Hollywood icon Sharon Stone has revealed that five glowing ‘orbs’ spoke to her after she nearly died from a stroke and warned that she would be separated from her son.
The Basic Instinct star said that the lights appeared while she was drifting between sleep and wakefulness at home. They apparently communicated with her in what she could only describe as a ‘digital language’.
Stone suffered a near-fatal stroke and brain haemorrhage in 2001, when she was just 43. She’s previously said that her brain bled for nine days and that she had to re-learn how to walk, speak and read.
Speaking on Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast, she said that she was given only a 1% to 5% chance of survival. Stone also discussed what she believes may have been a separate near-death experience while undergoing an MRI scan at the hospital.
She recalled travelling rapidly through a brilliant white light and seeing friends who’d already died. ‘At the top of it, I saw some of my friends who had passed away,’ she said. ‘It was just so beautiful.’
Stone said that she suddenly felt an enormous kick to her chest, comparing it with being struck by a horse or mule. She then found herself awake on the table, which appeared to be unusually high in the air.
The encounters with the orbs began later, after the Total Recall actress had returned home from hospital. Her recovery had left her unable to sleep at night, meaning that she instead dozed during the day.
‘When I was first home from the hospital, I couldn’t sleep at night and I was sleeping in the day,’ she said. ‘When I was laying on the couch, sleeping and awake, these orbs sort of presented themselves to me. These five orbs presented themselves to me and they sort of talked to me, but in a digital language.’
The 68-year-old said that the encounters continued for ‘several days’. She described the orbs as balls of light filled with golden swirls, adding that they resembled ‘moving, pulsing light’.
Stone had never publicly discussed the experience because she struggled to explain exactly what it was that had happened. Despite having come close to death, however, she wasn’t frightened by what she saw.
‘I was curious,’ Stone said, adding that she felt ‘very much at peace’. As the orbs appeared, she began asking whether she was meant to survive her ordeal. ‘I just kept saying to them, “I don’t know if I’m supposed to stay here or if I’m supposed to die,”’ she recalled. ‘And they said, “You’re supposed to stay.”’
Stone said that she told the orbs she could only remain alive if two of them promised to protect her eldest son, Roan. He was around one at the time, having been adopted by Stone and her then-husband, journalist Phil Bronstein, in 2000.
The Pennsylvania-born Stone believed that the encounter contained a warning that Roan would be taken away from her. ‘I can only stay if two of you will stay with my son,’ she remembered telling the orbs.
‘Because I don’t want him to be alone, and I think he’s gonna get taken from me,’ she added. Stone said that two of the lights agreed to protect Roan, although they also told her: ‘But your destiny requires that we stay with you.’
Stone and Bronstein divorced in 2004, with Roan later primarily living with his father. Looking back at what she considers to have been a premonition, she said: ‘Sure enough, he was taken from me.’
Despite the rather painful dispute, Stone has remained close to Roan, who’s now 26. She later adopted two more sons by herself, Laird, now 21 and 20-year-old Quinn.
There’s a certain level of irony in Stone being visited by mysterious spheres with the power to influence her life. Three years before her stroke, she appeared alongside Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L Jackson in the 1998 science-fiction thriller Sphere.
The film followed a team of experts investigating an enormous glowing sphere discovered inside a spacecraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Perhaps Stone’s subconscious was simply working through her cinematic back catalogue.
The Oscar-nominated actress has said that the damage caused by her stroke took years to overcome and badly affected her Hollywood career. Whatever the explanation for what she experienced, Stone believes that she was told she had plenty more life left to live.