Not exactly the topic - but I went through a strange consciousness bottleneck during a near death experience (in risk terms, not in the medical death sense), in which I was extremely lucky.

A car I was driving to a parking area for someone had incredibly loose steering, and I lost some traction on a tight turn on a country highway that had been covered with gravel. As I straighten out of the turn I was heading straight at an oncoming car.

I calmly jiggle the steering wheel to avoid the head-on collision, with as little adjustment as possible to avoid losing control, but the car fishtailed anyway, hit a rock cliff wall on the right, bounced 45 degrees and off a short cliff on the left side of the road.

As I went off the cliff I just thought calmly "So that was it.". At the same moment, not having had the sense to be wearing my seatbelt I threw myself flat across the unified front seat.

The car went over the cliff, hit it, flipping end over end and then rolled before coming to a stop, upright, facing the opposite direction I had been driving, completely destroyed.

Technically, I never lost conscious, but from the moment the car launched I lost all awareness except for sound. My mind absorbed endless crashing, metal rending, glass shattering, 10 or 20 seconds of silence, and then I suddenly had vision again, and a sense that I was still in my body. Calm, with normal physical sensation, and no pain.

I was incredibly banged up, but couldn't feel any of it. I moved my limbs and body carefully, guessed I was ok to travel, crawled out a missing window and sat on the bottom slope of the drop until help arrived - the oncoming driver happened to be a medic. I was so calm and lucid people expected me to stand up and find my way up a navigable part of the slope with them, and so did I. But while I had been sitting and talking without effort, I couldn't get a single muscle to actually move. When my legs wouldn't move, I tried raising an arm and it just didn't respond. I had to tell people I couldn't move, because there wasn't any evidence I was trying.

Bruises of the steering wheel around my body, and other lacerations formed a visible record of my body being thrown around in complete mayhem. But all I retained is a clear disembodied memory of endless crashing, eventual silence. Without any fear or emotion, beyond a feeling of acceptance that morphed into interest in what had happened.

Nothing broken - no stress or post-stress, despite a couple weeks of miserable pain and soft tissue recovery. I could be wrong, but I don't think my heart rate or breathing adjusted at all.

Apparently, I survived in part by being completely relaxed the whole time.

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Roark66 2 days ago | parent [-]

Wow, thank you for sharing this. Kudos on surviving this.

I had an interesting experience during a high speed car crash years ago.

I was driving on a newly built motorway going south from Gdansk(in Poland) around 2am, in the rain in a very old rented VW Golf.

Before, when I got to the (cheap)rental place the seatbelt on the driver's side was caught behind the interior plastic panel. The guy that owned the place looked at me (wearing a suit, I just gotten off a plane) and said "You don't mind driving without a seatbelt don't you? This is the only car I can give you." To which I replied "no way", and "do you have a screwdriver"?

Then I proceeded to take off that interior panel. I freed the seatbelt and got on my way. This has saved me from very serious injury.

So, coming back to that moment. I'm driving at around 140kmh (which is normal speed at these roads, only 30kmh over limit). It is raining. I'm coming over a gentle curve and I see red lights of a big truck in my lane, so I flip the indicator with intention to overtake it (still maybe 300m away). As I'm changing lanes closing on it around that gentle long curve I suddenly see there is another set of lights in the left lane in front of the truck. That driver must have got startled by my lights because the moment I saw him his brake lights lit up (and I'm accelerating maybe 150m behind, gaining on him fast). I have to brake hard. I know my Golf at home with my tires would make it. This one didn't.

I lost maybe a third of the speed when it started fishtailing strong. By the time the other cars moved far enough so I could let go the brakes a bit, but instead of straightening it, the car spun sideways and slammed into the barrier.

I remember braking, turning, counter steering like in slow motion, then the last moment once car spun and was just about to hit I thought "That is going to hurt". Last thing I remember was a feeling of surprise how "soft" the crash felt.

I expected to feel a hard slam, it felt like I jumped into a soft bed and suddenly darkness and I feel wet on my hair. An instantaneous transition like in a movie. My first thought is "blood, I'm seriously injured", but no, this was rain. Suddenly I see some light and I remember I sit in a dark smashed up car in a middle of a motorway (it bounced off the barrier) over a hill and another car is quickly approaching without seeing me....

So I jump out of this car and (I didn't feel any injury with so much adrenalin) I push the screeching lump of metal on the driver side pillar as hard as I can, trying to get it off at least the left lane.

Thankfully the other driver saw me from far away, could slow down and stop in time. He helped me push the car onto the shoulder.

When police and ambulance came. The Police guy looked at the car, looked at me and said "where is the driver?" I said "I am" and he says "are you sure? If you're pretending for someone drunk that escaped it is a criminal offense"... Other than few scratches I was completely uninjured. The car looked horrible.

The police guy also said "we're having accidents on this stretch of the road every time it rains, they are going to replace the surface so I'm not going to fine you"... Well, good to know. They did rip it out few months later.

I estimate I couldn't be going that fast during that crash, as I was fine, or maybe I was lucky, but the car was totalled. I remember I paid £750 to the rental guy. That is how much the car was worth in it's entirety...

I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt.

	▲	Nevermark 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		> I'm very happy to this day I've asked for that screwdriver and I fixed that seatbelt. That was a great move! I guess in a thread on an article which mixes a little bit of mysticism into medicine, a little science philosophy fits. I take the plain reading of quantum field equations at face value. I.e. that superposition is real in the normal sense, and that quantum "collapse" is a perceived effect, not actually the superposition reducing to one history, but just the effect of a history becoming entangled with enough particles to be robustly statistically separated from other histories. (I have never understood why even some scientists can't take the equations at face value, when they already explain why large things don't act like individual particles, despite following the same rules. Without any "observer" voodoo. It as if those scientists agreed the equations say the Earth orbits the sun, and that calculating that way is the right way. But still propose there is some as yet gap in our understanding, that we need to resolve to make that consistent with our perception that the Sun goes around us - despite no actual gap that needs explaining.) So given that interpretation, we are likely to always (to a high statistical degree) survive scary situations. We may not make it through a high percentage of histories, a high percentage of others' histories may experience us dying, but we of course, are only aware of the histories in which we make it. This also creates an explanation for why we, as a particularly constructed human, exist. We are simply aware of the history in which we are. Not any of the overwhelming number of histories of our universe in which we are not. Among all the histories of the universe, given that they include every possible (consistent) history, and given that we are just normal chemistry despite our complex construction of statistically unlikely survivals, some have to include us. That explains (1) our lucky survivals (of ourselves, others certainly experience us dying), (2) our initial personal existence, and (3) the existence of life on Earth. And if there are superpositioned variants of universe laws in a similar fashion (we don't know that yet, but it is a credible idea), (4) why there are histories of universes with laws consistent with us. If it's possible in terms of physical or the ultimate laws, and all consistent possibilities exist, then it is a certainty that there is a version of reality which includes us. And that is of course, where we find ourselves.