LS: Then she must have been conscious or semi-conscious in the ER.
PG: Well, her heart had stopped and her brain waves were nil; neither sight nor sound was getting through to her. She had, in fact, been declared dead by a highly respected cardiac specialist. Even if she had been capable of opening her eyes, she accurately described things her physical vantage point on the gurney would not have revealed.
LS: For example…
PG: The fact that the nurse attending Dr. Harris originally picked up the wrong IV, noticed it and returned it for the appropriate solution. The fact that her Brain Pattern Monitor was showing nothing but failing Beta waves.
LS: She might have overheard the nurse tell someone she almost brought the wrong solution; someone might have told her—
PG: But they didn’t tell her. I interviewed that nurse—Evelyn Yamaguchi. When I told her what Julie claimed to have seen, she was shocked and ashamed. She’d never told anyone about the mix-up. She was just thankful she caught her mistake before Julie was harmed. It wasn’t something she was proud of.
LS: Then someone else must have seen her.
PG: Someone did; Julie Pascale.
LS: That’s impossible.
PG: Is it? You’re obviously convinced it is. A moment ago you asked why it was necessary to attribute this to supernatural causes. I don’t think they are supernatural. I think, because these things happen, they must be completely natural. How can any of us—except maybe a Julie Pascale—claim to have even an inkling about what happens after death, or during sleep, or in any other altered state of consciousness? From the perspective of twins during the birth process, the firstborn is dead, gone, unreachable. Neither could realize, until they reach the outside world, that there’s more to life than the womb.
LS: So this is a womb-world and we’re all headed for Julie Pascale’s raft of love?
PG: Let me ask you a question: Why do you so adamantly refute Julie’s experience?
LS: I’m not refuting it. I’m investigating it.
PG: No, you’re trying to attribute it to something you can comprehend. Maybe it’s incomprehensible… for the time being.
LS: Oh, I see. It’s what the Catholic Church refers to as a “mystery.”
PG: I’m not Catholic, but it’s what I refer to as a mystery. I’m not saying we’ll never understand it, just that we don’t now understand it. The child in the womb doesn’t have a clue about why she needs eyes. She probably doesn’t realize she has them. She certainly couldn’t grasp the concept of seeing, let alone the reality of it.
LS: So you do believe this is a womb-world and that we’re—what—carrying eyes we don’t know we have, couldn’t know if we wanted to, and won’t use until we die?
PG: Could be. Could be that rare individuals like Julie get their eyes opened a bit. It’s an interesting mystery, don’t you think?
LS: And you’re content with that?
PG: (laughing) Do I have a choice? The science fiction writer, Philip K. Dick, said, “We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile and, most of all, the unexplainably warm and giving…”
LS: A lovely quote, but don’t you want the mystery explained? Don’t you want to be able to comprehend Julie Pascale’s experiences… and your own?
PG: Certainly. But I don’t have an agenda that demands it be explained in a particular way. I’m content with the mysterious, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to clear up the mystery. Really, the whole process fascinates me.
LS: Hence, your involvement with parapsychology.
PG: The term “parapsychology” has a decidedly negative connotation. You’ll understand if I avoid using it. I’d like to be able to coin a more accurate term, but I’m not much good at PR.
LS: But you are good, I’m told, at studying unusual phenomena. Just out of curiosity, I’d like to see what you make of… some experiences I’ve had over the last couple of months.
PG: OK. I’m game.
Lissa leaned forward to flip her notebook out of record mode. She wanted this completely off the record. “I’ve been having dreams,” she said. “Dreams wherein I seem to be floating out of my bedroom, out of my house, sometimes out of my neighborhood. Four or five times I’ve seen things happening outside my house that I later find out have actually occurred. For example, my across-the-street neighbor’s house was tee-peed by a bunch of high school kids. I saw it in my dream—right down to the faces of the kids who did it and the car they were driving. The next morning I saw the house had actually been tee-peed. What could that have been?”
Dr. Genoa’s eyebrows raised delicately. “I’d say sleepwalking, but somnambulists rarely, if ever, recall their wanderings—let alone in that detail.”
“Rarely. But not ‘never’?”
Genoa nodded. “The sensation of floating—”
“Now that sounds similar to what Julie Pascale described, doesn’t it?”
The dark brows scooted higher. “That was a near-death experience. You weren’t dying.”
“Exactly. I was merely asleep. But you don’t think I’m sleepwalking.”
Genoa shrugged. “It could be lucid dreaming.”
“Could you define lucid dreaming for me? I want to make sure we’re on the same page.”
“Lucid dreaming takes place in the middle of REM sleep—it differs from sleepwalking in that major respect. Lucid dreams usually occur in the early morning and are marked by unusual lucidity, clarity of thought, the awareness that we are dreaming, an ability to direct the action in the dream.”
Lissa considered that momentarily. “I was directing the action somewhat. I was amused that my neighbor’s house was under attack by boys armed with toilet paper and I consciously moved in for a closer look.”
“Then what happened?”
“The neighbors woke up, the boys drove off, I was sucked back… um, into another dream.”
“Sounds like lucid dreaming, except for one important detail; what you saw really happened.”
Lissa toyed with the strap of her notebook. “My… a psychiatrist I interviewed said it sounded like a classic out-of-body experience.”
“Known in the vernacular as an OBE. Uh-huh. We don’t know that OBEs and lucid dreams aren’t related phenomena. In some people, they seem to be practically interchangeable.”
“Yes, but lucid dreams are in the realm of accepted psychology. Out-of-body experiences are psychic supposition.”
“As recently as 1990 lucid dreaming was lumped in with all that New Age jazz by skeptics and true believers alike. The ‘give-me-a-break’ fantasy of last week often becomes the gee-wow’ science fiction of yesterday on its way to becoming established theory.”