The article itself makes it clear and calls it "simulating death"

I grew up in a rather small community on the northwestern coast of Norway, home to a lot of small-time fishermen working up in the Arctic.

Just about everyone my age and older still remember when a vessel was lost back in the eighties, initial reports were all hands lost - until suddenly, a week and a half later, the fisherman we'd all mourned for the past days came home, puzzled as to the sensation his appearance made - he and a couple others had been picked up off a liferaft, and Canadian authorities had misspelled his name when notifying their Norwegian counterparts there were survivors after all - so his family had not been notified.

Allegedly, his father's first words upon seeing him was 'F[---] me, did I just die, or is it you who've not died after all?'

Magne is one of the few people I know who've had the pleasure of reading his own obituary.