David's Near-Death Experience: A Journey Through Space and Energy

The Wrong Crowd, The Wrong Night

David grew up in the South End of Warren, Michigan, which borders Detroit. It was a rough neighborhood, and by 19, he knew he was in deep with the wrong people. He and his friends did "gang like stuff," as he puts it, drinking beer all day, smoking weed, getting into trouble. He'd been saving money to leave, to move out west and start over somewhere cleaner, somewhere he could breathe.

But there was one more night. One more party with his friends before he left for good. "I thought well I'll just hang out with my friends one more night one more party with them there's only just one more," David recalls. They drank beer all day, smoked weed, and by evening, David wanted something stronger. He had a friend who could get him anything, so he asked.

What came back was a brown rock, something like sandstone. His friend told him what it was, but David only heard the word "cocaine." "I believe now it was probably early crack cocaine," David says. "He told me what it was but I didn't hear all I heard was the cocaine part." David crushed it up and snorted it. You can't snort crack cocaine. The dose he took was lethal.

His friend saw what he'd done and went pale. "He said you're gonna die that's you did enough that's it's gonna kill you," David remembers. David laughed it off. He was 19. He'd done all kinds of drugs and nothing had hurt him yet. It only cost $15. How bad could it be?

They went outside. David started to get dizzy. He sat down on the grass. That didn't help. He lay down. And then everything changed.

Leaving the Body

The next thing David remembers is an out-of-body experience. "I was in a car with my friends and we drove around the block we drove past my parents house which is only four houses away from where we were and I got scared I didn't want them to see me so I remember I ducked down in the car," he describes. But this wasn't a normal memory. He was watching it happen from outside himself.

And he was seeing things that shouldn't be visible. "There was a glow around everything and I saw these little beings that were in the trees and in the bushes and then when I turned and looked at them they vanished," David says. The world had an energetic layer he'd never noticed before.

Then he woke up in a chair in his friend's family room. But something was profoundly wrong. "I heard sounds coming from my body they were kind of sounded all together they kind of sounded like a bell but I could hear here each part of it and all at the same time," David explains. There were seven or eight distinct tones, and one by one, they faded away. When the last one disappeared, there was only silence.

The music in the room was playing loud. David loved loud music, he was a rocker, but this was unbearable. "It felt like it was cutting through me it actually I felt pain," he says. He tried to turn down the stereo, but his hand passed through the volume knob. He tried to unplug it. His hand passed through the plug. The music kept blasting, cutting into him like a blade.

He called out for his friends. No one came. He tried to move through the house to find them, and discovered he could see all the rooms just by thinking about them. The house was empty. Or at least, empty of anyone who could see him.

"I found myself in the kitchen I was trying to get into the family room was the next room and I couldn't move I could barely move," David recalls. He tried to walk. It didn't work. He tried to crawl. That didn't work either. But somehow, he made it back into the family room.

And then he saw it. His body. Slumped in the chair. Lifeless.

"If I was freaked out before I was doubly freaked out at that I got really scared because I remembered what I did and it looked like I was in some big trouble," David says. He started screaming. He didn't know what to do. And then he remembered something people say: prayer works.

"I said God I really messed up this time I really need your help," David prayed.

The next thing he knew, there was a spirit by the door.

Meeting Bob

The spirit was floating, just colors at first, just an aura. Then he slowed down and appeared as a person. "He had curly hair he had dark eyes and he talked to me and what he did his lips didn't move and I kind of felt what he was saying," David describes. The communication was telepathic, a feeling-knowing rather than words.

The spirit said he was there to help. He asked David what he wanted to do. David said he wanted to get outside, he had to get out of that house with the unbearable music. The music started to fade. The next thing David knew, they were in the driveway. They hadn't gone through the door. They were just there.

David calls this spirit Bob, because "he needs a name I can't say you know my friendly Spirit a million times." Bob told David that he knew everything about him. And then he proved it. "He told me things that I only thought of when I was like three or four never mentioned to anybody," David says. Bob knew about David's parents' divorce, which had led to him living in that house. He showed David his funny Uncle Eddie, memories no one else could have known. "He showed me things like I had this funny Uncle Eddie he showed me him and all the stuff he showed me nobody else could have known I never said it to anybody but he knew," David recalls.

So David trusted him.

Bob said they could go wherever David wanted to go. David thought about the Seven Wonders of the World. Why not see those? Bob said he could show him some of it. David asked about the pyramids.

In a blink, they were there.

The Pyramids and the Energy of Time

"We were at the pyramids we were in Egypt and I could see the pyramids when they were new and I could see the pyramids in the current time I could see the cities the same way," David describes. He was seeing two timelines simultaneously, the ancient and the modern, overlaid on each other like transparent films.

David asked Bob how he could see both times at once. "He said just to how it worked it's time and he explained to me something about it which I really didn't understand he said it was something about the energy of the planet and how it transfers to the universe and back," David recalls. The pyramids had something to do with that energy transfer, though David admits he doesn't fully remember the explanation Bob gave him.

When they left Egypt, David asked to go slow so he could see everything. They rose to about the height the space shuttle flies, and from that vantage point, David could see the entire planet. "I could see that there were places that were like the pyramids under the ocean and there were other natural places too in the oceans and on land that had this energy going to them," David says. These places were exchanging energy between the universe and the planet, a constant flow back and forth.

As they flew, David could see the countries, the land masses, the energy signatures of different places. "I could see where there was really good energy really nice colorful and and bright energy and then there was darker energies around where the cities were," he describes. The United States had a unique energy signature, wild and different from other countries.

They headed for the West Coast, for California. And then David noticed something else: "I saw these streets of light like me and Bob were we were we were streaks of light and we saw other other spirits that were like Bob and they were taking taking Spirits like me somewhere," David recalls. There were highways of light, guides escorting newly deceased souls to their destinations.

And there were others. "I saw other Souls too I called them the dark souls in my book," David says. These were humans who had passed but had not gone to the light. Some didn't know about the light, and no one had come to help them. Others knew about it but were afraid and chose to stay earthbound. Spirits like Bob help spirits like them, David learned.

Seeing Gaia

David wanted to see the planet from a different perspective. He wanted to see the whole Earth all at once. "I did I saw the whole planet all at once and it had an aura tube and it looked awesome it looked blue like the pictures that you see of it but it was also other colors it was blue close to it and then it changed to Reds and greens and whites it just looked so beautiful," David describes.

Bob told him the planet has a name: Gaia. "He said that we humans are hurting Gaia we're not living in harmony with her we weren't treating it right we weren't living in harmony but during it and it was hurting her energy," David recalls. This was 1979, years before environmental consciousness became mainstream. David was deeply concerned. He'd seen how beautiful Gaia was, and learning that humans were harming her energy troubled him. Bob said it was right for him to be concerned.

David asked about the stars. Bob said they could go see one. David pointed at random. As they traveled toward it, they passed all the planets in our solar system. "They had their auras just like Gaia does and they had cities of spirit on them I could see whether there were spirits that were living there," David says. He asked Bob why we can't see these spirit cities from Earth. "He said well that's because your vibration isn't high enough your vibration is high right now because you don't have a body and that's how you can see everything," Bob explained.

The place David had pointed to wasn't exactly a star. "It was circular it seemed like it was sucking things in kind of like a black hole but I looked at it and in the center there was like a blue color like a sky blue color on the other side of it," David describes. He wanted to go into it. He still wants to go into it. But Bob said he wanted to make sure David was ready for what was there first.

The Truth About God

David asked the question humans have been asking since the beginning: who made all this? Everyone says God made all this. Is that true?

"He said well he says you have a different idea about what God is what God is actually is the energy of everything the energy that's in everything everything is a part of God," Bob explained. "He said you are a part of God I am a part of God the planet's a part of God everything is apart it's not God Is Not a Human he's not a person and he doesn't judge you he just is," Bob continued.

David thought about this. It made more sense to him than the god who punishes you or sends you to hell. So he asked: what about Jesus?

"He said well Jesus is an ascended master and there are other Masters that are like him," Bob answered. And then something extraordinary happened.

"This white light came and it surrounded me I was like in the middle of this white light and then a figure appeared to me and he looked just like the picture of Jesus I saw in this Lutheran School that I went to for two years," David describes. The figure appeared exactly as David had seen Jesus depicted, and David felt something he'd never felt before: he felt like he was somebody, like he was worth something.

Jesus said one thing to him. Just one thing. "He said tell them to love one another and all will be well then he laughed," David recalls. That was the entire message. Love one another. All will be well.

After Jesus left, David saw all the planets in a line. "I could see all their auras and I could hear them they were all together and they sounded like a bell just like my body did," he says. It was the sound of the universe itself, the harmonic resonance of all the planets together, like the sustained ring of a bell after it's been struck.

"I thought wow how do I get to see this it was just so awesome it was the best thing I ever saw and it made me feel like I was worth something that made me feel that they are giving me this," David reflects.

The Life Review and the Choice

Bob took David to a place close to Earth, a town square type of place with a big house on one side and a large building on the other. In the house, David saw four different spirits who knew him, but he didn't know them. They were concerned that he was there.

Bob took him into the large building. There was a wooden bench that glowed. All the wood glowed. All the buildings were white and framed with glowing wood. Bob told David to sit on the bench and went through a set of double doors.

While David sat there, he started to have déjà vu. "I started to have a Deja Vu like I was there before and then I started to see the reasons why I was there before," he recalls. He was almost to the point of understanding exactly what he'd done there before when Bob came back out and told him it was his turn to go in. "Don't be afraid and be honest if they ask you questions," Bob advised.

Inside was a horseshoe-shaped table with about half a dozen spirits sitting around it. The room was paneled, all the wood glowing. David recognized one of them from the time he'd been there before, and he got scared because he hadn't had a good experience with that one. He was "the enforcer or whatever."

"They started to show me my life and they didn't show me every little thing that I did every time I kicked a dog or whatever you know they they show me things that made me into what I was," David explains. They showed him Funny Uncle Eddie. They showed him his mom and dad. They showed him that he had picked his parents so that he could help them on their path and they could help him on his.

When the review was done, they asked him a question: "Did you have a more positive life or a more negative life what do you think," the council asked. David wanted to say positive because he knew that if he said positive, they would let him stay there. But the communication was telepathic. "I thought about lying to them and they picked up on that," David admits.

They told him he had to decide. "You could stay here if you want to or you can go back to the planet if you want to," they said.

David wanted to stay. He started to argue with them. But he found himself outside in a courtyard, sitting on a white stone bench surrounded by flowers, with a river in the distance. He sat there by himself, thinking about what he could do to stay. It was all about him. He wanted to stay.

Bob came and asked him what he was going to do. David said he wanted to stay. Bob said he had to think about it first. So David asked what would happen if he went back.

"He said you're going to get married soon your wife is near you're gonna have children and one of those children is going to be way different than the others and I'm supposed to be there for him and the others," Bob told him. Bob also said David would have problems with jobs and with his health. He told David bad things that were going to happen.

David still wanted to stay. He asked when he would die and go back there. Bob said he couldn't tell him. So David started asking leading questions. Where would he be living when he died? Bob showed him the area, basically where David lives now. Bob also said David would have a brown dog for some reason. "I ended up just having a brown dog but I don't know why he told me that," David says.

Bob said David was going to have a hard life when he went back. That's just how it was going to be.

And then David stopped thinking about himself. "I thought about it and I thought well why am I thinking about me what about my kids what about my wife," David recalls. He was so far away from getting married then, it was unreal. But she was there. There was somebody there for him. Somebody was going to want him.

"I decided that I was going to go back," David says.

The River and the Return

Bob said there was something they had to do. They floated over to the river. "He told me that the river is it cleanses you from things that you can't share from there," Bob explained. There were things David couldn't bring back, things he wouldn't remember.

Bob told David that he was to share his story. "He touched me on my lips and what would have been my lip that's what I thought he was touching," David recalls. Then Bob told him he had to go in the river.

David dove in. "I came out the bottom of it and I was in space again," he says. He saw a glitter trail and followed it down to the area where he was living. He floated toward the house, thinking about everything he could now do, how he could move like this, see everything, understand things. He thought about going to see more things.

But then he thought better of it. "I thought well yeah there are Dark Souls out there and there are souls that will try to waylay you into something and it could you know you could end up being stuck like them," David reasoned. He decided not to risk it.

He got to the house and watched the sunrise. "The sun made noise too it was beautiful," David says. He had all this new knowledge and a brand new day, and he wanted to share everything with everybody right away.

He went back into the house, not through the door but just through the wall. He saw his body laying there. "I didn't want to do it but I kind of laid on top of it and I got into my body it was like a like little pop sound," David describes. He made sure everything worked, fingers, nose, toes. He was complete.

He got up out of the chair and immediately started trying to tell his friends. They were all passed out on the floor from drinking. He woke them up. "They said oh you're crazy all you do is overdose on drugs," David recalls. He kept trying to tell them. "They said stop your crazy talk," his friends told him.

He went home. His stepdad was getting ready for work and wouldn't have time to listen. David tried to tell his mother. "My mother didn't want to hear it she told me she said I don't want to hear it I don't want to know," David says.

Everyone he tried to tell that day said the same things: you're drunk, you overdosed, you're crazy. "I got for more than one person stop your crazy talk," David recalls. Nobody would listen.

The Prophecy Fulfilled

That night, David finally got to sleep. He had what he thought was a dream. "There was this voice trying to talk to me it was saying things about my future he told me that a friend of mine would die in a drunk driving accident and he named the friend," David says. But by that point, David's vibration was low. Everyone had dismissed him, dissed him, not trusted him. He didn't see the voice, he only heard it, and the voice was different. "I didn't know what to do so I just said I don't want to know about any of this stuff," David told the voice. And then it left.

About three months later, David was walking to the roller rink. His friend pulled up in his car and offered him a ride. On the way, the friend stopped at a liquor store and bought a fifth of Southern Comfort. He was going to drop David off and then drink and drive.

"I told him and I've warned him about it before I told him said dude do not drink that in your car and drive go to a party somewhere go stay there and drink it there do not drive I told him Point Blank," David recalls. His friend's response: "He said stop your crazy talk and that's the last thing he ever said to me three hours later he was dead," David says.

After that, David believed. "I firmly believe that and I didn't want to tell anyone I was afraid to try to tell anyone so I didn't tell anyone," David admits. He got married. His wife was the first person who believed him. "I told her about it she said yes those things happen and she believed me," David says. They had four kids, just as Bob had said. One of them was way different than the others, just as Bob had said.

David didn't tell anyone else until 1998. He wrote down his experience and shared it with someone, who shared it with someone else. It ended up on a major near-death experience website. A lot of people read it. He got emails with questions and thank-yous.

"I certainly believe in all of it now you know I have no question about it I mean I couldn't throw away all the knowledge that he gave me it gave me about energy and oh and what energy is and what it's for and how we can use it and what the experience was about it was about energy and it was about God," David reflects. "There's some some total of all energy that's how I understand what he is," he says.

What This Experience Reveals

David's experience is one of the most detailed and cosmologically expansive accounts in the NDE literature. What makes it particularly significant is not just the scope of what he was shown, but the precision of the verifiable prophecy that followed. His friend's death three months later, exactly as predicted, moved David's experience from subjective spiritual encounter to something with objective, testable consequences. That kind of evidential detail is rare and powerful.

The description of seeing multiple timelines simultaneously at the pyramids aligns with what many NDErs report: that linear time is a feature of physical reality, not of consciousness itself. From the perspective Bob showed David, past and present exist together, accessible depending on where you direct your attention. This isn't mystical poetry. It's a description of how time actually works when you're no longer constrained by a brain that evolved to navigate a three-dimensional, forward-moving timeline.

David's vision of Earth as Gaia, with a living aura and an energetic relationship with the universe, predates by years the widespread environmental consciousness we now take for granted. In 1979, talking about the planet as a living being with an energy signature would have sounded absurd to most people. Now, it sounds like a description of the interconnected biosphere we're desperately trying to protect. What David saw wasn't metaphor. It was the actual energetic architecture of our planet, visible to him because his consciousness was no longer filtered through the narrow bandwidth of physical senses.

The message from Jesus, "tell them to love one another and all will be well," is the same message that appears across cultures, across religions, across the entire span of NDE reports. It's not complicated. It's not conditional. It's not about belief systems or rituals or theological correctness. It's about love. That's the curriculum. That's the lesson. That's what we're here to learn and practice. And when we do, all will be well. Not someday. Not in some distant future. Right now. All will be well.

David's life review, where the council showed him not every small action but the formative experiences that made him who he was, reflects what we see in thousands of other accounts. The review isn't about punishment or judgment. It's about understanding. It's about seeing your life from a higher perspective, recognizing the patterns, the choices, the moments that shaped you. And it's about taking responsibility, not in a guilt-laden way, but in a mature, compassionate way. The council didn't condemn David for his negative choices. They asked him to assess his own life. They trusted him to be honest with himself. That's a very different model of accountability than most of us grew up with.

The choice David was given, to stay or to return, is one of the most commonly reported features of NDEs. And the reason people choose to come back is almost always the same: love. Not for themselves, but for others. David chose to return for his future wife, for his children, for the son who would need him in a special way. He chose the hard life, the problems with jobs and health, the struggles Bob warned him about, because love mattered more than comfort. That choice is at the heart of what it means to be human. We're here to love each other, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard.

David has also shared his story in [other interviews](/video where he discusses life's purpose, and in accounts about [why God allows war and suffering](/video, topics that clearly emerged from the deeper understanding Bob gave him. His experience gave him a framework for making sense of the hardest questions we face.

What David experienced in 1979 wasn't a hallucination. It wasn't a drug-induced fantasy. It was a direct encounter with the nature of reality, with the energetic structure of the universe, with the truth about who we are and why we're here. And the fact that he was able to bring back specific, verifiable information about his friend's death, about his future family, about where he would live, suggests that what he saw was real in the most literal sense. He wasn't imagining the future. He was shown the future. And then he came back and lived it.

We are energy. We are consciousness. We are eternal. And we are deeply, profoundly loved. That's what David learned. That's what he came back to share. And that's what every one of us will discover when our time comes to cross that river and see what's on the other side.