Man declared dead after lightning strike shares 'what happens after you die'

Have you ever sat and wondered what happens after you die? Dannion Brinkley, a former Marine and businessman whose life was changed when he was struck by lightning, claims to have the answer.

We already know what happens to our physical bodies, which is unsettling enough to think about, but pondering what happens to your consciousness after death can often lead to a crushing feeling of dread creeping up through your stomach.

Existential crisis aside, plenty of people claim to have crossed over to the other side — only to come back to life once again and share their experiences.

One of those people is Dannion Brinkley, a man who claims to have survived multiple death experiences and has written about his experiences in various books.

Thinking about death can be very daunting (Getty Stock Images)

Formerly an all-star athlete, US Marine and businessman, Brinkley didn't have much time to think about life after death. Then he got struck by lightning.

There's no exact figure on what your odds of being struck by lightning are, with experts arguing that your chances are anywhere from one in a 300,000 to one in a million.

Unfortunately for Brinkley, he found himself becoming the statistic in 1975, telling KLAS: "It went into the side of my head above my ear, it went down my spine... I am burning. I am on fire. I am paralysed."

He said he left his body, whizzed around above the ambulance as it rushed him to hospital, before waking up in the morgue.

Brinkley would later wake up in a hospital morgue, after being legally declared dead for 28 minutes.

This wouldn't be his only brush with death, so you could say he's a bit of an expert on the subject.

Following this, Brinkley claims he 'died' again during open heart surgery in 1989 - and that time paid a flying visit to the afterlife.

There he says he learned to 'use his new psychic and spiritual gifts to aid the dying and the desperate'.

He has since produced several books on the subject, recalling how his brief trips into death featured 'angelic instructors' and 'crystal cites' instead of eternal nothingness.

Damon Brinkley has survived multiple NDEs and now reassures terminally ill people about the death (Mintaha Neslihan Eroglu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

And what does a man who's experienced a few brief trips to the other side have to say about death? Well, if the 74-year-old is to be believed, then it's good news as he believes that no one really dies.

"If I didn’t go to hell, in the last four journeys, nobody’s going to hell, OK," he told KLAS.

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"So, when you learn you don’t die, when you learn you’re a spiritual being, you’re not going to go to hell. That’s enough to inspire you to change."

Doubling down on his beliefs, which has led him to provide counselling to terminally ill people, Brinkley added: "Nobody dies. It never happens. It’s not a part of the nature of reality, it’s not."

Which is certainly a much easier idea to get onboard with.