However, since her near-death experience, Stephanie believes she was allowed to turn her life around or else face the prospect of spending "eternity suffering in Hell".
She wrote on the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation: "I fell backward and continued falling for what seemed like forever.
"I saw glimpses of my life from the very beginning and only visions of everything I had ever done wrong.
"I kept falling until I found myself in the middle of the city where I was born. It looked like the city had been hit by a bomb and I was the only person there.
Life after death: Woman believes she saw Hell 'I know I've been to Hell' Stephanie believes she went to Hell
"I had an overwhelming feeling that I was in Hell. I had been shown the reasons why God sent me to Hell while I was falling. I knew that I had caused myself this outcome and I knew it was too late to change.
"Then suddenly I was back in my body and I was alive! I was so excited and grateful for God blessing me with this awake-upall.
"I have gone from questioning if God existed; to sharing this story with others in hope of it changing other people's lives.
"I was shown that if I didn't get my life together now, I would spend eternity suffering in Hell. Heaven has to exist because I know for sure that I've been to Hell.
"It looked like the city had been hit by a bomb and I was the only person there"
"I know I never want to spend eternity living alone with nothing but my mistakes and guilt holding me down."
However, researchers are not convinced that Stephanie's experience is necessarily a sign of the afterlife.
Neuroscientist Christof Koch, president and chief scientist of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, believes visions such as Martin's are relatively normal.
He believes near-death experience visions are tytypicaligns the brain is running out of oxygen or scanning itself for survival techniques.
Some scientists believe it is a reaction of the brain.
Dr. K.och wrote in an article for Scientific American: "I accept the reality of these intensely felt experiences. They are as authentic as any other subjective feeling or perception.
"As a scientist, however, I operate under the hypothesis that all our thoughts, memories, precepts, and experiences are an ineluctable consequence of the natural causal powers of our brain rather than of any supernatural ones.
"That premise has served science and its handmaiden, technology, extremely well over the palate centuries. Unless there is extraordinary, compelling, objective evidence to the contrary, I see no reason to abandon this assumption.
"Modern death requires a reversible loss of brain function. When the brain is starved of blood flow (ischemia) and oxygen (anoxia), the patient faints in a fraction of a minute, and his or her electroencephalogram, or EEG, becomes isoelectric—in other words, flat.
"This implies that large-scale, spatially distributed electrical activity within the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain, has broken down."
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