Most of us make a deal with ourselves, sometime around the age of thirty or so, that we will think about death later. Not in any deliberate way, just a quiet arrangement with our own minds to file the whole business somewhere toward the back and get on with the errands. The deal works reasonably well for a while. Then someone you love gets a diagnosis, or you sit beside someone in their final hours, or you wake up at three in the morning with your heart racing for no reason you can name, and the filing system fails completely. Suddenly the question you had successfully postponed is right there in front of you, enormous and completely unanswered: what actually happens?
Ingrid Honkala has an answer. Three of them, in fact. Each one arrived under conditions that most people don’t survive, and each time, she says, it was exactly the same.
Honkala has a PhD in Marine Science, spent years working for NASA and the US Navy, and also claims to have died three times. She is not a mystic who stumbled into a near-death experience and built a life around it. She is someone who went looking for hard evidence about the nature of reality and ended up with something far stranger than a data set. Now 55 and based in Bogotá, Colombia, she has written about her experiences in her book Dying to See the Light, and is careful to frame all of this not as a rejection of science but as an extension of it.
The First Time She Was Two Years Old
According to a Vice report on Honkala’s story, she describes what happened after nearly drowning as a toddler, surviving a motorcycle crash at 25, and suffering a dangerous medical emergency during surgery decades later, and the experience she says shaped her most happened when she was just two years old. While at home in Colombia, she fell into an icy water tank while a household worker listened to the radio in another room, unaware that the child was drowning nearby.
While her body lay submerged, she recalls a transition from panic to a profound sense of peace and stillness. What came next is the part that stays with you. She claims she could somehow sense her mother several streets away as she walked to work, and she remembers recognizing her and thinking “that’s my mom.” According to Newsner’s coverage of Honkala’s account, the communication that followed did not happen through spoken words. “At that moment,” she has said, “there seemed to be a form of communication between us, not through spoken words, but through awareness.”
Her mother, who had just left for a new job, inexplicably turned around and came back, arriving just in time to pull her daughter out and resuscitate her. When Honkala later shared the memory with her mother years afterward, she said the details closely matched her mother’s own recollection of that day. You can decide what to do with that. A two-year-old’s description of her unconscious minutes matching what her mother remembers is either a remarkable coincidence or something that deserves more than a dismissive shrug. Honkala has spent a lifetime sitting with that question.
The Pattern That Kept Repeating
The first experience could be explained away, imperfectly but plausibly, as a child’s fragmentary memory reconstructed over years of retelling. The second and third are harder to file in the same drawer.
She later faced death again during a motorcycle accident at 25 and during a surgical procedure at 52, when her blood pressure dropped. Three different decades, three different causes, three completely different physical circumstances. And yet, Honkala says she felt the same calm awareness she first experienced as a toddler in the water tank.
Each time, she entered a state of pure awareness, calm, and detachment from her body. She describes being immersed in a vast interconnected consciousness filled with light, clarity, and peace, and suggests that death may be a transition rather than an end. The consistency is what she keeps returning to. Not that it happened once, during a childhood trauma that could have warped the memory in any number of directions. Three times. Across five decades. The same field of light, the same peace, the same sense that what she was experiencing was more real than anything she had felt in her ordinary waking life.
For those of us who are used to dismissing supernatural claims, the repetition is the hardest part to set aside. A vision during drowning is a vision. A vision during a motorcycle accident is a vision. A vision during surgery when your blood pressure crashes is a vision. Three identical visions, separated by decades and completely different physiological crises, start to feel like data.
What Science Actually Says About the Dying Brain
Here is where Honkala, the scientist, becomes genuinely interesting. Because she is not asking anyone to take her word for it. She is pointing at a question that neuroscience has not yet resolved, and asking what we are so afraid of looking at.
A 2023 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provided early evidence of a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain, led by Jimo Borjigin, PhD, associate professor in the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology and the Department of Neurology at the University of Michigan. Michigan Medicine reports that two of the four monitored patients had little to no change in their brain activity before they died. But the EEG readouts for the other two recorded significant bursts of gamma waves beginning just seconds after their ventilators were removed. Gamma waves are the highest frequency of brain waves and are typically associated with higher levels of conscious processing.
The neuroscientist’s interpretation is that this surge of activity could explain the vivid, seemingly transcendent experiences people report at death’s threshold. The brain, it turns out, does not go gently. It fires. Whether that firing produces something like what Honkala describes, whether it is a last burst of electrical noise or something that actually means something, nobody can say with confidence yet. Because of the small sample size, the authors caution against making any global statements about the implications of the findings. They also note that it’s impossible to know what the patients experienced, because they did not survive.
That limitation is not a flaw in the research. It is the nature of the thing being studied. The only people who can tell you what dying feels like are the ones who came back.
The Career She Built from the Question
What is striking about Honkala’s story is not just the experiences themselves but what she did with them. A lot of people who have near-death experiences quietly adjust their beliefs and get on with their lives. Honkala turned hers into a decades-long inquiry. The near-death experiences, she says, are actually what drove her toward a scientific career in the first place. “I wanted to understand the nature of reality through observation and research,” she has said.
Despite her spiritual experiences, Honkala dedicated her life to rigorous scientific inquiry, earning a PhD in Marine Science. She spent years focusing on her professional career at NASA and in underwater exploration, rarely speaking publicly about her NDEs. There is something in that restraint worth pausing on. She did not run toward the story. She held it privately for years while she built a scientific career substantial enough that when she did start speaking, the credentials were not in question.
Her conclusion, after decades of both: “Science and spirituality may not necessarily be in conflict, they may simply be exploring the same mystery from different perspectives.” That is not a retreat from science. It is an extension of the curiosity that makes science worth doing in the first place.
Others who have had near-death experiences often describe a similar shift. You can read about what one man reported after dying for six minutes and notice that the emotional aftermath, the changed relationship to death, the altered sense of what matters, tends to look roughly the same across wildly different accounts. The specific content varies. The transformation does not.
The Skeptics Are Not Wrong, Either
It would be easy to write a piece that simply hands Honkala’s account over to the reader as settled truth, and that would be a disservice. Skeptics and researchers often attribute such visions to “psychospiritual coping mechanisms” or hallucinations triggered by a lack of oxygen to the brain. That is a serious scientific position, and it is not one to wave away.
The brain, under extreme physiological stress, does strange things. It produces visions. It generates narrative. It reaches for meaning. The gamma wave surges that researchers have detected in the dying brain could be the mechanism behind every near-death experience ever reported, from Honkala’s light-filled field of consciousness to the pearly gates others have described, a last electrical flourish that the surviving mind then shapes into story.
What neuroscience cannot yet fully explain is the corroborated detail. From wherever her consciousness had gone during those few minutes, Honkala believes she spotted her mother walking away and somehow communicated the urgency of the situation. When she later described what she’d seen to her mother, the details matched. A hallucinating brain does not typically produce accurate, externally verifiable observations. That gap, between what the neurological model predicts and what some NDE survivors actually report, is where the honest scientific conversation currently lives.
What She Says Death Actually Feels Like
From that first experience forward, Honkala says she no longer feared death. “The experience showed me that what we call the afterlife did not feel like a distant place at all. It felt like entering a deeper layer of reality that exists beyond our physical senses.”
She has described how these experiences transformed her understanding of life itself. “Instead of seeing ourselves as isolated individuals struggling to survive, I began to understand that we may be expressions of consciousness experiencing life through a physical form.”
That is a large claim. It is also, if you sit with it for a moment, a strangely comforting one. Not because it confirms any particular religious framework, and Honkala is notably careful not to map her experience onto doctrine, but because it reframes the question. Death stops being the end of a person and becomes something else, something harder to name but also, she insists, less to be afraid of.
In her most recent book, Ingrid Honkala, PhD, shares the insights gained through multiple near-death experiences and a lifetime of inner exploration, describing how after multiple NDEs beginning at the age of two, her life became a bridge between science and spirituality. The book, Dying to See the Light, is explicitly aimed at people who have not had a near-death experience and probably would prefer to keep it that way.
What This Might Mean for You
Nobody can tell you what happens after death. Ingrid Honkala cannot tell you with certainty, and she is the first to say so. What she can tell you, and what she has now said three times over the course of fifty years, is that the thing she encountered each time she came close to dying did not feel like nothing. It felt like more.
That distinction matters even if you are not someone who has thought much about the afterlife, even if you are someone who finds the whole conversation uncomfortable or impractical or too abstract to engage with on a Tuesday morning. Because most of us will, at some point, sit beside someone who is dying. We will stand in the aftermath of a loss and not know what to do with the question. We will lie awake running through the math of our own mortality and come up empty.
Honkala’s account does not resolve any of that. But it offers something smaller and more honest: a scientist’s admission that the experience of almost dying, repeated across three different decades, consistently produced something that felt like peace rather than oblivion. She is careful not to tell you what to believe. She simply reports what she found, three times, in three very different circumstances, and leaves the interpretation where it belongs: with you.
The question of what waits on the other side is not going anywhere. And whatever your own answer is, or isn’t yet, Honkala’s account is at least one more reason to hold the question with something closer to curiosity than dread.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.