In the summer of 1976, Timothy Cleve Abbott was rushed to hospital when a blood blister on his foot became infected and spread up his leg.
Doctors injected him with penicillin to stop halt the infection but the shot triggered a violent allergic reaction, causing him to ‘leave his body’.
The Austin, Texas, musician said the experience totally transformed his life and his views on religion and the nature of reality.
Mr Abbott, now 68, went on to suffer multiple near-death experiences and he believes there’s a reason around a third of people become recurrent ‘experiencers’.
Tim Abbott says the experiences changed his life and his views forever (Tim Abbott, Supplied)
He told DailyMail.com: ‘It started in the summer of 1976, I got out of high school.
‘I bought a new pair of shoes, and I developed a blood blister, and I didn’t pay any attention to it, but it went up past my knee to the point where I couldn’t walk.’
After friends hauled him to the hospital, doctors lanced and drained the blood blister – but immediately injected him with the antibiotic penicillin, which Abbott said he is extremely allergic to.
The young man immediately collapsed.
He said: ‘I immediately left my body. I saw my body fall down and bounce off the cement floor.
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‘The staff started freaking out and screaming, and the next thing I know, you know, they’re trying to bring me back with CPR.’
Abbott said that despite watching his own dead body on the floor, the experience was ‘very calm’.
He said: ‘I wasn’t in a panic or anything like that. I was just there.’
After three minutes, medical staff brought him back, and they sent him for a skull X-ray after his head had bounced off the floor.
His second near-death experience came just six years later, in 1982, when he was inner-tubing on the Guadalupe River in his home state.
Abbott said: ‘It’s a slow moving river, normally, but it wasn’t slow moving. It was 20 feet above flood stage, but we went ahead and did it anyway, because we were young and dumb.
‘I hit an area of turbulence, and I went down to the bottom of the river and ran out of air, and I had an X-Ray vision, I can’t explain it any other way.
Finding the bottom of the river, Abbott kicked himself back to the surface.
Abbott said: ‘I saw a hand and instinctively grabbed it and he pulled me up. And when I came to I was spitting out water, and I looked in, amazingly enough.
Tim as a young man (Tim Abbott, Supplied)
‘The weirdest part of this story is that I knew the guy that saved my life. He was from my hometown, 400 miles away, who just happened to be in the same spot at the same time I was with other friends.’
In both experiences, Abbott said, he had a feeling of ‘infiniteness’.
He said: ‘I knew that I was not in my body, and I was down looking at me like you would be watching someone in a movie, you know, something you’d see on TV.’
But Abbott said that the experiences changed his views on religion and life and death totally.
He said: ‘I believe once you have opened that window, or crack the door to what happens in the afterlife, you carry it with you as a marker of sorts, or you are able to be in touch with things that you can’t quite understand.
‘I have had some odd stories happen to me after all that and I feel it’s all connected.’
Since his two near-death experiences, he has felt a presence watching over him – and has come to believe that it is his deceased grandmother, Theresa Rigby.
He said: ‘I was born and raised a Lutheran Christian, and now I have the tendency to embrace something similar to that, but I believe in reincarnation after going through these things.’
Since his experiences, Abbot has spoken to others who have been through similar things, and they too feel that the experiences have opened their minds to other phenomena.
Abbott said: ‘Some of these people have taken it to levels that are far beyond anything that I’ve experienced.
‘It set me on a path or a journey, to figure out what is the secret of life. What is the answer to this? Is there really one God, or is there one God who goes by many names?’
‘I believe that pretty much no one knows what happens when we die, but there are plenty of clues left for us to figure it all out. Some people have keen abilities that allows them to be a conduit for things we don’t quite understand yet.’
Abbott says the experiences changed his life and his views forever (Tim Abbott, Supplied)
Abbott has written rock, country, Americana, blues – and says many songs have a theme of life and loss.
Abbott said that he has tried to convey his experiences through his music in the decades since – and also strives to live ‘the right way.’
He said: ‘I do believe we’re the good side of humanity. Is that we’re all supposed to be here for a reason, and we’re all supposed to be helping each other out.
‘It’s so much easier said than done, of course, in today’s chaotic world, but I do believe there is a higher power at play.
‘There is so much clutter in our everyday lives that it’s really hard for us to find these true meanings in life – unless maybe you have some crazy experience that happens to you, that affects you and causes you to look inside as well as outside to see what the answers are.’