My experience is not a near death experience, per se.

It does have elements that are very similar to what the people who had an NDE report. But I was nowhere near death or in any danger of dying. Everything was going quite well actually. I was driving my car on the highway and just about to take a wide curve to the right when it happened.

The whole experience lasted a fraction of a second in this dimension. It couldn’t have taken more than that or else I guess I would have gone off the road, and I didn’t feel any discontinuity in my driving. What happened to me during that blink of an eye is something I cannot explain and that has taken me nine years to assimilate. I have never talked about this experience to anyone yet and this is the first time I write about it. I’ll try to explain why later.

So I was driving my car on the highway with my wife to my side and our kids in the back. Suddenly, I saw or perceived something passing quickly in my peripheral vision on the far left. I then heard clearly a voice in my head saying, ‘’tout est comme il se doit,’’ which is French for, “everything is as it should be.” At the same moment I felt light and free as if a huge weight was taken off my shoulders. I realized immediately that this huge weight was totally useless stuff that I was carrying around for no valid reason. I was embarrassed because I felt that I had been fooled into believing that life on earth and all that ‘’imaginary’’ stuff is reality.

I clearly felt that there was absolutely no judging. Even though I felt embarrassed, I realized that there was no reason to be. I felt something I can’t describe. The closest I can come to it is to say that it was the opposite of judgment more than just the absence of it. Judgement just doesn’t seem to exist in that dimension.

Even though everything happened at the same time, there was a sequence in my experience. Except for the voice I heard at the very start, I didn’t see or hear anything. I don’t know how to describe this, but I felt or I realized and also, I think, remembered things that I knew already but had forgotten.

The second element in my experience is the realization that everything makes sense: you, me, the universe. There is a meaning to all of this. After that, I realized or remembered that everything is linked. We are all linked to one another and to everything around us. And we’re all linked to what I could call the ‘’source’’ from which we all originate.

Those three elements - everything is as it should be, everything makes sense, and everything is linked - were very clear and evident. It was all so obvious and simple. I understood it in a flash. I don’t remember thinking ‘’of course,’’ but that is how it felt. I know that at that moment, if there is such a thing as a moment in the dimension I was in, it was clear to me that that was reality. It couldn’t be more real than that. I know from that experience that I am more myself on that other dimension than I am here. I know that I know a lot of things on that other dimension even if I can’t remember for now what it is I know. This other dimension is vast and profound to a point that it cannot even be imagined and expressed in human terms. Our language is inadequate to really explain anything about that dimension.

I can’t understand any more why everything was so obvious and simple, but I can remember the feeling of complete acceptance without any judgment and of total serenity that I felt there. I remember the intensity, the depth, and how real it was. I just don’t have the words to describe that reality.

The fourth and last element of my experience is a very strong feeling of coming home. I just know that I was home. There is no two ways about it. You just can’t have that feeling if you enter the neighbor’s house. It only happens when you are truly home, where you grew up and have all those good memories. It is a profound and unmistakable feeling.

Then, suddenly, the window closed. I was back to driving my car, even though I had never left and no time had passed in our human dimension. It felt like my world shrank down to a very limited dimension. As soon as, in this dimension, I realized and started to intellectualize what had happened, it disappeared. I was back in a thick cloud after having floated above it and having been exposed to the universe. So I kept on driving like nothing happened. I just thought to myself, “well that was something interesting.” I didn’t feel startled or surprised. Even though it’s not an experience that happens every day and that is way outside of anything I ever thought was possible, it was not a strange experience. It was in fact the exact opposite. It felt very, very familiar. It felt more familiar actually than this human dimension will ever feel.

This description of my experience is of course limited by the constraint of my human condition. There is, I’m sure, a lot more that I can neither describe nor remember. I feels like I went to see a movie in ultra high definition, in an Imax theatre and In 3D and all I have to show you to explain that experience is a tiny and fuzzy black and white picture. Now I’m showing you that picture and telling you, "See, that’s what happened." Not very convincing, I’m afraid, to most people.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons it took me nine years to assimilate the experience. I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t "lived" it. I’ve always been very skeptical about anything related to paranormal, new age or even spiritual stuff. So, what do I do now with that experience I just had? Nothing. I guess I put it away in the section ‘’unexplained and unexplainable’’ of my brain and I mostly forgot about it. I just didn’t want to be that person that hears voices and I would probably have pitied myself in the past. I can’t tell my wife who is an engineer and probably more materialistic than I was. I can’t tell anyone, so I don’t.

Maybe one day I will tell my wife and our kids. Writing down my experience is helping me, I think, to find a way to come to terms with it and find answers to my two biggest questions:

- Why give me the message that everything’s fine? I would understand if the message was, "A deer will cross the road just in front of you in 1 km, watch out," but just giving me thumbs up doesn’t make sense to me, for the moment anyway.

- Why did it happen at that precise moment?

I have hypotheses for answers to both questions but I would really like to hear or read from people who know more than me or had a similar experience.

Thank you for reading this account of my experience and please forgive my poor English.