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Actor Jason Riddington said he had a near-death experience while having an operation to treat a brain haemorrhage which lead to a near-fatal seizure in June 2021.
The 54-year-old, who is originally from Derby but now lives in Buckinghamshire, has appeared in EastEnders, Luther and Doctors.
He has now written a book after suffering a brain aneurysm and compared the feeling to dreaming you are falling during his near-death experience.
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“But this was no dream. I knew that. I knew this was real. As real as it gets. I could feel it as reality,” he recalls in an Instagram post about the incident.
After feeling as though he was falling, Riddington remembers seeing a man lying on his back and ‘motionless – facing upwards’ and somehow he was able to see the man from ‘directly above him’.
He adds: “He was wearing what I could only describe as a very feathery, very black, very theatrical crows outfit.”
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The man had a ‘beak’ which ‘covered almost all of his face’ and he had no eyes. The pair were in a ‘white void’.
“He had white face paint. Upon reflection I would say he looked a little like Robert Smith from The Cure – but not really because that’s just me making a connection with the known from my teenage past, listening to The Cure and looking at the cassette album cover.
“The truth is, his image remains clear to me and his isn’t a face that I’d seen before, or one that I’ve seen face, but he did look a bit like Robert Smith, that’s all.”
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Riddington says he will never forget the man’s face. “We floated there in the white void together – the crow man and me,” he describes, adding that the man was ‘friendly’ and ‘gently smiling’ under his feathers.
In the next part of his account, Riddington shares how he envisioned his eldest daughter, Emily, who was pregnant at the time.
“Trying to get up in the white void, ‘No, I need to meet her’. Emily had found out the sex of her baby and we were all waiting to meet her, baby Leila as it turns out, but at this point, she was unborn and other than being female, unknown to me. But I called out that I wanted to meet her all the same.”
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Then Riddington says the ‘strangest’ thing happened. “Suddenly, the palm of my right hand slowly raised in front of my gaze in a move that I knew well. It was second nature to me. For some reason, still unknown to me, I was doing a bit of Tai Chi Qigong, a fairly nondescript exercise,” Riddington tells his followers.
The Luther actor has opened up about his near-death experience, brain injury and recovery in his new book, Life, Death, Tai Chi and Me, where he writes about performing tai chi exercises while surgeons fought to save his life. The book is out now.
Gregory Robinson