Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon's Journey into the Afterlife

24. The Return

Bond had envisioned his same old dad would wake up, take a look around, and just need a little catching up on what had happened before resuming my role as the father he’d always known.

He soon discovered, however, that it wasn’t going to be quite that easy. Dr. Wade cautioned Bond about two things: First, he shouldn’t count on my remembering anything I was saying as I emerged from the coma. He explained that the process of memory takes enormous brain power, and that my brain wasn’t sufficiently recovered to be performing at that sophisticated level. Second, he shouldn’t worry much about what I said during these early days, because a lot of it was going to sound pretty crazy.

He proved right on both counts.

That first morning back, Bond proudly showed me the drawing he and Eben IV had made of my white blood cells attacking the E. coli bacteria.

“Wow, wonderful,” I said.

Bond glowed with pride and excitement.

Then I continued: “What are the conditions like outside? What does the computer readout say? You need to move, I’m getting ready to jump!”

Bond’s face fell. Needless to say, this was not the full return he had been hoping for.

I was having wild delusions, reliving some of the most exciting times of my life, in the most vivid fashion.

In my mind, I was on jump run, ready to skydive out of a DC3 three miles above the earth… going to be the last man out, my favorite position. It was the maximal flying of my body.

Bursting into brilliant sunshine outside the airplane door, I immediately assumed a head dive with my arms tucked behind me (in my mind), feeling the familiar buffeting as I fell beneath the prop blast, watching from upside down as the belly of the enormous silvery plane started to shoot skyward, its huge propellers whirling in slow motion, earth and clouds below mirrored on its underbelly. I was musing over the odd sight of flaps and wheels down (as if landing) while still miles above the ground (all to slow down and minimize wind shock to the exiting jumpers).

I tucked my arms in extra tight in a head-down dive to accelerate briskly to over 220 miles per hour, nothing more than my speckled blue helmet and shoulders against thin upper air to resist the tug of the huge planet below, moving more than the length of a football field every second, the wind roaring by furiously at thrice hurricane speed, louder than anything—ever.

Passing between the tops of two enormous puffy white clouds, I rocketed into the clear chasm between them, green earth and sparkling deep blue sea far below, in my wild, thrilling rush down to join my friends, just barely visible, in the colorful snowflake formation, growing larger every second as other jumpers joined in, far, far below…

I was flipping back and forth between being present there in the ICU and being out of my mind in the adrenaline-soaked delusions of a gorgeous skydive.

I was between nutty—and getting it.

For two days I blabbered about skydiving, airplanes, and the Internet to all who would listen. As my physical brain gradually recovered its bearings, I entered a strange and exhausting paranoid universe. I became obsessed with an ugly background of “Internet messages” that would show up whenever I closed my eyes, and that sometimes appeared on the ceiling when they were open. When I shut my eyes I heard grinding, monotonous, anti-melodious chanting sounds that usually went away when I opened them again. I kept putting my finger in the air, pointing just like ET, trying to guide the Internet ticker flowing past me, in Russian, Chinese.

In short, I was a little crazy.

It was all a little like the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, only more nightmarish, because what I heard and saw was laced with the trappings of my human past (I recognized my family members, even when, as in Holley’s case, I didn’t remember their names).

But at the same time it completely lacked the astonishing clarity and vibrant richness—the ultra-reality—of the Gateway and the Core. I was most definitely back in my brain.

Despite that initial moment of seemingly full lucidity when my eyes first opened, I soon once again had no memory of my human life before coma. My only memory was of where I had just been: the rough, ugly Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, the idyllic Gateway, and the awesome heavenly Core. My mind—my real self—was squeezing its way back into the all too tight and limiting suit of physical existence, with its spatiotemporal bounds, its linear thought, and its limitation to verbal communication. Things that up until a week ago I’d thought were the only mode of existence around, but which now showed themselves as extraordinarily cumbersome limitations.

Physical life is characterized by defensiveness, whereas spiritual life is just the opposite. This is the only explanation I could come up with to explain why my reentry had such a strong paranoid aspect to it. For a stretch of time I became convinced that Holley (whose name I still didn’t know but whom I somehow recognized as my wife) and my physicians were trying to kill me. I had further dreams and fantasies about flight and skydiving—some of them extremely long and involved. In the longest, most intense, and almost ridiculously detailed of these, I found myself in a South Florida cancer clinic featuring outdoor escalators where I was pursued by Holley, two South Florida police officers, and a pair of Asian ninja photographers on cable pulleys.

I was in fact going through something called “ICU psychosis.” It’s normal, even expected, for patients whose brains are coming back online after being inactive for a long period. I’d seen it many a time, but never from the inside. And from the inside it was very, very different indeed.

The most interesting thing about this session of nightmares and paranoid fantasies, in retrospect, is that all of it was indeed that: a fantasy. Portions of it—in particular the extended South Florida ninja nightmare—were extremely intense, and even outright terrifying while happening. But in retrospect—indeed, almost immediately after this period ended—it all became clearly recognizable as what it was: something cooked up by my very beleaguered brain as it was trying to recover its bearings. Some of the dreams I had during this period were stunningly and frighteningly vivid. But in the end they served only to underline how very, very dissimilar my dream state had been compared with the ultra-reality deep in coma.

As for the rockets, airplanes, and skydiving themes that I imagined so consistently, they were, I later realized, quite accurate from a symbolic point of view. Because the fact was that I was making a dangerous reentry from a place far away, to the abandoned but now once again functional space station of my brain. One could hardly ask for a better earthly analogy for what happened to me during my week out of body than a rocket launch.