One Sunday evening in September, nearly 30 years ago, Xavier Melo, then 23, was driving home from his job as a private math tutor in Barcelona, Spain. It was one of his two weekend jobs, and his car was stacked with study notes and practice tests for an upcoming business school entrance exam. Melo retraced the familiar route home at a leisurely pace, to savor a gentle breeze and the satisfaction of a weekend’s work complete. As he pulled into an intersection, a Volkswagen Golf violently crashed into his car, destroying it. Melo himself suffered head trauma, lost consciousness, and fell into a coma. He woke up in his hospital bed, screaming, again and again, “I have been with God!”

Melo’s memory of the immediate aftermath of the crash is vivid and mysterious; it follows the familiar arc of the near-death experience. He recalls that he flew out of his body and hovered above it, that he observed a nurse in the ambulance who held his hand and called out, “We’re losing him, we’re losing him,” as he watched his papers swirl and scatter in the street. Then he began to rise, the ambulance receding from him in the distance, until he came to a tunnel, where scenes of his life as a child began to play out. He felt an overwhelming sense of belonging, of kinship with the trees, the wind, and the water, and saw an indescribable light that drew him in, a light he began to believe was a being. “It was like the magnetism of love, something that attracts the deepest part of you,” he told me. “I have never been more alive, I have never felt more lucid in my life.” Regaining awareness and sense of his physical body, Melo said, was traumatic.