I was twenty eight years old at the time, I was in a dental surgery having two wisdom teeth taken out with the aid of gas. As I sat in the chair with the mask on my face, the dentist commenced to take one of the teeth out before I was fully anaesthetized. The pain was unbelievable and the shock of experiencing it so great that I inhaled fully and found, to my horror, that I could not exhale again. I remember feeling very frightened and helpless for quite some time, thinking that I was certainly going to die from lack of oxygen. I was trying to do something about the situation but it was as if there was just enough anaesthetic to keep me half dazed yet I could feel all the pain. As I struggled to breathe the dentist had his assistant to hold me down and started to extract the other tooth. The feeling of total agony was indescribable. Then suddenly all the fear was gone and I was in a most beautiful place where there was green grass and beautiful flowers, and little fawns and wild animals grazing everywhere.
I was lying on my back in a place of tremendous beauty, a beauty of such that I have never seen in all my travels in this world. It was as if I had just awoken from a deep sleep, my twenty eight years of life was as the dream and that was reality. I remember several people were gathered around me. I felt a great love for these people, a love that was deeper than any I had ever known, almost as if they were a part of myself. They were not people that I had known or seen in my lifetime, I cannot even say whether they were male or female, it did not seem to matter. Yet I felt like I had known them for an eternity. At that moment I knew the mystery of life. It was as if all the questions I had ever wanted answering about life's purpose were being answered in a split second of wonderfully perfect knowledge. I felt as if that place was reality and my whole twenty eight years of lifetime was just as fleeting and unimportant as a dream. I remember a feeling which can only be identified with how the prodigal son must have felt on returning home to his father.
This quickly changed to a feeling of tremendous sorrow and disappointment as one of these beautiful people said ' It's not time yet, you must go back.' I seemed to know that what was being said was said with authority and that I would very soon be leaving them. I knew also that there was no personal decision made by these people as to whether I was to stay or not, only that this was how it had to be. I remember saying with great sadness in my heart ' I don't want to go back.,' only to be told ' You must go back' Then I felt as if I was spinning around in a tunnel and being drawn backwards at tremendous speed. The speed was so great that although I knew I was spinning, I appeared to remain in an upright position, almost like the propeller of an aircraft appears to remain still, when rotating at high speed. The next thing I knew, I was in the dentist's chair and I started to cry. I wanted to tell them that I was in the wrong place, but I did not know how to explain. I tried to remember what it was that I had known and understood in my moment of revelation in that beautiful place, but the knowledge had been taken away from me as suddenly as it had been given to me.
I will never forget the torment of the next three days or so, my poor husband thought I was going to have a breakdown. For nearly a week after my experience, each morning my husband would say to me 'You was speaking in a foreign language in your sleep last night'. I said to him the first morning 'What do you mean a foreign language, was I muttering?' 'No' he said 'you was speaking in a foreign language'. I tried to explain my experience to him and to several people but they all put it down to the anaesthetic. How could I convince them that this had been no dream, that it was more real than anything else I had ever experienced. I'd had dreams before, under normal circumstances and under anaesthetic, and this was totally different. Eventually I tucked my memories of my wonderful experience away in my heart knowing that despite other people's disbelief, I was now convinced that I had proof that there was something more than this life, and I was also convinced that it had something to do with the God of the Bible, the God that my father had believed in. I seemed to be experiencing glimpses of His supernatural power at different times in my life, and it was making me more and more aware of Him. I did not understand why or how this had happened to me, but I knew that it had happened, and nobody on this earth could persuade me otherwise.
Some years later three separate incidents in my life were to strengthen this conviction. I read that the actor, Peter Sellers had also had a 'near death experience' and he too was told that he had to come back as his time here was not finished, and I came to live next door but one to a girl who had exactly the same experience as myself, also in a dental surgery, with the very same words spoken to her. Seven years later I became born again of God's Holy Spirit, receiving the gift of tongues, a language I had never learnt, after being baptized in water and suddenly I felt a connection with my experience seven years previous. Then I read two passages in the Bible. One which spoke of a person experiencing a similar incident, also being told things that they were not permitted to speak about:- ' I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago—whether in the body I do not know, or whether out of the body I do not know, God knows—such a one was caught up to the third heaven And I know such a man—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— how he was caught up into Paradise and heard inexpressible words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter.' (2 Corinthians ch. 12 vs. 2,3 and 4. } Here the place 'paradise' is also called the 'third heaven' a few verses down.
The other passage was Jeremiah ch. 1 v. 5 , where God says to Jeremiah 'Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.'
These scriptures were the greatest comfort to me, and verified what had happened to me and where I had been taken to seven years previous.
