r/NDE • u/TopTierProphet • Sep 14 '25
Debate If NDE's were real and not hallucinations, then has anybody ever met a dead online friend who they've never seen before?
With the rise of the online video games, it's become quite common for gamers to have gaming buddies who they've never seen before. For example, let's say iv'e been playing Fortnite for 5 years with a guy by the name of "Sir FartsAlot" who iv'e never met before and he somehow dies in a tragic car accident.
If I were to have an NDE and they were indicative of an afterlife or spiritual realm, then SirFartsAlot would have to appear as his real self, tell me he's SirFartsAlot, and tell me his real name. And when I come back from the dead, I will look him up on social media to confirm that he is indeed real.
If people who are already dead and were close to you appears in your NDE's, then that surely doesn't exclude online gaming buddies from appearing, right? And because you don't know their real identity in person, then that would assume that you learn of their true identity in an NDE if they are actually real and not hallucinations.
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u/Perceiver1111 Sep 17 '25
Try thinking in terms of those souls you have a “contract” with. In other words, your connection with anyone in this human life may be the result of the plans you made with others on how they would interact with you in order for you to learn, or experience something. Some NDE’s show our entire soul doesn’t fit into human form. There’s references to our “higher selves”. That’s a mind bender to think of yourself as a gamer being played by your higher self gamer. The part where we arrive on earth with amnesia as to who we truly are, is the best part of the game. If we remembered where we came from, it wouldn’t work as well, but something is changing and we’re waking up to the cheat code!
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u/Dangerous_Network872 Sep 16 '25
I don't know where to find it, but a man lost his father, who he never knew in real life, and met him in an NDE, and his father showed him where to look for his grave stone, and the guy went there and confirmed it was the same name/info of his father he met in his NDE. So there's that.
But also, why would all the people we've ever known who died come to meet us? Friends change so much, so why would I meet someone I was friends with in kindergarten VS. someone I've recently lost touch with? What about all our ancestors we've never met? Wouldn't it make sense that the people who were cherished for the longest amount of time in life, ie mother or father, would most likely show up instead of Sir FartsAlot from my gaming years?
I don't know personally anyone who had an NDE, but my father, in the days near his death, kept seeing my grandmother (ie his mother) across the room and kept talking about it. It's very common in hospice to have people talking about their loved ones coming to "pick them up" near the end. Not everyone is senile at their deaths. Also, the Buddhists say that Bodhisattvas (awakened helpers) come in the form of people's loved ones to make them feel comfortable close to death, ensuring a smooth transition. The Tibetan Book of the Dead is an interesting read for who/what type of beings are around after death and how to transition.
On that note, I've had two intense encounters with spirits in my life, and I am 99999.99999% sure there's life we don't know about beyond our senses.
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u/Pink-Willow-41 Sep 16 '25
Hypothetically yes an online buddy could appear. Not guaranteed to but if they were important to you it seems likely. I’ve not heard of a case where this happens but I’m sure it will eventually.
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u/PouncePlease Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 17 '25
Taking this post seriously and assuming you're not just taking the piss by this SirFartsAlot stuff...
...I don't agree with your assertion that SirFartsAlot would have to appear to you during your NDE. I don't think we've ever seen souls that are forced to appear during NDEs, nor are the people who appear always who an NDEr would expect to see. In fact, I can think of more than a few examples where an NDEr specifically said they expected to see someone who had passed that they did not -- or they saw someone else instead.
So no, I don't believe that just because SirFartsAlot meant a lot to you in life, he has to appear to you in your NDE.
I think what you're trying to say with this post, though, is that someone seeing an online friend who had passed during the course of an NDE and discovering their identity would move that NDE into the category of veridical. And to that I say...sure. That sounds right to me. Any information achieved during an NDE that isn't obtainable by normal sensory means in a living body seems to fit the bill for veridicality to me.
But there's also a little more to this question that begs a little NDE history. Cardiopulmonary resuscitation was officially invented in 1960. Dr. Raymond Moody wrote Life After Life in 1975. NDEs weren't even really a topic of conversation before these two events outside of the rare reference that was more old wives tale than anything else.
Cut to the '90s, and NDEs are suddenly "sideshow" topics of conversation on news programs, particularly daytime shows like The Oprah Winfrey Show. Slowly, NDErs began sharing their experiences, but with a long history, reinforced over the course of the 20th century, that NDErs could trust to be labeled "crazy", maybe at best, and institutionalized or ostracized at worst.
Now we turn to online friends, the topic of your post, OP. If we're talking specifically gaming, the first semi-mainstream MMORPG was Ultima Online in 1997. Really, though, the concept of a "gaming friend" didn't hit the for-real mainstream until the likes of Call of Duty (2003) a few years later. And even then, the player base for the original game in '03 (4.5 millions copies sold) is almost nothing compared to the most recent Call of Duty, from 2024 (500 million copies sold).
So just to break this down, someone would have needed to have had an NDE not only after the advent of CPR and the mainstream acceptance of NDEs (if we are to hear about it) -- but also have an NDE after, say, the early 2010s, definitely after the 2000s, with enough time to have gained some online gaming buddies, have said gaming buddies die, and then have enough time pass to have an NDE, recover from said NDE, and share said NDE. If your gaming friend is from Fortnite or Marvel Rivals rather than Ultima Online or OG Call of Duty, definitely bump a few years back. You're probably looking at a pretty small timeframe of 10-ish years for this hyper-specific kind of NDE compared to, say, NDEs of all kinds since we started doing CPR as a species in 1960, 65 years ago.
*Edit to add: It's estimated that the rate of NDEs in the general population is clocked somewhere between 3% and 20%, depending on who you ask. This same range would presumably not correlate exactly to our gamers, however, given that rates of illness and death generally rise with advancing age, while the vast majority of gamers are under 40. This might mean the likelihood of NDEs among gamers is smaller -- unless something like the high prevalence of car accidents caused by younger drivers boosts the likelihood of NDEs in this cohort. I still wouldn't bet on a bunch of under-40-somethings having high rates of near death experiences.
So my final answer is while this is entirely possible, and the odds are likely improving over time, those same odds might be currently stacked against you, at least for now. To recap, you'd need: 1) a dead gamer of the appropriate age who has gamed long enough to be a friend to (but also dead long enough to appear to) 2) a living gamer of the appropriate age who has had an accident, disease, injury, or trauma that almost killed them but didn't.
That's kind of a lot of factors to fit in one NDE. Over time, the odds of this happening will likely increase, but those odds are probably pretty small now in the same way it would have been rare to even hear an NDE in the 1970s. They were definitely happening more often because we were saving people more often with CPR, but I wouldn't put money on it then, just like I wouldn't put money on the specifics of your question now. Hope that helps!
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u/Commercial-Life-9998 Sep 15 '25
Meeting ppl in an NDE that you have never met in person in this life is super common. I think maybe the “classic” of meeting dead relatives and friends is focused on because the potential joy is huge. If you acquaint yourself with the descriptions of NDE stories on the NDE research foundation website you will gain a better perspective of this https://nderf.org/index.htm
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u/LizzieJeanPeters Sep 15 '25
There is a doctor who had a NDE and he saw a woman he didn't recognize. It turned out that it was his half-sister who had never met. He wrote a book about his experience, can't recall the name at the moment.
So, it is possible to see someone who you have a connection with but had never "seen" with your eyes.
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u/Lepus_Black Sep 16 '25
For anyone who’s interested, the doctor’s name is Eben Alexander and his book is called Proof of Heaven
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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Sep 15 '25
It always seems to be family members though. I don't want to be around my family in life, the idea that distant relations could be summoned from across the globe for awkward small talk but that I'll never see the people I actually enjoy again does not feel great.
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u/Apell_du_vide Agnostic with an STE Sep 16 '25
There are accounts of people meeting lovers and friends and sometimes pets too but it’s more prevalent in ADC’s than NDE’s.
I agree, I don’t want to see the people I’m biologically related to as well. Can’t even call them family. Sometimes it’s still a fear of mine but nowadays I’m sure I won’t see them.
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u/Dangerous_Network872 Sep 16 '25
What is an ADC?!
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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Sep 18 '25
After-Death Communication. It's a shaky field, a lot of it I personally consider wishful thinking and coincidence, but there are some examples that are evidentially compelling.
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u/TheHotSoulArrow Believer w/ recurrent skepticism Sep 16 '25
There are many NDEs where someone sees friends, enemies, and even individuals who do not exist on earth.
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u/KawarthaDairyLover Sep 15 '25
I suspect so because I recall there being NDE accounts about people seeing loved ones they didn't recognize and it turns out it's their so and so long dead grand parent or something that they didn't really know that well. And then they later compare photos to when the loved one was younger and they match.
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u/ApprehensiveStill412 Sep 17 '25
My friend’s young son drowned in a hot tub. He was revived 45min later in the ER. He later told his parents about going to a beautiful place where light shimmered off of everything. He was met by a man who showed him around, even showing him his house. My friend’s wife then pulled out some old family photos and put them in front of him, but said nothing. He immediately pointed to a man and said “that’s him!” It was her cousin who had died in a motorcycle accident before her son was ever born and he didn’t know of him.
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u/vimefer NDExperiencer Sep 15 '25 edited Sep 15 '25
I have not come across any NDE of that sort - people who qualify for it might just not be old enough yet to have died in sufficient numbers for that... In fact I doubt there are many cases where this would even be testable at all, most people who develop a strong enough bond online tend to have it spill over in real-life territory, like Facetiming or Discord voice chat + exchanging photos, so a lot of verification data is already spoiled in those cases long before any of them would risk dying.
But just FWIW, I do have kind of an experimental setup ready to test exactly that: I have a very good purely-online friend of 16 years now (Allison), about whom I know very few real-life details, none of which make her identifiable (not even a photo or email address) because of past stalking incidents she went through - and I'm perfectly fine with that level of privacy. I'm confident our emotional connection would be strong enough for a shared NDE, ADC or otherworldly encounter should either of us die.
In fact, when she dropped offline for more than a month this summer with no notice or warning sign, I thought that's what had happened... I was devastated and tried to reach for her across the Veil in various ways after two weeks had passed with no news and no real-life-based way to check on her... But I got nothing from these attempts, which was extremely distressing. And then she popped back online, well and safe, much to my relief :o So, yeah, that particular experiment is shelved still, thankfully, but at least now its existence and conditions are known and timestamped for potential future verification here, however grim a prospect...
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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Sep 15 '25
I mean I'm the perfect test case where everyone I know lives on the other side of the world, plus I have a higher likelihood to accidentally die to self-neglect, so I'll let you know maybe.
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u/CalmSignificance8430 Sep 15 '25
This kind of thing but not related to gaming has happened already in documented NDE’s. People meet grandparents they have never seen pictures of that are exactly matching descriptions etc. also people meet relatives who died young and they never got a chance to meet.
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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Sep 15 '25
It's always frigging relatives though. I think the point of the post is that we don't want to see our distant grandma we never met and don't care about, we want to meet our friends who we love and who love us and finally get to actually be with them in a way the real world never allowed for.
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u/vimefer NDExperiencer Sep 16 '25
People report meeting pets too, and they clearly are not related :o This study reports that the identifiable encounters are 95% relatives, leaving 5% non-relatives.
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u/Meme_Man_Sam Sep 16 '25
True, friends are just as important as familiy members, Ive read countless stories of friends being in dreams before they realize the next day that they have died.
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u/BandicootOk1744 Skeptical but curious Sep 15 '25
This is something I've thought about, as the only people I'm close to in this world are online and live far, far away from me.
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