Heather Mae's NDE: The Atheist Who Died and Discovered We're All Connected

The Void

Heather found herself suspended in absolute darkness. Not the darkness of a room at night, but a blackness so complete she couldn't see her hand in front of her face when she tried. She describes it as "pitch black pitch pitch black there was no top bottom side like it was just this incredible vast space."

But the darkness wasn't frightening. It was comfortable, like floating alone in a lake, completely supported. "There was no fear," she recalls. "I had absolutely zero fear. There was no stress. I was more or less intrigued to be honest with you."

This wasn't the nothingness her father had promised. This was something else entirely.

The Light and the Tunnel

In the distance, a tiny spark appeared. The only thing visible in the entire vastness. It grew larger, coming toward her, and she watched with curiosity. As it approached, she realized it was a tunnel, swirling with different tones of gray and sparks of brighter light.

Suddenly she was ascending upward into it, with no control over her movement. Panic set in. She put her arms and legs out, trying to touch the sides, trying to stop herself from going up, "because I was trying to control the situation I did not want to be out of control with this." But the tunnel expanded around her.

She went up and over, and then she saw it: an extreme bright light at the top. "Extreme extreme extreme," she emphasizes. "It was like a blue white light and within that white light are also Silvers and like there's a lot of depth to that white light it's not just a color."

The Reunion

People began emerging from the light. Hundreds of them. Heather's first reaction wasn't joy or recognition. It was fear and anger. She was rude, she admits. She told them to back away, to get away from her.

Then she started recognizing faces.

"Oh wait a minute," she remembers thinking. "There's Nanny my great-grandmother oh there's my great-grandfather there's my Aunt Alice and my uncle dick and like I'm noticing these people that I knew that passed."

She didn't understand. Her great-grandmother stepped forward, and Heather still tears up remembering what happened next. Her great-grandmother said: "Heather you have died."

"No that can't be," Heather protested.

But it was true. She was dead.

The Light of Unconditional Love

As the reality sank in, Heather began to recognize the light itself. It wasn't just bright. It was alive with love. "Beyond beyond what we could imagine," she says. "Just incredible and acceptance and support and kindness and gentleness."

She fell to her knees on what felt like a floor, though everything around her was white. She was sobbing. "I don't want to be here I don't want to be dead I didn't I didn't even get to live I didn't even get to do anything you know that was my main thing I didn't get to do anything it was just it was too short."

Then another energy appeared. A higher presence. She could only differentiate it by feeling, by its frequency and vibration. Everything was telepathic now. No words, just immediate knowing in her head. The presence told her she was going to be okay. Yes, she had died. And then, almost immediately, they went to a life review.

The Life Review: Feeling What Others Felt

The life review wasn't like watching a movie. Heather was immersed in it, experiencing her life "in all sense of it but be well beyond the five senses well beyond that."

The most interesting thing, she found, was "the understanding on how we affect one another we even when we have a thought about somebody they pick it up it's subconscious but they pick it up and they'll they'll store it you know so if you have a really harsh thought about somebody um they pick it up and they they bring it into themselves as part of their understanding of themselves."

She saw a childhood friendship, a girl she fought with constantly but also got along with. There were things they said to each other that each took into themselves as truth, "right into her body as a truth." They were always in an energy exchange, affecting each other in ways neither understood at the time.

"You never know on how a little bit of kindness to somebody can change their life," Heather reflects. There were people she had absolutely no idea she'd helped, small acts that altered their entire course.

She saw herself in a group home with six girls. She would always tell them: "You're more than your body you're more than your body." One girl she was particularly worried about, hoping she wouldn't go into stripping, actually didn't. "That was amazing to me," Heather says.

The life review wasn't just about harsh things. It showed wonderful connections too. Exchanges with animals, with pets, with the world around her. But what struck her most was that you really feel "the sense know exactly how the other person felt 100%." "It's almost like you're a part of them but you're not you know what I mean um because we are actually so Interlink energetically we really are."

Soul Agreements and Past Lives

The review expanded to show her parents. She learned that she chose her parents, that they were her soul family, and that they had agreements with each other before incarnation. But not everything was planned. "We have also free choice," she was shown.

She was shown karma and how it works through these agreements. She saw other lifetimes. In one, she had killed somebody. Then she was shown an agreement she'd made with that person: they would reverse roles in this lifetime. Not to the point of death, but "some uh really traumatic stuff you know and um I was going to be the receiver they were going to be the doer."

This gave her understanding about why certain things had happened in her current life that seemed to come out of nowhere.

The Download: Understanding Energy

Heather learned about energy and the human body "in lightning speed." "It's like it's just there all the information is just there very very very quickly and flashed in front of you this is how it works just real quick."

She learned how the human body works on an energetic level. What we take in, what we put out, how it moves within the body. All about the auric field, energy points, how emotions work, how unprocessed emotions affect the physical body.

"Brains are so incredibly so incredibly power powerful," she learned. "We can hinder ourselves or not we can make things better within ourselves what we direct out there is a frequency and that frequency we can also invite though depending upon it a lower level frequency higher level frequency."

She learned how to move energy, how to pull in energy. The body is like a filing cabinet, she explains. When we don't have the luxury to deal with an emotion right now, "we file it and put it away" in our lower back or somewhere else in the body.

This was knowledge she would bring back. This was her work.

The Crystal City

Heather visited what she calls the Crystal City. She was about 15 to 20 miles out, and she wasn't there very long. Somebody came to meet her. She didn't see their face, just knew it was a body, somebody who really liked her because they gave her a great big hug. She was told it wasn't her time to be home yet, and immediately she was gone from there.

The Healing Place

She was shown a place of healing for souls who have completed lifetimes. "Sometime lifetimes can be really traumatic," she explains, and souls go to this place to heal. There were healing pools, water healing. "Everything's marble everything was marble White marble," she remembers. There were columns.

Some souls can be there for quite some time, "not that there's time that's how we understand it," depending on the life experience they had.

The Hall of Records

Heather was taken to what she calls the Hall of Records. The books were as high up as you could possibly imagine. She was shown her book. It was pretty thick, obviously containing many lifetimes. She'd been around quite a bit.

Within it was a little running banner of her current lifetime, which she found odd and strange. Years later, when Harry Potter came out, she thought: "Did they talk to some people who had ndes and maybe had looked at their book?"

I keep coming back to that detail. The running banner. It's such a specific, odd thing to notice, and it doesn't fit any religious framework I know. Which makes me trust it more, actually. People don't invent details like that when they're making things up. They invent things that sound profound.

The Cosmic Board

Heather was shown that on a soul level, not all souls are in the same place. If you've got a soul vibration on level three, "well they're not going to be in the same Soul understanding vibration as somebody sitting at five or six frequency." Like was with like. There were many different levels.

She was taken to meet what she calls a cosmic board. "Is it the same as what people are talking about nowadays is the Federation no it's not different," she clarifies. It wasn't quite a government system, but "they're there to to talk with you to also help you and others and they're they're from multi-dimensions."

Nothing shocked her. "It's like oh yeah oh yeah I know all this oh yeah I know this all from this side you know um because we when we incarnate um everything's wiped clean."

Some of them were just pure light, balls of light that changed colors from pinks to whites to very pale blues. Others she could actually see their faces. Some had white cloaks. One specifically wore a blue cloak.

"When you're there you just you know that they're from other galaxies other dimensions," she says. They were extremely wise. Some looked like ETs. They sat around a long table in an illuminated area, with everything around that area black.

Portals and Travel

Heather was shown modes of travel she called wormholes at the time. She went through a couple of them. They were like tubes with flashes of color, extraordinarily fast. "It was kind of a bumpy ride," she felt. These were modes of transportation to get from one place to another.

But not everyone needed them. Others could just imagine a place in their mind and then they're there. The portals would just suddenly be there, and you could travel through them.

More Real Than Real

When asked how real the experience was, whether it could have been a dream, Heather is emphatic: "Oh gosh no it even life does not feel as real as that you sent more you know more you you're sent are so highlighted here everything's kind of dimmed down right it's more dim you know whereas on the that experience was like Wow and now I feel alive now I'm alive."

"What was I doing before obviously I didn't feel like I was living a dream," she reflects. This life felt almost two-dimensional compared to that. "Absolutely no way no way no," it wasn't a dream.

The Future: A Warning

Heather hesitates when asked about being shown the future. "I don't want to scare anybody that's my whole thing," she says. But she shares what she saw.

She was sitting in some kind of chair. Golden balls, bigger than basketballs, came in front of her and opened up. Inside each was a movie. She saw the start of mankind, then wars. "Murdering each other all through the Earth's history one after the next one after the ne and it just kept going," she describes.

The level of trauma was huge. Death, death, death. Lots of fires, flooding, what we now call tsunamis. Lots of protests coming more into our world today. "Definitely saw all the Wars all the wars I mean it was just absolutely excruciating to watch," she says.

There was a lot of unrest in our world. People were desperate to be heard, desperate to be as much a priority as anybody else. Marches, anger. "Lots of anger lots and lots and lots of anger."

"We've got to shed we've got to shed our beliefs about other cultures our beliefs about other people to get to get through where we need to go," she was shown. There were lots of civil wars dotted all over, lots of starvation.

She asked them to stop. She couldn't bear anymore. "The death the children he all of it I could I couldn't," she says, her voice breaking.

The point of showing her this, she believes, was "to have the understanding of um unfortunately what we do to one another" over religion, land, crops, anything. "Without the understanding that we're all here for the same purpose we're all we're all here as brothers and sisters."

The Choice to Return

Heather was not originally going to come back. But through her crying and disbelief, she expressed that she didn't have a chance to really start, didn't have a chance to do the things she came here to do. "I wanted to go back and I I wanted to do the work that I I set out to do uh in regards to my life contract," she told them.

But there was a warning. She was told coming back was going to be far more difficult than before she died. On a physical, emotional, mental, and psychological level, it was all going to be extraordinarily painful. There were things physically she wasn't going to be able to heal, and she was going to live with that pain.

She was asked again: do you want to come back?

"Yes I do," she answered, "because at when I was over on the other side I firmly believed that I could do a lot of that work."

Life After Death

Heather's family was not supportive when she tried to share her experience. "They were not supporters of it because of course that was their belief structure right," she explains. She never pushed it, "but um it was definitely uh a lonely Journey at the time."

But she came back with gifts. She came back seeing energy all the time. Since the 1990s, Heather she explains, "to learn how to do the work for themselves."

Her Message

"We're connected to each other," Heather says. "I think if we if we could just have that understanding how connected we are to one another and and and let go of all our our false beliefs of one another and really have that understanding that we are ener ically a part of each other at all times we're all human period you don't have to have all these divisions and everything that have been created I think if my wish could be anything if we could just get to that understanding."

What This Tells Us

Heather Mae's account stands as one of the most comprehensive near-death experiences on record. What makes her story particularly significant is the breadth of what she was shown and the practical knowledge she brought back.

The detail about feeling exactly how her actions affected others, including thoughts she had about people, aligns with one of the most consistent features of life reviews across thousands of accounts. But Heather takes it further. She describes the mechanism: thoughts are picked up subconsciously and stored as part of how people understand themselves. This isn't mystical language. It's a description of energetic reality that modern quantum physics is only beginning to approach.

Her visit to the cosmic board, with beings from multiple dimensions and galaxies, echoes accounts from experiencers like Dannion Brinkley and others who describe councils of wise beings. The fact that some appeared as pure light while others had visible forms suggests different levels or types of consciousness operating in the afterlife realm.

The Hall of Records, with books stretching impossibly high, appears in numerous accounts under various names. The Akashic Records. The Book of Life. What Heather describes matches these reports precisely: a complete record of every soul's journey across all lifetimes, accessible and reviewable.

Perhaps most striking is what Heather learned about soul agreements and karma. The idea that we choose our parents, that we make agreements before incarnation, that karma isn't punishment but agreed-upon learning, appears consistently across NDE accounts and ancient spiritual traditions. Heather's specific example of reversing roles with someone she killed in a past life provides a mechanism for understanding why terrible things sometimes happen to good people. Not as random suffering, but as agreed-upon opportunities for growth and balance.

The warning she received about returning, that life would be more difficult and painful, also appears frequently in accounts of experiencers who chose to come back. Many report chronic pain, heightened sensitivity, difficulty adjusting. But they also report profound purpose and the ability to help others in ways they couldn't before.

Heather's vision of the future is harder to sit with. Wars, civil unrest, natural disasters, starvation. She asked them to stop showing her, unable to bear seeing more. But the message embedded in those visions is clear: we have to shed our beliefs about other cultures and other people. We have to recognize we're all here for the same purpose, as brothers and sisters. The future she was shown isn't inevitable. It's a warning, a call to change course.

What gives me hope in Heather's account is the love she encountered. The light that was beyond anything we can imagine. The acceptance, support, kindness, gentleness. The fact that her great-grandmother and other relatives were there to greet her. The healing place for traumatized souls. The cosmic board of wise beings helping souls plan their journeys.

This is the universe Heather discovered on the other side. Not a cold, mechanistic void where consciousness ends at death. But a living, loving, interconnected reality where we are all part of each other, where our thoughts and actions ripple through the web of existence, where we come from love and return to love, where we are never alone.

Heather came back to teach us what she learned. To help us understand energy, to give us tools to heal ourselves, to remind us of our connection. Her work continues. You can learn more about [Heather Mae](/experiencer and her teachings on Instagram at heather_mae_insight, where she offers one-on-one sessions and teaches people how to work with energy for themselves.

The atheist who was taught that death is the end discovered instead that death is a doorway.