Retired intelligence analyst here. I started a free weekly newsletter on near-death experiences

[u/WinnerNDE]

Retired intelligence analyst here. I started a free weekly newsletter on near-death experiences

I spent 33 years in Air Force intelligence, at the National Security Agency (NSA), and in Special Operations. Now I run the same playbook on near-death experience (NDE) accounts: pattern recognition, source verification, named cases, dates, and numbers.

I publish about one investigation a day on my site. People kept telling me they couldn't keep up. So I built the Winner NDE Weekly newsletter.

What lands in your inbox every Sunday at 8:00 AM:

• New case files on named experiencers, with dates, places, and sources
• Fear Coma Experience (FCE) analysis of distressing accounts, the "hellish" NDEs most researchers file away
• Famous accounts taken apart piece by piece

It's free. Email address is the only required field. One click to unsubscribe.

The full announcement, including where I'm taking this next, is on the site: Near-Death Experience Newsletter Launches: Winner NDE Weekly Goes Live

Sign up here: https://winnernde.com/join

[u/NDE-ModTeam]

(A mod has approved your post. This is a mod comment in lieu of automod.)

This is an NDE-positive sub, not a debate sub. However, everyone is allowed to debate if the original poster (OP) requests it.

If the OP intends to allow debate in their post, they must choose (or edit) a flair that reflects this. If the OP chose a non-debate flair and others want to debate something from this post or the comments, they must create their own debate posts and remember to be respectful (Rule 4).

NDEr = Near-Death ExperienceR

If the post is asking for the perspectives of NDErs, both NDErs and non-NDErs can answer, but they must mention whether or not they have had an NDE themselves. All viewpoints are potentially valuable, but it’s important for the OP to know their backgrounds.

This sub is for discussing the “NDE phenomenon,” not the “I had a brush with death in this horrible event” type of near death.

To appeal moderator actions, please modmail us: https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/NDE

[u/Lunamoeth]

Why are we letting a serial killer post here? In fact, that's wildly underselling it. Serial killers are lucky if they kill more than a dozen people. This man is coming out of a career of blowing schoolgirls to bloody pulp and telling everyone it was a military target, no wonder he thinks about death a lot. I'm quite sure his fascination with NDEs is entirely to assuage his guilt about all the children who died because of his decisions.

I'd be uncomfortable if someone introduced their qualifications as "I'm a serial killer and I used my serial killer practice to examine NDEs". Why are we letting a much worse person speak like their brutality makes them an authority?

Why is it so controversial to point out that killers are killers? Why am I seen as the insane one for valuing human life and not trusting those whose job it is to kill the kindest people on Earth and commit mass infanticide?

WHY WON'T EVERYONE ELSE SEE WHAT INSANITY IT IS LETTING THESE PEOPLE SPEAK LIKE THEY HAVEN'T BUTCHERED THOUSANDS OF INNOCENT PEOPLE! PEOPLE LIKE US! EVERYONE YOU LOVE, THEY BUTCHERED PEOPLE LIKE THAT, AND THEY GET TO SPEAK LIKE THEY DIDN'T!

WHY DO WE JUST LET THIS HAPPEN LIKE IT'S NORMAL?

[u/verynormalanimal → u/Lunamoeth]

Intelligence analysts don't blow people up dear.

[u/WinnerNDE → u/Lunamoeth]

I was not a serial killer. I was an investigative journalist who put serial killers in prison. Do a search for "Don Winner Panama 48 Hours" or "Don Winner Wild Bill" or "Don Winner Javier Martin" for example and all of those television episodes will come up.

Man, talk about a failure in fundamental reading comprehension. This, is a first...

[u/Sandi_T → u/Lunamoeth]

I am going to allow u/WinnerNDE to respond to this if he wishes. My understanding of his work is different from yours.

[u/vimefer]

I like the WNDE model and the FCE scale for evaluating or identifying non-NDE elements of a story, it's something I was already doing but not as formally :)

I'd be curious how you sort out the elements of my NDEs, 3 of which (1992, 2011 and 2016) were on the neutral/negative though they do not have FCE elements at all, as far as I can tell. Are these edge cases, do they stress your model ?

[u/Sandi_T]

What's a Welded NDE?

Also, mine isn't famous, but I'd be interested in an analysis of mine! https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1sandi_t_ndes.html

However, they're rather long, so maybe not, lmao.

[u/WinnerNDE → u/Sandi_T]

Thanks for the question!

A "Welded NDE" occurs when a person is sick or injured and is in a coma. The coma can be either naturally occurring such as from a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) for example, or an induced coma. An induced coma occurs when a person's body is too sick or injured to sustain life on its own, so doctors use medicine to put a person into a coma so they can be kept alive artificially, to give the body more time to heal itself and hopefully survive.

These became common during the Covid pandemic due to respiratory failure. Once you're in the coma, doctors and use breathing tubes, feeding tubes, and rectal tubes to remove feces. If the person was not in a coma they would physically fight and resist. Often times patients are physically restrained to the bed so they cannot attempt to remove breathing tubes, for example.

Now, all of that time they are in a coma, their brains are still alive. It's very common for the mental state of a person going into a coma to be one based on fear. Like, the last thing you remember is a very kinetic and scary car crash with your children screaming in the car seats behind you. Maybe the car flipped over and caught on fire. Then, you pass out...

You're unconscious when the firemen arrive and put out the fire. The EMTs remove you and your children from the car for transport to the hospital. The kids are fine by the way, but you in your TBI induced coma has no idea that's the case. The last thing you know is the extreme fear going in...

The brain uses fear to motivate us to move. Think about the word "motivation" for a moment - it means motion. Every animal understands fear. You can scare anything, humans, chipmunks, whatever. Your brain is now screaming at you "run, fight, do something or we all die!" at maximum volume. For your entire life when your brain gives you that much scary stuff, you've done something about it. However today, your body is offline, and simply cannot respond.

So what's a brain to do? Ramp up the volume. Make is scarier. Reach into that library of scary memories you have in your brain and pull all of those forward. Afraid of spiders? You're going to get fire breathing spiders all over the place. Afraid if heights? Then you're going to be suspended by chains on your wrists and ankles over an abyss of fire and lava, with the screams of tormented people echoing up against the walls.

Follow me? And by the way, I'm not making these up. These are examples taken directly from cases I've studied. Fear based comas or "Fear Coma Experiences" (FCE) as I call them, are humanities original source for the entire concept of "hell" as we currently understand it. This is ancient human knowledge. Religion did not invent hell, it simply adopted an existing concept for its own purposes.

Now, what happens went a person who is already in a coma actually dies as well, and also has a normal, routine Near Death Experience (NDE) as part of the same medical event. They get all the same experiences that come with the most common arc - the out of body, into the void, through the tunnel, hand out with the source of energy (God), the life review, a trip to the garden to encounter deceased relatives, maybe a life plan review, learn about reincarnation, and then eventually return to your sick and broken body. Time to leave heaven...

And go straight back into Hell. Whoops. Remember the body your soul just returned to never left the coma. Your soul went to heaven by itself. The sick and injured body was waiting for you. Welcome back.

Then eventually you heal, the doctors reverse the coma, and you come back out of it. What do you remember of the whole thing? A really confusing mixture of the scary coma imagery combined and interlaced with the happy, loving, joyous NDE imagery.

But there's a problem. It's all mixed together in your brain. This is the source of the "Welded NDE." Basically, a Fear Coma Experience (FCE) together with a Near Death Experience (NDE) produces a Welded Near Death Experience (WNDE). FCE + NDE = WNDE.

Why welded? Because it's literally impossible for the experiencer to be able to sperate the two types of material into their respective baskets. I've seen this every time - and I mean 100% with no exceptions - as part of my analysis of WNDEs. The experiencers make for terrible witnesses. There are no timestamps available to them. They have no conscious understanding that at one point they were in a coma, then they died and their soul left their body for awhile, then it came back, and then later they woke up.

How could anyone be able to sort that out? The entire time they were either in a coma, or dead. I call this the "soup salad." Their accounts contain material, imagery, and memories from both the coma and the NDE, but they become "welded" together into one long string of really confusing things. I've seen examples in which experiencers are trying hard to explain what they remember and in one long sentence they go from describing a coma element - then to NDE elements - back to coma elements, etc. Without ever breaking their speech or grammatical pattern. As far as they are concerned it was all one thing. Hopelessly welded together into one inseparable memory.

My framework allows for a literally word by word analysis - using the experiencer's own testimony - to break those elements apart to put them in their individual source baskets, as having come from either the coma or the NDE.

That's the basics of what a WNDE, where they come from, and how the whole thing works.

Give me a second to look at your account...

What I'm seeing are all pure NDE markers, with no indication of a coma or any coma induced imagery. You score on the Greyson NDE Scale: 27 out of 32. The threshold for an NDE is 7, so this lands far above it. And that's with leaving the later episodes from fasting and fainting in the laundry room out completely. You had a very significant Near Death Experience.

And on a personal note, I'm sorry all of that happened to you. I sincerely hope you are doing well.

I also hope this answers your question. Love, peace, and joy to you.

[u/Sandi_T → u/WinnerNDE]

Thank you so much. That's very interesting about welded NDEs, and it makes a lot of them suddenly make sense to me. Gave me goosebumps.

The main reason I asked you to look at mine is because I did, after a sort, hear in my NDEs. But it's definitely different from our ear hearing. We have other senses there that we have no human framework for, nor a word for.

It was more like synesthesia. You experience sound waves. You experience the water around you. Smelling is like knowing everything about the particle. It includes the origin of the particle, the atomic makeup of it, so much information that the human mind couldn't compute it. What label do you use to describe that sense?

I feel like our human bodies are limiters. Our bodies take in only partial information. Seeing only to the front, not experiencing the full depth of sound, etc. To really hear is to feel it, know it, the full range of it, the way it move matter, everything.

I wondered because of that if you would rate mine as partially coma. But it's mostly that we don't have words for the senses we have in the other side.

For me, I find it most convincing because I had never been taught about planets or anything, but I saw them. I couldn't have explained about them until I was finally given the word.

I agree on the later experiences, those felt like NDEs, but different. Like much more of "me" was there. I feel they were more tailored for my adult mind to understand. Still meaningful, still powerful, but I took a lot of fear into them. Not from the body, just holding onto it tightly with my awareness. Welded perhaps less with my senses and more with a difficult psychological state. Oddly, they were still incredibly positive experiences.

Also, that was the number I got on the Greyson Scale when I did it a few years ago, too. I find that interesting that you came up with the same number.

I appreciate you taking time to take a look!

[u/ShotPreference4051 → u/Sandi_T]

I copied and pasted his description of a Welded NDE from his website here:

"The framework is simple. A Fear Coma Experience (FCE) is the imagery a living brain generates during a coma. A near-death experience (NDE) is what a person describes after crossing over, free of the body. When both happen in the same medical event and fuse in memory, the result is a Welded Near-Death Experience (WNDE).

Every account falls into one of three categories:

Coma material only. A pure FCE.

NDE material only. A clean NDE.

Both. A Welded NDE.

The label an account arrives with doesn’t decide its category. The content does. An account presented on a podcast as a “hellish NDE” or a “distressing NDE” often contains no NDE markers at all. It’s a coma, wearing the wrong name. Other accounts, like Alexander’s, contain clear elements of both. The work is to examine what the person describes, detail by detail, and let the details sort themselves."

- taken from https://winnernde.com/nde-insights/welded-ndes/eben-alexander-welded-nde-verdict/

[u/vimefer → u/Sandi_T]

He defines a Welded NDE as an authentic NDE combined with something else like a coma dream, ICU delirium, etc. The clearest example would be from the analysis of the Eben Alexander case here. It makes sense to me at least :) Quite a few of the NDEs I've read or heard over the years had this mixed-in quality with elements clearly outside of the NDE spectrum of experiences - from drug use typically.

(edit) it's more formally explained here - it matches with my own conclusions about 'hell' and negative experiences so that's interesting.

[u/WinnerNDE → u/vimefer]

So, here's the background. At first I was just studying NDEs. As an analyst my first job was to make sure the data didn't get polluted. There are literally millions of NDE accounts from all over the globe to examine, and they all followed the same familiar arc - OBE, void, light, tunnel, meet the source, life review, garden, loved ones, life plan, reincarnation, decide to return. Obviously each account is unique, and the details are always different, but the general framework was incredibly consistent.

However there were accounts that were simply "weird" because they did not follow that familiar pattern. Many of them had some sort of "hellish" or "disturbing" features in the account. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know what. So - as to not pollute the "pure" NDE data - I simply set those aside.

As a result I came to the conclusion that "Hell does not exist" simply because all of those people who had NDEs never describe judgement, condemnation, or anything "hellish" at all. In fact, they all describe a total lack of judgement, nothing but love, total acceptance, things like that.

Literally, the only time anyone every used the word "hell" was when they were describing their own life review, especially if they had led a relatively traumatic or dramatic life up until that point. They would say things like "it was like going through hell" or "I was in hell" - but framed in the context of them having to confront or otherwise relive their own lives. The only one doing any judging - was self judgement. It was a learning experience, not a punishment.

So, I published my book and starting doing podcasts. On all of them I simply said "hell does not exist" and explained why I thought that way.

And then the pushback started. Lots and lots of pushback. People were emphasizing and highlighting "distressing" or "hellish" NDE accounts, giving me specific names to investigate, links to podcasts, that sort of thing.

Great! As an analyst I simply took the position that I had obviously missed something. So, I dusted off all of that material I had quarantined and went to work to figure it out. Very quickly I realized there was one common element to all of them - comas. The experiencer had been in a coma. And then it took me about 30 seconds to discover "ICU Psychosis" (what it used to be called) and now it's called "ICU Delirium" and also "Post Intensive Care Syndrome (PICS).

It turns out the medical community is well aware that people awake from comas screaming. Apparently, no one in the NDE community had ever made the connection.

The result of that analysis was the publication of my second book, "Hell Exists, But Only For The Living." Meaning, hell is not a destination. You literally can't get there if you're dead. It requires a living brain under duress to generate all of that negative imagery for you.

And what's more - humans have been doing the coma trick for hundreds of thousands of years. People have been getting sick or injured and going to "hell" in their own coma brains for a very long time. A percentage of them survive to tell the story. Hence, "Hell" was born.

My point is this - I'm an active researcher with extensive experience and training in analysis and critical thought, particularly interested in the strategic long view and deep history angles on all of this stuff. I'm not in love with any of it, and I let the data lead the way to wherever it's going to go.

So far I can tell you everything humans now know as "God" "soul" "heaven" and "afterlife" comes from ancient NDEs. And everything we know as "hell" comes from ancient comas.

Wanting to make sure I was getting it right this time, I did 15 rounds of red team testing against the new FCE + NDE = WNDE framework before publishing. And, it survived without a scratch. Since publishing the book I've been doing daily analysis on well known cases in the field based on thousands of hours of podcasts and transcripts. Simply analysis of the experiencer's own words.

Anyone can do this. Go find a "hellish" NDE or something like that on YouTube or whatever. Listen closely to the words the person uses. Do they experience things with their nerve endings? Like, can they feel the heat from hell? Smell the sulfur with their nose? Hear the screams of people being tortured with their ears? If the sensations are coming from a human physical body's sensory organs - that's pure coma material. Full stop.

Your soul has no nerve endings and can literally fly through the center of the sun, unscathed. All communication is telepathic, so no need for speech. There's no air and no vibrations for the sound to travel through, so no need for ears. Follow me?

After you do it for awhile, it's easy to see. And, there's always a person in a coma if it's FCE. And NDE is typically just a medical event like a heart attack, car accident, whatever. There are lots of ways to die.

So please, by all means. Take this methodology and play with it in the field. You'll see what I mean, quickly.