Proof of Heaven

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