Often in my dreams one situation can swiftly and easily meld into another, the shift seamless but illogical in the cold light of dawn. Well, that’s how it seemed to me.
From floating above the scene, I was suddenly and fluidly inside an ambulance where my physical body was strapped to a cot and covered by a red blanket, an ambulance man (who would be called a paramedic these days) easing off my battered helmet to examine the wound in my skull. This, quickly and fluidly again, changed into a hospital emergency theatre where people in white gowns and masks calmly tended my body. I assumed my head and other parts had been X-rayed before the surgeon got to work on me, but I must have missed that bit because I have no recollection of it at all. I hung around the ceiling of the operating room for a time, watching over the medics with concern: if I wasn’t dead already, then I certainly didn’t want to be. Too young to die, I assured myself.
Next thing I knew I was in an intensive care unit, standing by a bed in which I lay unconscious with a swathe of bandages around the top part of my head. There were three other beds around the room, these filled with patients fitted with IVs and tubes and wires hooked up to little machines. Fade into Mother weeping at my bedside. A nurse lifting an eyelid to check my pupil. A doctor giving me the once-over. My mother again, weeping as before. Then complete fade-out until I woke up.
I think what had actually happened during this, my second out-of-body experience, is that the other me, the one with no flesh and blood form, had returned to my body from time to time. To my unconscious body, that is. And because I was in a coma for a couple of days, with no conscious thought, I had no natural memories of that period.
When I finally came round, much to the relief of my mother and my friends, I kept quiet about the odd experiences, a) because I didn’t understand them myself and b) because I didn’t want everybody to think the head trauma had short-circuited the wires in my brain.
I recovered quickly, you do when you’re young. My leg took a little while to mend (still had the occasional twinge up until my death), but the hairline fracture in my skull soon healed with due care and attention of the medics and nurses (I dated one of the nurses for a while when I got out, a pretty redhead of Irish descent but no accent). Despite heavy bruising there was no internal damage. In short, I’d been bloody lucky; and so had that little boy, thank God.
Physically, I was soon back to normal. Mentally? That was something else.
Oh, and the motorbike was wrecked, by the way, and I never bought another one. Death or injury comes too easily on those things.
4
Figure this…
A woman walks into a London police station, her step awkward, slow, kind of stiff. Much of her face is covered with dark drying blood. Blood also ruins her blouse and jacket just below her left breast.
In faltering words, she speaks to the duty sergeant, who is more than a little surprised, maybe nervous too—the visitor’s face (the part that could be seen) is chalky white in stark contrast to the burnt umber bloodstains. And her clothes are a mess, stockings or tights laddered, dirt on her knees and hands. She is wearing no shoes.
The woman’s voice is somewhat forced and gargled, as if internal blood has risen and is congealing inside her throat, and the policeman struggles to make out the words she says. But he understands enough to catch the meaning.
The deathly pale woman is telling him that she wishes to report a murder. Her own. A name is almost spat out, but it is coherent. Then the woman drops dead. Or so the policeman thinks.
A police doctor is called, who quickly examines the body and asserts that the woman is, indeed, dead. But the doctor is puzzled and adds another diagnosis.
The corpse is taken away and because there is some confusion, if not mystery, about her condition, a post-mortem is swiftly carried out.
The pathologist confirms the doctor’s first conclusion: at the time the woman had walked into the police station, her body was already in the first stages of rigor mortis, indicating she had been dead for at least forty-five minutes.
How so? Later.
5
I continued to have those OBEs. Sometimes they were vague, like a partially remembered dream, while at other times they were perfectly clear yet somewhat unreal in their flow, like movies that have been badly producer-edited. There were gaps in the order, you see, as if I’d reverted to my sleeping body for a while where even my subconscious seemed to be in repose.
The thing is, they no longer needed to be sparked off by any sort of trauma, they started to happen of their own volition when I was near to sleep, body and mind completely relaxed. They occurred only perhaps once or twice a year at first, but then I began to control them—at least, I tried to control them. I’d lie in bed alone and concentrate on leaving my body at will, but nothing transpired at those first clumsy attempts, either because I wasn’t relaxed enough, or was trying too hard. I learned that OBEs are not something that can be controlled entirely at will.
I also realized that between the hot potato incident when I was seven and the motorbike accident when I was seventeen, there had, in fact, been a few other OBEs, when I’d wandered through empty darkened school classrooms, visiting my own desk, or flights when I seemed to be high over the city, with thousands of lights below, many of them moving traffic headlights. I’d put these down to dreams, very, very clear dreams. What did I know? I was just a kid. But dreams always fade with time, if not on awakening, and these excursions or “flights” never did. I nearly always remembered them.
As I got older I began trying consciously to put myself into the OBE state, lying in bed at night and imagining I was looking down at myself from a corner of the ceiling. At first, I’d choose a point above me, think of a small bright light glowing there, then I’d will myself to join it. Nothing really happened though, at least not for a long while. I even used doped—marijuana only, nothing hard—to see if it would help, you know, put me into a relaxed state, free my mind, transcend the norm, but it never worked. I almost gave up until one day in my last year at art college I was bored and listless—a hand-lettering class, I seem to remember, always a drag for me—when suddenly and without warning I was gone.
This was weird phenomenon (I agree, it must always sound weird to anyone—which means most people—who has never been through it themselves) because it was daytime, the sun shining gloriously through a window—maybe its warmth enhanced my drowsiness—and nothing physical had jolted me; no trauma and certainly no accident. One moment I was trying to get the curve on a Century Old Style cap “S” right with my 3A sable paintbrush, next I felt a kind of shifting within me, as if I were being gently hovered out of my skin, and then I was floating above my own head.
Now on this occasion and after the initial surprise—oddly, there was no apprehensive shock involved—I decided I was going to examine the experience rather than just live it. It was as calculating as that. No alarm, no concern that I might not be able to re-enter my body again, no panicky thoughts about death. I could see myself with exquisite clarity, my figure and everything around it finely defined. I noticed the tip of my paintbrush was poised about a millimetre above the letter “S” and my arm—my whole body, in fact—was perfectly still, as if I’d been frozen there. Other people in the artroom were moving: the girl student next to me was wiping her T-square with a clean rag, while on another table, a friend of mine was carefully dipping his brush into an inkpot as our tutor, a thin dandified Swiss with a wispy blond moustache and slicked-back hair, was turning the page of a typeface book opened out before him on the desk top, unconsciously tucking an overspilling cream handkerchief back into his breast pocket with his free hand as he did so. A round clock with a dark-wood frame ticked on the wall. Someone sneezed. Someone else said, “Bless you.” A putty rubber fell off a table and a student bent to retrieve it. All was normal. No one was taking any notice of me.