28.

The Ultra-Real

There   are two ways    to  be  fooled. One is  to  believe what    isn’t   true;   the

other   is  to  refuse  to  believe what    is  true.

—SØREN  KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)

In all this writing, one word seemed to come up again and again.

Real.
Never, before my coma, had I realized just how deceptive a word can
be. The way I had been taught to think about it, both in medical school
and in that school of common sense called life, is that something is either
real (a car accident, a football game, a sandwich on the table in front of
you) or it’s not. In my years as a neurosurgeon, I’d seen plenty of people
undergo hallucinations. I thought I knew just how terrifying unreal
phenomena could be to those experiencing them. And during my few days
of ICU psychosis, I’d had a chance to sample some impressively realistic
nightmares as well. But once they passed, I quickly recognized those
nightmares for the delusions they were: neuronal phantasmagoria stirred
up by brain circuitry struggling to get running again.
But while I was in coma my brain hadn’t been working improperly. It
hadn’t been working at all. The part of my brain that years of medical
school had taught me was responsible for creating the world I lived and
moved in and for taking the raw data that came in through my senses and
fashioning it into a meaningful universe: that part of my brain was down,
and out. And yet despite all of this, I had been alive, and aware, truly
aware, in a universe characterized above all by love, consciousness, and
reality. (There was that word again.) There was, for me, simply no
arguing this fact. I knew it so completely that I ached.
What I’d experienced was more real than the house I sat in, more real