Afterlife debate: Sharon Stone ‘saw the light’ in incredible near-death experience

Legendary actress Sharon Stone has opened up about an incredible near-death experience, describing the moment she left her body and headed toward the light.

Appearing on Good Morning Britain, the 63-year-old spoke candidly about her brush with the afterlife after she suffered a near-fatal brain haemorrhage and stroke in 2001.

The actress told hosts Susanna Reid and Adil Ray that she felt herself “being pulled outward and upward” but made a choice to return to her body.

“I had a near-death experience and people discuss these in many ways,” she said. “They discuss them from a scientific perspective and discuss them also from a spiritual perspective. I believe that they are both.

“In my case when this happened to me, I had all of these things that people talk about where you see this kind of light, that you leave your body, that you have this feeling of being pulled outward and upward.”

Stone went on to say that she had “a sense of seeing people that had gone before” her and then made the choice not to continue on the spiritual journey.

“I had a sense of communicating with them and sort of an ephemeral sense – not really with dialogue per se – but I did have a sense of understanding that we were communicating and then suddenly I had this gigantic pain like I’d been kicked in the chest,” she said.

“I don’t know if I’d been defibrillated or if this was just how it happened with me, but suddenly I was back in the room and it was very clear that I had chosen to be back in the room and not chosen to continue on that journey, that outward upward away journey.

“I think that’s all I can really say that would describe it.”

Since suffering the stroke, Stone has worked to raise awareness for the Women’s Brain Health Initiative, and revealed that both her mother and grandmother also had strokes.

She told Variety in 2019: “This is why I do it: My mother had a stroke. My grandmother had a stroke. I had a massive stroke — and a nine-day brain bleed,” she said.

At the time, Stone said she wanted women to know the warning signs of an impending stroke or brain haemorrhage.

“If you have a really bad headache, you need to go to the hospital,” she said. “I didn’t get to the hospital until day three or four of my stroke. Most people die. I had a 1 per cent chance of living by the time I got surgery — and they wouldn’t know for a month if I would live.”

Stone said her own near-death experience fundamentally changed the way she viewed the world and that she’d learned that life is too short to do things you don’t enjoy.

“For me, you know I believe in the body, mind and spirit of it all, and you know if there are things that like, aren’t working for you, stop doing it,” she said.