“My body just didn’t seem relevant anymore," says 
    Iona. "And I felt like I arrived in some consciousness 
    soup which seemed like a different realm to the one I 
    ordinarily inhabit – even in dreams. It just seemed like 
    everything was rotating and swirling and spiralling. It 
    didn’t seem like there were normal space-time proportions 
    going on.”

I'm not exactly sure how close I came to dying, but I had the exact opposite experience in the ER one night.

I had a bout of acute pericarditis, a swelling of the sac that protects the heart, essentially preventing it from beating. Usually it's a milder chronic condition but for whatever reason (freak infection?) I had an intense acute attack one night. It presented almost exactly like a heart attack which is why I rushed to the ER.

We got there just in time. My lips were turning blue and I was drenched in sweat, semiconscious as I was wheeled back to the ER. Heart rate plummeting, etc.

So anyway I was hyper attuned to my body as the doctors worked on me. I was terrified and didn't want to die so for a lack of any other options whatsoever in my barely conscious state I became profoundly aware of my breathing.

I could feel that I perhaps going to die, and didn't want that to happen, so I just focused on being the best damn breather the world had ever seen. I figured whatever the hell was happening...well, I was alive as long as I was breathing, and the more oxygen I could suck into my body the better.

I have never, ever felt more connected to my body than in those moments.

Think about times you've been asked to focus on your breathing during yoga, meditation, etc. Like that, except times ten or twenty or a billion or something.

After some completely amorphous amount of time during which they worked feverishly, the doctors gave me a jab of atropine and I was more or less instantly OK, hilariously enough.