Dax Shepard reveals near-death experience: was ‘seconds’ after dying
Dax Shepard has revealed he had a terrifying near-death experience after being involved in a serious car crash in high school. RadarOnline.com can reveal.
The podcaster revealed how feeling like he was ‘going to die at any moment’ ended up being ‘shockingly comforting’, leaving him wondering for days afterwards if he was really dead.
The conversation about near-death experiences started during Shepard’s Armchair Expertt podcast on Monday, February 9, when guest Kaley Cuoco said she hadn’t had one but “wished” she had: “Because I want to see what these people are… what do they see?”
Shepard then talked about what he experienced during the horrific car accident when he was in 12th grade.
“I don’t know what the definition is. But I had that moment, one of the most unique feelings I’ve ever had in my life, where I thought, ‘Oh, I’m about to die. I’m just seconds away from dying,'” he explained.
“I was sitting in the backseat of a car. Like I had the seats folded down in the back of a Ford Probe, like a hatchback, and my friend was driving. We were coming back from Toledo, back to Detroit,” he remembers. “It was late at night and I had to work really early in the morning. So I said, ‘Hey, I’m going to sleep in the back. Can you drive?’ [He said] ‘Yes, I’m doing absolutely fine.'”
“He had the cruise control at 85, and I’m there, I’m listening, and the road was really rhythmic,” the comedian said.
I thought the rhythm was nice. “I’m going to fall asleep,” Shepard continued, and then I just heard gravel hitting the side of the car. And I immediately looked up, and he fell all the way down, and we had gone off the road, and we’re going 85, and the car started going sideways and it’s just pine trees along the highway in Michigan.
“I started going over and grabbing the steering wheel there, and there was a moment where I just knew it was too far away. Like we had gone completely sideways. I laid back down and then we started, we just launched into the air and we started rolling right down the highway.”
“And as this was happening, I was waiting to hit a tree. I thought, we’re going to hit a tree and that’s going to be that. And I definitely had a moment where I thought, ‘Oh wow, I’m about to die,'” Shepard recalled.
“And that feeling was so shockingly comforting. I remember going into total fear, s— the car is out of control. Oh my god, we’re going to roll. F— we’re going to roll. Oh yeah. We’re going to roll into a tree. I’m going to die. Like all that calculus. And then I just… and I got really calm,” Shepard recalled of the harrowing crash.
He noted that whatever ‘weird chemical’ is in the brain “certainly started to be released. I think in a strange way I was completely at peace with it.”
Miraculously, Shepard walked away from the accident.
“We just rolled ten times and landed upside down. We didn’t hit a tree. We crawled out the windows. My friend was fine. He was fine, and I was fine,” the Idiocracy star revealed.
Shepard said he wanted to talk to other people who had near-death experiences because, for him, the “trippiest thing” was “spending like three days after that event, because I was already like, ‘Oh, I’m dead.’ And I accepted it.
“For the next three days I was just in one place, and I felt very strange: ‘Am I dead? As I was, I know I died. Am I dead?’ So, that was the weirdest part of the whole thing.”
This experience ensured that he could never sleep in a car with someone else behind the wheel again.
“This may shock you, but I have never been able to fall asleep in a car since,” he said of the crash’s lasting impact. ‘I can’t possibly sleep while someone else is driving. That’s the end.’
