Rage, rage against the dying of the light

Many people have asked me what it was like to experience a long term coma. A good question indeed and one I shall attempt as best I can to answer.

I now know that Camilla, my parents and family spent eight tortured weeks conducting a horrific bedside vigil desperately encouraging a very sick body to rage against the dying of the light. I, however, was elsewhere. My recollection of the experience is understandably imperfect but has improved significantly over time.

In the coma, I constructed a disturbed alternative reality - a vivid and emotive dreamscape that had some elements of reality and many of my own creation. I am told this is common.


I started in a hospital room, but a different room to the one I was actually in. Camilla, Dr Thomson and my parents were all present at various times. There was a heavy curtain surrounding me, but I could hear conversations between them conducted outside the curtain. The conversations were supposed to be secret but I could hear them clearly. I recall Dr Thomson telling my parents that I had died and this caused them to fall apart with grief. They then decided to steal Camilla's mother's car from the parking station. Camilla and her mother were incensed and got the police involved.


As it turned out I had not died and was released from hospital. There was no VAD and no illness. I was completely recovered in all respects. My sister, Shelley, then had twins. 


Camilla and I were then invited to a large party at Dr Thomson's house. He lived in Toowoomba, in a big house near East Creek. Camilla and Mrs Thomson were now good friends. For some reason, I was not allowed to drink alcohol at the party, but everyone else was. They were drinking excellent wine from Dr Thomson's cellar, all in moderation in a very civilised and urbane manner. My temperance was not a concern for me, as I was greatly enjoying the company of the Thomsons and their friends.


A few days after the party, Camilla and I visited the Thomsons and we thanked them for their hospitality. They said that we were friends and that was what friends did.


I then played a game of golf on a country golf course with some mates. We abandoned the golf game and decided to started drinking cheap nasty spirits. We got drunk and rowdy and found what we believed to be an abandoned warehouse next to the golf course. I found a darkened room in the warehouse and it contained a bed. I then damaged something in the room. I cannot recall what it was. It may have been a window. I crashed on the bed and fell into a deep drunken slumber.

I was awoken by a security guard brandishing a flashlight. He said that I had been trespassing and had damaged the property of the company he worked for. It was a large American company and corporate policy was to sue to the full extent of the law, however trivial the incident. 


I then did a dumb thing, because I was scared. I confessed that I had trespassed and damaged company property. He completed an incident report and I signed it. He then left.


I immediately realised that this was a stupid, stupid thing to have done. Had I shut my mouth, the company had no case against me. My own foolish confession had given them all the evidence they needed to put me in jail. So much for years of training. I was just an idiot.


I then decided that the only thing to do was run. To evade service. They could not prosecute me if they could not serve me.


Our family then began life on the run, moving steadily North. We spent a few days at different locations. We stopped at a resort near Mackay where I had conducted a mediation years before. It was safe and one night we were there Bob Dylan's son and his band put on a show in the lounge. 


But the company process servers got word where we were. Someone tipped us off and we kept moving North. We stayed at a farm outside Townsville owned by some friends. They were convening a camp for underprivileged children so we helped out with that. It was a happy few days but we knew the company process servers would find us. Our only choice was to keep going North to Papua New Guinea. We organised a small plane and our friends saw us off at the local airport.


I then can recall being back in a hospital bed surrounded by drapes. I was screaming like a banshee and could not get out of bed. I would see inanimate objects in the room become animated as monsters. The nurses yelled at me to control myself.

That's all I can really remember. There were no bright lights that I walked towards. Just lots of fright and running from trouble.

Waking up was a gradual process. There was no moment of my eyes suddenly opening and my consciousness returning to the real world. It happened slowly over a few days.

I then had great difficulty distinguishing what I had dreamed and what had actually happened. I asked my sister how the twins were going.

I guess my dream sequence has meaning to some extent and I am sure that anyone who would be interested enough to do so, from an eminent psychiatrist to a pop psychologist, would be able to distill the events into a meaningful response to recent events. I was on enough sedatives to put down a horse and I am told that this of itself is a factor which promotes distressing dreams.

I cannot help but believe that some things from the outside world permeated through to my subconscious. They were not actual events as such, but more impressions and silhouettes of reality, which were incorporated into my new perceived reality.

So that, for what it is worth, was what I saw when addled with drugs and close to death.  Somehow I managed to summon sufficient rage against the dying of the light. The lion's share of the credit, of course, must go to the many doctors whose skills and expertise got me through these darkest of days. I like to think that they too were able to invoke some degree of rage in successfully fighting the good fight.



Until next time,