Adam Tapp: A Paramedic Becomes Part of Everything

Medical Details

On February 28, 2018, while doing high-voltage wood etching with a modified microwave transformer, Adam was electrocuted when the current arced into his hand. He went into ventricular fibrillation and was defibrillated twice. He says he was dead for around 11 and a half minutes before being resuscitated, then in a coma for about eight hours. He was intubated, had an IO needle drilled into his shoulder bone, lost a finger and had third-degree burns on his hand, which he says healed faster than expected without the skin grafts he was told he'd need. Afterward he had strong light sensitivity.

The Experience

Adam Tapp has been a paramedic for twenty years, and he finds woodworking a way to unwind. In February 2018, while etching wood with a dangerous high-voltage device alongside a friend, the current arced into his hand. He describes an overwhelming, total pain, as if every cell were being pulled apart, and a field of iridescent green vertical lines. He remembers thinking, "I'm being electrocuted," and then, "I'm falling."

After what felt like a long fall, he says it was like waking from a nap somewhere he had always been. He found himself in a perfect inky blackness, like deep space, with distant twinkling lights. He was seeing in every direction at once, as a single point of awareness. He was not Adam, not dead, not anything, only perfectly content, simply existing.

Then he felt a frequency wash over him, with fractal patterns and iridescent rainbow colors like gasoline on water, carrying thoughts, feelings and emotions. He felt himself being gently pulled apart and deposited into everything, becoming the fabric of the universe. There was no fear. He describes it as the natural progression for every one of us, a return to the source, to infinite consciousness.

Twice he felt himself being electrocuted again, which he later understood to be the defibrillation that restarted his heart. After the first, he became aware that he was Adam and that he had died, and he spent what felt like a very long time in a void, coming to terms with who he was and his place in the universe. After the second, he felt himself pulled back.

He woke in intensive care, intubated, and wrote to ask how long it had been. Told it was about eight hours, he was astonished; he would have believed five years or a decade. For months afterward, he felt as though he had been downgraded from a supercomputer to an old pixelated screen, and he told his wife, "This isn't real." Slowly, he came to accept being back in his body.

He did not see figures or beings, he says. He describes only a return to the infinite consciousness he believes permeates everything. Being dead, in his words, was easy, perfect and beautiful; it is being alive that is hard.

How It Changed Their Life

He says the experience made him deeply spiritual rather than superficially so, eased much of his fear of death, and changed his personality so that he can simply appreciate a moment, something he notices especially with his daughter.