.

So at this point, I want to stop and talk about this other thing that's been going on in my head for probably as long as I can remember.

When I was like, I'm thinking, like five or six years old, I have this recurring dream.

It was like a It wasn't really a nightmare, but it was kind of a terrifying dream.

And this dream would go on for years and years and years, Like sometimes it would happen like three or four times a month, sometimes not for several months, sometimes once a year, but it would be the same dream every time, where I was kind of floating sort of in space, I had a body.

I could feel myself having a being.

I was in some sort of body.

Everything was pitch black, but I could hear off in the distance.

It sounded like a thunder.

It's like a low rumble.

It's just kind of like a like a boulder rumbling the distance or thunder and coming distance just kind of force it very far away, and we get closer and closer and closer, and you could tell it was coming at me, and we get louder and louder and louder and louder, to the point where you can kind of judge how fast it's going.

Had this rolling pitch that was moving, you know, like it's thing coming down a hill, but not through a hill, or maybe a gun coming through a chamber or something like that, but but massive.

I could hear it, and I could hear closer clo clo, close to the point where I know what I'm about to get hit, and so I kind of clinch and everything in my body just gets tight, and then all of a sudden it hits me.

But instead of being smashed for this gigantic force, it was all the weight of the force and like the eye of a needle, So it would pierce me in a very heavy way, like imagine like a building falling on you, but at the point of a needle, so all the way to the world at one point, and it would strike me, and then I would wake up just shivering and screaming or shaking, and it would take me hours to kind of like shake it off.

And this happened for years even went into my adulthood.

It's the same dream over and over and over again.

And sometimes it would happen a lot during the year, just sometimes once or twice a year, but it's always there.

I always didn't understand it parallel with this, and I don't know if it was related or not.

But a lot of my risk taking I always had like a permission or an idea about the outcome of that risk.

Everything I would do, I could tell how I would land or jumping off train tracks and drag them on whatever whatever I was doing, I could always kind of see myself doing those things.

I could see myself at the end, like I never saw myself getting hurt.

I was always able to overcome, or I could if I could visualize I could do it, then me feel anvintable.

I feel like I want to jump off a bridge onto that moving train, and I could see myself doing it, and then I did it.

I was a big athlete at the time too, so I had, you know, a lot of wherewithal of how my body worked and what I could take.

And I was very coordinated, I guess, so I could predict how I would land or roll or not land, or if I failed to land the jump, I could roll in a certain way.

I was set it out on some kind of second day plan in case it didn't go exactly right.

I could always see myself in the future after that, and I was safe.

I mean there was I always knew that I wouldn't get hurt.

I always knew that I would, you know, land the jump or be okay.

I could always kind of see myself in the future.

But there was some point where I realized I couldn't see past you know, age, you know, twenty five.

It's like somewhere I just couldn't quite visualize myself being older, thirties or forties or anything else beyond this one point.

And I'm not sure why.

It was always kind of interesting, like I had this kind of saw my own death or a lot of I didn't see death, but I saw my own ending.

I couldn't see past a certain point.

I could never see myself as an older person or even older adult.

I could never see myself past twenty five, but also knowing there's a certain point where that all stopped, maybe maybe more fearless, Well, well, this is where it ends, So I'm gonna take this any risk until then so going back to Cuba.

So the squall was forming, you know, like I said, within eight minutes of siding on the horizon, it hit us.

So the anchor catches immediately.

The ways are hitting the boat, and we're going back about twenty thirty feet fifteen twenty feet every time the war hits us and no way started.

We're starting to see the land behind us, so we know we're coming on the reef pretty soon.

And if we keep getting hit back around be hitting the reef and that I'll like tear the hole up and our boat will be to kind of smashed.

And this rip apart from the bottom up.

So now my fingers are caught in between the cleat and the chain, and this lightning is flashing, and I'm fitting all the way to the boat on my fingers.

I'm trying to rip my fingers off just to get them out, and all of a sudden, this lightning flashes again, and I'm reminded of this recurring dream.

I have this thunder and far away coming towards you, faster and faster and faster and faster until a point where it hits you.

Everything slows down, like in your mind, and like why am I thinking about the stream right now?

Why is this in my head when I'm you know, working to save the boat.

And then I realized that that was the moment I've been dreaming about my entire life, This one moment, this gigantic masts is force that I couldn't never see past.

And I would wake up in this moment and shiver.

That was the point where I felt my fingers being crushed.

This way to this boat was this thing that had been hitting me my entire life.

And I see another wave coming.

So I grabbed the excess of the chain, pull it between the cleat and my fingers, and when the wave hit me, I use that extra slack to pop my fingers out.

So my fingers pop out, and then all of a sudden, like one hundred and eighty feet of open chain are gone, and we've lost our anchor.

We're just getting was getting pounded by this water and its waves and the wind.

And so I run back and I grab another anchor from underneath, and I run out to the front of the boat again.

It about twenty eight feet, so I had to run from the front of the boat to the back again.

I began to see this rain everywhere, lightning slashing everywhere.

At that point, it's just about saving the boat.

So the rest of the chain was gone.

One hundred and eighty feet of the bruce is gone.

I run back to grab another anchor, a smaller anchor.

I have to run back over the deck.

The wind's going ninety miles an hour.

I can't see.

I'm holding on everything go beneath markets in the back, trying to get the engine going.

Then all of a sudden, you hear this gigantic crash and the engine gets knocked off the blocks and hits the bottom of the boat.

So now we've lost our engine and we've lost our anchor.

So I grab a smaller anchor, run back up to the front.

I cleaned it first with about twenty feet of a line and throw it out and it immediately catches again on something below prior wreath, and we were in irons.

Our boat goes into the wind.

We're riding out the storm now mhm.

Everything else is just kind of tattered and broken.

At the end, we've kind of ried the storm out, and then we were kind of just sitting there at the end, kind of licking our wounds.

And I think it was a point where I kind of realized, like, I'm not I didn't die, I did.

We didn't hit the reef, we didn't go over board a boat.

Still intact, we're beat up, but what we've survived.

I think if we would have hit the reef, we'd have torn our boat apart.

We would have been out in the water.

But I could never see myself beyond that point.

But then again, we survived the storm, and I realized that I was going to love.

In my head, I could all of a sudden see a new future.

It was almost like being born again again.

I think I had not thought about this dream for a long time, you know, and to have that dream kind of flashed to my head in that moment, in that time, in that you know, in that desperate moment, in a way, we were there's no reason I should be thinking about anything else, but you know, surviving Why does this dream pop in now?

And it kind of all fell into place, and I kind of realized that I was going to be alive beyond this point.

When we survived, I feel like I was sort of born again and having given like a renewal, a second lease in a way, like I was now on extra time, uh, extra credit.

Maybe it's kind of living on extra credit.

So in a way they've maybe more fearless but also grateful.

So I think for years after that, I would always say, well, I'm living in after credit.

Now it's all just you know, bonus bonus life.

At this point, the storm had kind of resided and sun's going down, and I'm still kind of like full of adrenaline and full of angst and full of like what the hell just happened?

But that feeling of calm kind of came over me in a way of just like okay, now now what you know?

Now I've got this new feeling, this new manual gratitude.

We kind of bat down our hat, just shook it off and kind of I'm not sure what we did.

We probab drink some whisky at that point, just like, uh, sit down and watch the sun go down.

Because that storm kind of went as as as it came.

I just disappeared.

The next day, you know, I woke up and this I felt like cop was almost a new person, all right.

I just had this new idea about where I was going.

Or now I could plan things differently, or maybe I could see things differently.

Then again, at this point, we're broken down in Cuba.

So we sat in that bay for the entire day and the sun just baking, and I could see this gunboats approaching.

The boat remarks like, hang on, d it's just your Canadian hydrated passport and let's just like talk to these guys.

So the Cuban guys came up in this gigantict gunboat, this huge so whatever canon is, three canes pointing at us.

They docked us.

They came on boards with guns.

Mark was like a well, you know, we're briing Cuba and they can't get any American goods down here, so let's just give them beer.

So they boarded us and they had these guns and the AK forty sevens and pistols, and they're kind of like, who are you, who are you?

Tell us who you are, We give you your papers, why are you here?

And we're just handing him beer as they boored Boden Advisor, Bouton Advisor, Budweiser, and they're like, okay, okay, So we're just trying to get them beer, American beer, which they can't get down there, so they're pretty interested in that.

So we bought them off the beer and they decided to tow us in, so they called our toe tugboat.

They strapped us up and drove us around to it in a marina, and they decided, since we were two white dudes in the yacht, that they're going to charge us like eight thousand dollars for the toe and they just gonna, you know, went to extort us, which we didn't have that money.

But so they tied us into the dock and we dock next to these German guys and a bunch of other sailors who are out, you know, because Europeans and Canadians and all those those shutters were down there.

So we had like some pretty cool neighbors.

Then the dock master, he was Cuban.

He would come down and say like, you know, hey guys, you guys seem pretty cool, you know, in his I had taken I took five years of Spanish side about five years of Spanish in high school and college, and I really didn't know any of that, but it came back pretty fast, Like everything that I'd forgotten really came back fast.

My Spanish kind of kicked in, so so I guess it was kidden in my hidden Spanish brain, so I was able to understand the dock master, and he was able to tell us, Hey, the Federal he's not going to be here around eight o'clock.

If I were you, I wouldn't be here.

So he would tell us when we were coming down and they were coming down to get money from us, and he would just tell us, hey, don't be here during this time and ended up being really cool.

So we would going to Cuba around to the I guess the hotels there, the e repeat hotels, and just hang out during the day and then we come back and try to fix our boat at night.

We were there for about a month and a half.

Basically the German guys helped us get our engine back on the blocks, get our retor straightened out, and then we just took off during the one night we just took off.

It was also interesting because I never had that dream again.

That was the end of it.

I never had that recurring dream that I'd been having my entire life.

It just stopped.

Now it can start planning the rest of my life.

I see myself as thirty or forty, or you know, being an old man even so I could start visualizing that or before I could.

It was like a mental block.

I think it's like this, the whole very devil thing is I always about taking chances.

It's always about almost dying.

But did you die?

No?

I didn't, but I definitely lived, you know.

It's it's one of the things where you uh, the more chances you take, the more times you realized, holy shit, that was stupid.

But then you come out alive and then scathed or slightly scathed or slightly broken, but you're still alive and you still got the scars to prove it.

And that's one of the things that you didn't Did you really live?

You know, if you didn't come close to dying, did you really live?

Not really a mantra to live by, but it's it's something to feel really alive.

Like if you wake up and there's ice and sleeping bag and you're like, oh man, I can't feel my face.

Then later on you feel the best you've ever felt because you just live through it.

You know, somebody sleepless nights or so many times we've just been broken, and you feel better afterwards because you realize how close you came to to really ending in all and not that any must have a death wish, but you know, you should definitely push yourself to the point where you know, know your limits if there are any.

Yeah, I think it is about being alive.

It is about like suffering.

It is about, like you know, pushing yourself.

And I've always enjoyed flirting with death.

Yeah, that's that's a good way to put it.

I have annoyed starting with death.

It makes me feel alive.

I'd worked at Rockies pick up and Pizza here in Atlanta, and they had and they kept calling me the guy who wouldn't die, like they sold them all like keeping ours and some money, and they I guess they just there's Nate, the guy who won't die.

Like I foresaw the boat thing happening, I didn't know exactly what it was going to be.

So I think I had this premonition of this moment in time, and I don't know how that moment time would play out.

But when it happened, it happened, and I recognized it.

So I think I started taking myself a little bit more seriously, started thinking a bit more about you know, what is it I love, what is it I love to do?

Who do I want to be?

What is my legacy if that.

You know, I think I started taking life a little bit more seriously.

I wanted to play and stuff.

I want to finish college.

I think I just found a new way to see things and wanted to live in a creative way.

I have more of a creative lifestyle.

Now.

I'm a professional photographer, photographer, editor.

And it's been like a really really interesting and cool ride because I've been able to live a very creative lifestyle.

I'm still able to travel quite a bit, control my own hours, wake my own money, and mostly just make creative choices and then what I ultimately just enjoy doing.

And that's been a very freeing life.

You know.

I think that we're all in my understanding of life and our connectivity to the earth.

I feel like we're all part of this, you know.

Not this sound all hippie dippy, but I think we are a part of this flow and this energy, and I think that we are a part of everything around us, and I think that we are all connected in certain ways.

I think we are able to feel certain things and understand certain things and not understand a hell of a lot, but we have these little signals that kind of pop in and out we recognize them.

We can't always connect the dots.

Some of the dots we connect aren't the right ones.

But we feel all these things, you know, and we just trying to make sense of it.

Welcome back, This.

Is Alive again, joining me for a conversation about today's story.

Were my other Alive Against story producers Louren Vogelbaum and Brent Die and I'm your host, Dan Bush.

How does this sound better?

It's not as not, there's no base, but it's okay.

Well that's my voice.

I'm not a very masculine, very masculine speaker, so.

That's not true.

You just need to dig deeper.

Let me uh dig deeper.

Let me scrunch.

Come on, all right, okay, you need to sit on the toilet.

Okay, we have Lauren Vogelbaum, Brent Die and myself, Dan Bush, and so Nate Dorn story.

Did you guys get a chance to listen to this one?

Yeah?

Yeah, this is one of my favorites.

Like this one reminded me of the kind of story that like you'd read in a horror anthology series, you know, like the dreams that lead up to a certain point, you know, the.

Full Twilight zone, right.

The premonition part of it is fascinating.

I have another fiction show called The Maniwac Caves, and part of the horror motif that was that we were using throughout the Maniwac Caves is this guy keeps having these premonitions or like he.

Says, it's so scary.

He says, you know.

When the entity is getting closer because the fog comes in, the temperature drops, and he's like, you know when it's getting closer because you'll get these signs like you'll you'll always see three three three on the clock, or you'll think about somebody you haven't thought about in twenty years and then you'll see that they just died on Facebook.

And he called them devil's pranks.

If you guys ever experienced any kind of premonitions or anything like that in your life, I.

Haven't really any experience any premonitions, but I have, as I've gotten older, looked back at my life and been like, you know, if I would have more aggressively pursued the things that I was dreaming about in my life and not let myself be worried about the fear of making a living or you know, whatever was holding me back, I really do think I would have achieved them.

And Nate gets to that point in his story where he's like, you know, I've lived this really cool life of everything has been unborrowed time, and it's given him that the passport to really just pursue what he wants to pursue.

And he and he's built you know, I think some any of us, so many people get caught up on the in the rat race of having to make a certain amount of money, having to have a certain kind of lifestyle.

And he's rejected that and just lived the life that he's he wants to live.

And I think that's maybe one something that comes out of having those near death experiences, like putting himself on the edge like that all the time.

Well, it does match his fearlessness, right, because I think to get the reason we ever end up in a job that we don't like and spend you know, some obscene portion of our lives in that job is because of fear.

Yeah, exactly.

How about you, Lauren?

Have you had a premonition?

Not particularly, I mean not that I I have like deja vu all the time, like I'll feel like I've definitely seen this before or I've definitely experienced this feeling in this place, brought about by a specific turn of phrase or something like that.

But I mean, of course, there's there's ideas that scientists have about why we experience days of and that it's actually just a buffering issue in our brain, and that it's our brain kind of lying to us and try to trying to put things together and sort of putting them together in the wrong order and reporting that information to us in the wrong order.

So something that we've just experienced feels like it had already happened.

It's just yeah, getting right punted back and forth between long term and short term memory.

And you know, like this is actually an amazing thing about the human mind is that it's bad at stuff, but it wants to be good at stuff.

It wants to it wants to help us make sense of things.

Like the human mind, not even conscious people, but our brains are storytellers, and that's so cool.

It's also cool that, like our brains are really unreliable narrators, and that's just because like we're not machines.

Like we love thinking about we love thinking about our brains as being computers, but they are absolutely not.

You know, like every time we recall a memory, we change it a little.

When we put it back in, you have.

To repaint it.

You have to take the painting from scratch, and so it's always going to be a creative process.

Memory is creative.

Yeah, yeah, And so you know, like, can our dreams be portentious or will they always be portentious and reverse like become portentious once we think about them.

And at the end of the day, I don't think that it really matters what the science is.

I think I've you know, I think I've said this in other episodes.

But if it's part of your experience, then then it is portentious and you can take something away from that.

There's a there's a movie called The Black Robe.

Have you guys heard of The Black Robe?

I don't think so, don't know.

It's about these missionaries that are trying to like bring religion into a very hostile, primal sort of indigenous culture.

And if this one missionary meets a guide to, you know, a native who's helping him to journey across on this big track.

Throughout the movie, you keep seeing these flashes, these of like this desolate, gray sort of wasteland and he keeps having The guy keeps having these visions and then at some point he gets I don't know, snared by arrows or he you know, he's laying there and he's towards the end of the movie, he's bleeding to death and he's in the missionary's arms and he looks up at the missionary and he says, if only I had known that those dreams were of this moment of my death.

Like he was like, this is he called up to his dream and he's like, this is what I've been dreaming about my whole life.

And he's like, if only I had known that this dream was of my death, I would have fought more furioucely in battle.

I would have taken more risks.

It's such a cool, weird Wow, it's a cool movie.

But but yeah, like I have these moments recurring from in my life more and more recently, and I don't know what to make of them.

And you know, it's he'd be so easy for me to be dismissive of them and be like, oh, I'm these are just coincidences.

This is just deja vus whatever that is or whatever.

But more and more frequent in my life, I have these almost like prompts from the universes the way I like to look at him, because why not play with that game for a little while, and despite my skepticism and go, okay, this is a prompt, I'm on the right path.

Or but it's interesting that I have.

I've never had a dream that caught up with me later in life like Nate.

But I do understand the sense this sort of experience of like these breadcrumbs along the way that are like, okay, this makes sense, this is a familiar thing to me, or I know that I know that this feels right because of this cue that I'm getting.

I think that ties in kind of to you know, like Nate kept having this dream and where is that coming from?

That it would all hit in this moment where he recognized that that was something that the quote unquote universe had been trying to tell him his whole life.

He was experiencing that at that moment.

So for me, it was a moment maybe just the way he magically set up the mood of the story with the luminescence floating behind them and just kind of it put me in a real magical space to kind of be open to whatever that possibility of what that dream could be, and it is like, what is there on the other side, you know, is this the universe or God telling him something that's going to happen?

Is his life preordained in some way?

But does that depend on the choices he's making along the way?

And that's sort of how I am, even as a spiritual person.

I don't really feel like I need to know what's on the other side of the veil, Like that's a surprise that we'll get to discover.

It's either there or it's not.

But when you have these moments like Nate's story, where this dream that keeps haunting him throughout his life, what does that mean?

Well, we also we do just a little bit of a counter maybe idea to what you're saying.

Learn about the brain like it does.

It is a creative process, and we are building narrative.

That's what it's good at.

That's what it's supposed to do to help us orient ourselves on multiple levels in our lives to make sense of all of it.

And there's even the quantum field of like if it's not observed, then it's not behaving in the same way behavior changes with the observation, and it makes you wonder, well, what is what is the thing?

What is the unobserved thing?

Does the you know, tree in the woods make us whatever?

But I also think that we, especially in the West and sort of euro Western culture, we have really worked hard to create sort of a box, and we have this box and we try to fit everything into this box of understanding, whether it through science or whether through faith or whatever.

We have this box, and anything outside of that box we call supernatural, or we call you know, anything that is not yet able to be measured or described, we we have a problem with.

But you know, there's so much more outside of the box than there is inside the box that we that we go, oh, this is reality, this is the this box is reality.

I'm so interested in the infinite stuff that's outside of that box, you know.

Yeah, And.

I want us to be able to look past the box, because it's a small box that we think is every like this is everything, and it's like.

Is it is it?

It's of course it's not.

And even like the little tendrils that are kind of reaching out from the box or reaching into the box, and you're kind of like, oh, that's okay.

I don't know quite to categorize that.

Well, even our religions do it.

Even our religions are an attempt rather than embracing the mystery.

My critique of my own religion is so many people want to define everything, and I'm like, I think we're just here to enjoy the ride o way.

This dogma is part of the human need to sort of make sense of everything or make everything.

You know, we all we all think we know the mind of God or something like.

It's religions get that dogma where they're.

Like, but can we put it on a spreadsheet?

Nate?

For me, Nate's story was above all about feeling this feeling that he kept talking about about feeling fully alive and connected, like this state of mind where every sense is heightened and where every moment feels vast and like electric.

And part of that was like his adrenaline rush when he I guess he would get into some sort of zone and we've all felt that zone where you're like, Okay, I can see the outcome of this before I make the move.

But then he also describes these other moments after having put himself at risk or gone on the great adventure, where that beautiful stuff.

Right where he's talking about racing over the water at full sail, there's nothing but the sound of the wind or the endless expanse of the sea, and like the bioluminescence that he talks about seeing, you know, like everybody wants that's the stuff everybody wants to experience in the romantic idea of sailing.

But you can't get there unless you've gone through all of the other hardships that go with sailing, the hot, endless days with no wind, and do we have to suffer and take these huge risks in order to have these moments of transcendence.

Well, there's one thing I'd like to add to that is he also talked about those moments when you've had sleepless nights and you're broken and you make it through.

Like it's not just jumping off a train trestle or sailing across the ocean.

It's like when you've gone through something that completely breaks you in your personal life and you still survive.

Like it's almost like pushing himself to these extremes gives him the strength to also move forward in difficult parts of his life, which I think is a good lesson for everybody you know, like you can make it through these moments even if you're not practicing by jumping down a ravine or something like that.

You know, It's funny because I've been on a few camping trips with Nate.

We've been friends for many years, but he and I didn't even know this story, like he never told me the story before.

And he also has another whole story that's probably going to be another episode of this podcast where he actually had a near death experience whilst on a surfboard and saved attempted to rescue another person who did die in his arms.

And he has another one where he was hit by a hurricane and has this weird moment when he was in the eye of the storm.

Also another story at sea.

He's got all these water stories and this was just one of them.

And that crazy, but.

He's he's just a font of story.

But he yeah, he.

I was hiking with him in Zion National Park, which is sort of almost like roadrunner Coyote Country, and there's this one section where you hike along and we were very tired.

We'd already hiked like six or seven miles and we're, you know, coming in the sun was going down and it was kind of windy, and there was this path that was like to the it was carved into a rock cliff basically, and on your left there was no guardrail, there was no nothing.

It was just you know, primitive.

But it was a one thousand foot drop and I mean sheer.

Yeah.

Like it wasn't like the kind where you look down and you see a little bit some boulders fifteen feet down kind of cropped out below you.

No, this was a sheer drop and I'm terrified of height, so I was hugging the wall, you know, afraid to get anywhere near this share.

He was like he had a forty five pound pack, which is way too heavy, and he was just like with his toes sticking out over the ledge, leaning over to look and kind of rocking and I mean literally and with the weight of the pack on his back, like any slip or any imbalance there, boom, there would have been no more Nate.

And it just you know, and a cringe to even think about that.

But he's just this guy who's not He's just kind of got this fearlessness about him which is insane.

And I don't know, he's also the most chill, laid back guy.

You would never know that he has this danger streak if you just met him, because he's.

Yes and gets it all out for those adrenaline rushes.

He doesn't need to be wild in his real life.

In his daily life, you know that's wild.

After the first like two near death experiences on the water, I might step back personally, but I'm happy that he's like, yeah, sure, that's.

How you feel alive, let's go.

He's able to achieve these moments where he feels completely alive and completely awaken, in the zone of like aware that he's in this body and aware that he's alive.

And that's interesting because I don't know that I'm one.

I don't know if I ever seek that out.

I like to go camping, and I like to do cool things.

I like to do hard things, but I've never been like and I have experienced that feeling of like, oh I am exhausted on more now this almost killed me, you know, crack a beer whatever and sit back and go, oh wow, this is kind of beautiful, and so I understand, like, and that wouldn't You wouldn't have that moment unless you had the previous moment.

So in many cases.

But yeah, yeah, I'm a very cautious person.

I tend to specifically not seek out moments like this because I I'm anxious, just like getting up and making breakfast, and so therefore, therefore the idea of going out on a ship in the middle of a storm, like like, I'm just like, no, no thanks, no thanks, I'm good here, I'm great.

Just sitting right, this is okay.

I can I don't know, like I'll watch the expanse and get my jolly's out for a minute totally.

But you know, like like I'm a big fan of little thrills, but I love the idea of pushing yourself further to.

I guess I had moments in your life when you felt like extremely more quote alive than other like extraordinary moments when when you're like, wow, I am really aware and conscious of being alive and being in this body.

I mean, I guess you know, and anytime that you're again like my nervous system is sort of always very open and on fire and telling me a lot of things about everything that's going on around me, and so I can just walk outside and be like wow, wind, who that's that's that's wild.

You're already sensitive.

Yeah, Like I talked to three people today that someone had their phone on very loud.

That's enough for me.

I'm going to go sit down for a while.

I mean, and of course, you know, like of course, like you know, you go, you know on like a fast ride or you know, like a you ride in a friend's fun car on a motorcycle or something like that, and you're.

Like, oh, yeah, whoa.

But it's a little bit too intense for me.

I'm just like, I'm going to go back and just have some hot sauce.

That's plenty of Yeah.

I think my reaction after what he experienced wouldn't be like I'm just gonna crack a beer and watch the sense that I think I just sit and shake for about forty minutes and write and think about it the next three days, like, oh my god, I almost died.

You know, I just don't have that as I was really accident prone little so I was breaking my arm or I was breaking my shoulder all this stuff as a young kid, and I think I just was like, you know, you could really get hurt if you do that.

So I was always a.

Little more I wonder if it's like amigdala is smaller than everybody else's, you know, like if he has no fear, and he's like, you know, what does is Nate Dorn capable of experiencing PTSD?

I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't know.

Man.

It reminded me that there's there was a Buddhist monk who talked about pain and suffering as being two very different things.

Pain is your nervous system and it's something that you can't necessarily control.

Suffering is not pain.

Suffering is the story we tell ourselves about the pain.

And for Nate, you know, and I see it like I see it with my kids on the soccer field, like one kid will fall down and skin his knee and just really lean into the drama of that and the narrative he tells himself.

Our little friend Jonah actually sit cried out at one time and when he skinned his knee when when he was visiting, and he said it was probably five years already.

He said, dear God, why the cutest.

Thing I've ever.

It's okay, Jonah.

But then other kids, you know, skin their knee and they get them and keep running and they have a different narrative that they're telling themselves about what's happening to them.

And and Nate, Yeah, he has a different he has his his narrative is a.

Shrug yeah, which is amazing.

I hate calling other people's stories inspirational, but it is like, oh yeah, like maybe maybe I should like like like d clench a tiny bit.

Yeah.

So the stories we tell ourselves about our experiences, that's the perspective.

And that is a choice.

That's not you know that, that is a voluntary thing.

That does bring up one other point that I wanted to raise, and that is he talked about never like previous to this event, never having the concept of getting older than he just about was right then like mid twenties or so.

And I wanted to ask you, guys, did you think about this when you were a kid, Like did you were you able to perceive yourselves as being as old as you are now.

Thirty?

I remember talking to my friends and we were like, we'll meet back when we're you know, like eight years old or something.

We'll meet back at this one place when we're thirty, as if it was like forever, Oh sure, oh my god, like and yeah, I have I have never I've always seen myself as throughout all these stages of life.

In fact, I see myself as probably I see myself as potentially being one hundred.

I've never had this block that he described of like I you know, we had another story Lauren earlier in the season where the person had the exact same block at the exact same age.

She had the same thing happen.

It was a water incident.

She never could see herself past the edge of twenty five, and then this incident happened pretty much I think, right around her birthday, same as Nate.

And then it changed after she survived.

She almost like I think she described it almost as like having skipped into a parallel yeah, like reality where we're in this she shifted into another reality where in this other reality she keeps going.

Anyway.

But it was it was literally the same phenomenon.

I wonder if there's a lot of people that are like, I can't see myself past twenty five.

And then some incident will happen.

I mean, there's two of them we've got now in this show.

So I have to admit, when I was listening to a story, I was like, at that age, I couldn't see myself at age, even when I was twenty two.

I couldn't see myself at age twenty five or thirty, which is why I didn't have a mutual fund or wasn't planning ahead or what I was going to do in college.

And so I was going to leave it alone because it's like, it's such a great narrative device that he did.

Couldn't see himself into the future, and then he had this transformative moment.

But I'm like, I just I didn't have like any sense of who I would be past the age of whatever age I was in, And there's always very present even right now.

I'm very present in my age that I am right now.

I don't wish I was younger or older.

I don't really think about what I'll be like when I'm older, or really reflect a whole lot back on when I was younger.

I'm just very in the moment, I guess, so, yeah, and.

I think it's okay if your transformative moment is slightly smaller.

Yeah.

It was almost like a rite of passage, you know that they have in all these other cultures, Like that experience that he dreamed about allowed him then to contemplate adulthood, you know.

Yeah, and then he began to have plans for the first time.

Yeah, that'd be interesting to live a life without ever having a plan.

That's what I did.

I don't recommend it.

Next time.

On Alive Again, we hear from Chris Alonzo, who survived a devastating tornado and rediscovered his faith amidst the destruction, finding community.

And a path forward.

In this panicked moment, and in this moment of desperation, I remember thinking, take me, don't take my son.

Take me something that reminded me.

Hey man, in your deepest, darkest, most frightened moment, you didn't appeal to science.

You appeal to God.

Our story producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die, Nicholas Dakowski, 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 El Kali 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 Special thanks to Nate Dorn for sharing his story.

Nate is a talented photographer based in Atlanta, Georgia.

You can explore Nate's work and creativity by visiting Natedornimages dot com.

Alive Again is a production of iHeart Radio 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.