A former atheist who clinically died for six minutes says the experience completely reshaped her understanding of God, consciousness, and what happens after death.
When Dr. Anna Stone was 38, in 2016, an undiagnosed ectopic pregnancy ruptured inside her. It caused severe internal bleeding that doctors had mistaken for an ulcer.
By the time they found the real cause, Stone says she’d almost “bled out.”
Her heart stopped.
What she says she experienced
Before the traumatic event, Dr. Stone had considered herself an atheist. She believed death simply marked the end of individual consciousness, nothing more.
What happened during those six when she was clinically dead, changed that entirely.
Dr. Stone told the Daily Mail that she found herself outside her body, watching medical staff work on her and finally call her time of death.
She claims she also overheard a doctor refer to her as a “junkie” while she was clinically dead, something that troubled her less for the comment itself and more for what it implied. “I didn’t care that he had said it, really. I cared more, like, did I hear it? Because that’s a problem,” she said.
After being revived, she says she confronted the doctor directly.
“If I’m clinically dead and you called my time of death, I should not have been able to see or hear any of this, right?” According to Stone, to which the doctor responded, “I’m sorry, I did. You shouldn’t have been able to hear that.”
A shifted sense of time and self
Dr. Stone also explained how her sense of time disappeared entirely during the experience. She was aware of different versions of herself, at ages two, six, 12, and 16, all existing simultaneously around her.
She says she was also confronted with people from her life, seeing herself through their eyes. “I got to see from their perspective how selfish I was,” she said. “I didn’t consider the other people that I was interacting with. I was just going through my day, and just doing my thing, and I was not considering other people.”
At one point, she says she encountered a version of herself from 2016 and heard a presence say “nope,” which she took to mean she wasn’t meant to stay.
A new understanding of God
Dr. Stone says she came away from the experience believing that God, or whatever term someone prefers, is something closer to a vast ocean, with every person representing an individual droplet containing something divine before eventually returning to a shared, collective consciousness.
“We’re all going to go to the same place at the end,” she said, adding that she now sees divisions between people, whether religious, political, or cultural, as ultimately not meaningful in that bigger picture.
Real changes once she recovered
Dr. Stone says the experience reshaped her life in tangible ways too. She’d previously drunk heavily, but after coming home from the hospital, she tried to have a drink and says something strange happened.
“I tried to drink alcohol, and it foamed up in my mouth. Instead of drinking it, it turned from liquid into this foam and it was warm,” she said. “I had to spit it out, and I tried a different type of alcohol, same thing. That was the end of it. So I stopped.”
She also says she began hearing an internal voice giving her warnings.
“It was inside, and it would tell me things, like, don’t drink that, or, don’t go that way,” she said.
In the years since, Stone earned a PhD in spiritual psychology and now teaches at a continuation school, working with young people affected by trauma, focusing on the relationship between trauma, consciousness, and what she describes as heightened sensitivity.
“I really hope that there’s something after that makes all of this worthwhile.”
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