BERLIN, April 8 (AFP) - A three-year-old boy revived by doctors after being clinically dead for more than three hours says he saw his great-grandmother in Heaven, the Bild daily reported on Thursday.

The boy, named only as Paul, was airlifted to hospital after falling into a lake at the end of his grandparents' garden in the town of Lychen, north of Berlin, and doctors were about to abandon resuscitation efforts.

But after three hours and 18 minutes, Paul's heart starting beating again.

"I have never experienced anything like it," one of the doctors, Lothar Schweigerer, told Bild. "Normally when children have been underwater for several minutes, they don't make it."

"Paul said to his parents: 'I was with Oma (granny) Emmi in Heaven. She told me to go back really quickly'."