Actress Sharon Stone has opened up about a near-death experience (NDE) she had in September 2001, in which she saw the archetypal ‘white light’ and was greeted by friends who had previously passed away.
In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Stone – who shot to fame after her role as a murderous seductress in the 1992 film Basic Instinct – was prompted to discuss her brush with death due to a vertebral artery dissection. “Some would say I did die,” Stone clarified, “and was defibrillated and brought back.” She went on to note that she had “that white light experience”, and that – like other people who have had an NDE – it had provided her with ongoing solace in her life since: The experience, she said, has “stayed upon my shoulder and made me feel quite safe in this continued existence.”
After Cooper asked her if she could provide more details on what she saw, Stone continued, her voice cracking with emotion:
I saw and felt myself being pulled upward into this incredibly bright white…but white doesn’t exactly explain it…this light that is brighter than anything we’ve ever experienced. Like moving directly into something bright as the Sun, but not yellow.
And as I was whooshing upwards, the top of it appeared to open, and friends of mine, dear ones who had passed and particularly dear ones who I had aided in their passing who I had loved so much were like peeking at me through the top of this light, and smiling at me and welcoming me. And I was seeing them like, “Oh, hey,” you know, like ‘Hi!’ I was so happy to see them when all of a sudden I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest by a mule, you know, just wow.
Stone said she believes the ‘kick in the chest by a mule’ was when the paramedics defibrillated her. “And I just remember gasping like that kind of thing when you’ve been underwater too long, like you’re swimming in a lake or somewhere and just all of a sudden you’re like ‘oh I’m underwater way too long’, and you come up for air…I had that kind of experience and I sat up.”
Stone’s experience, as she recounted it to Anderson Cooper, contained two of the key elements regularly found in NDEs: An unearthly, brilliant white light, and being welcomed by friends and family who have already passed. But, in her 2021 memoir The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone went into more detail about her experience, and it also included other elements such as the ‘life review’.
As she lay in the emergency room, Stone recounts in her book…
Then came the silence again… I remember feeling something between scared and fascinated that no one was running around yelling, “STAT STAT!” like they do on TV. There was a stunning lack of urgency and movement… It was then that I suddenly felt everything moving strangely, as if the film of my life were moving through a camera backward. Fast. I started to experience a feeling of falling, and then as though something were overtaking me, body and soul, followed by this tremendous, luminous, uplifting whiteout pulling me right out of my body and into a familiar brilliant other body of…knowing? The light was so luminous. It was so…mystical. I wanted to know it. I wanted to immerse myself.
Stone recounted that the faces she saw, of departed friends, “were not just familiar, they were transcendent.” As opposed to the cold emergency room she “was coming from”, the friends in the light “were so warm, so happy, so welcoming. Without their saying a word, I understood everything they were telling me about why we are safe, why we should not be afraid: because we are surrounded by love. That in fact we are love.”
These dead friends, Stone says, “told me what it would be like. I felt so safe, so immeasurably at peace,” just as many other near-death experiencers have recounted. “And yet I was pulled back into this life, this world. It was so confusing and harsh.”
In addition to this near-death experience, Stone also says that a few days later – as doctors struggled to diagnose her ongoing dire health issue – she had a ‘deathbed vision’ of sorts, in which she not only saw her deceased grandmother at the foot of her hospital bed, but was also helped by her:
This is where it gets weird, and I hesitate to share this with you, but I want you to believe in yourself and your instincts no matter how they come to you. So here goes. One night I awoke to my grandmother Lela standing at the foot of my bed. I know that sounds reasonable, except my grandmother had been dead for thirty years. She looked beautiful. She smelled beautiful: she always wore Guerlain perfume, Shalimar. She was at her best, wearing her favorite suit and hat. She said, “We don’t really know what’s wrong with you — we are working on it. But whatever you do, don’t move your neck.” Then she was gone.
I took the teddy bear my dad had brought me, squiggled to the side of the bed, and stuffed that bear by my neck and DID NOT MOVE. No matter what, I immobilized myself. I did not roll onto my side.
When doctors were persuaded to do an exploration of Stone’s artery, they found it to be on the edge of tearing apart, and quickly undertook life-saving surgery. After the procedure, Stone says, “I woke up in my room knowing my grandmother had saved my life. She had put her hand on my family and on me and guided us through.”
