It looked like I was in an event hall, but I wasn’t sure. The ceiling was too low for it to be a warehouse. It was hard to tell in the dimly lit room. The only light shone through a couple of doors, perhaps one small window.
The wires hanging from the ceiling made me think it was a warehouse. But thinking back on it, it was just an old room where they placed junk they wanted to forget about. I was alone, except for a guard who watched me to make sure I couldn’t escape.
I don’t know how it got there but there was a heavy wooden shipping pallet on my back. It kept me from leaving the room. I wandered around looking for a way to remove the pallet so I could escape. Once I got rid of that, I’d be able to squeeze through the door when the guard wasn’t looking.
The room was about 150 feet square. Eventually, I was joined by another man. He was stuck just like me. We started walking together. He was weaker than me and died quickly. It wasn’t dramatic. He just stopped breathing and was gone.
A couple of days later his family showed up looking for him.
I couldn’t see them directly. They were mostly shadows outside the window in the adjacent room where the guard sat, but I heard the family’s pleadings.
Strained voices weaved a rope of confusion, inquisition, and desperation. The guard gave them no useful answers. Their pleadings became more shrill as they tried to figure out what had happened.
I tried calling out to them. But they couldn’t hear me. I wanted them to know that their loved one was here, that I knew him, and that he didn’t die alone. I wanted to give them some level of comfort and closure.
Eventually, they dropped their heads and slowly walked away. I never saw them again.
I’m still not sure how this happened, but I escaped the room. The shipping pallet was still on my back, and I had to get it off. I was in a parking lot that had a beach berm on one side. On the other side was a gate that led to the free world. Next to the berm was a blue steel slatted fence. It was about 10 feet tall and had six-inch steel posts. After some effort, I managed to hook the pallet onto the slats. A few minutes later the pallet separated from my back.
I crossed the parking lot hoping to cross the gate into freedom. But the guard blocked me. He told me he was just following orders. “You will be held accountable for what’s happening here,” I told him. “Following orders has never been an acceptable defense.”
Again, I’m not sure how it happened. But I was on the other side of the gate. Next, I was in the back of a two-ton truck that was parked on the edge of a shipping yard near the gate. We called these “stake bed trucks” in the Marines. They were basically flatbed trucks with fittings in the bed to erect stakes or posts that would constrain the cargo. Sometimes, the stakes were attached to a fence to convert it from a flatbed to a bedded truck.
In this case, they were single stakes along the lengthwise edges of the truck. And they constrained a pile of four-inch pipes that were twenty feet long and laid lengthwise down the bed of the truck. The pipes were a grayish color as you’d expect. And I was buried under the pile.
After some time, I heard voices. Folks were milling around the truck and discussing what they would do with the cargo. I tried calling out, but they couldn’t hear me. I couldn’t kick the pipes because they held me down. I discovered that I could wiggle a lone pipe. So, I started wiggling it in the hopes of someone noticing.
Sure enough, someone did notice. They called the others over and started to remove the pipes. My rescue was finally under way.
If this sounds like a dream, it was. All of this is from a “dream” I had in the second week of September 2021 while I was still on the ventilator after what the doctors considered was the last stage of Covid before death. I’m writing this in July 2023 and still remember this dream like it happened last night. In fact, I remember my dreams from the hospital better than I remember my dreams from last week.
Those “dreams” were my reality. I call them “dreams” because I don’t have a better word to use. Think of them as my unique zone of consciousness where I lingered between reality and darkness.
The “dreams” were so vivid, that I believed they were reality. And as I started waking up from my coma, I’d talk to my wife, Karen, as if they really happened. It wasn’t until October 9th, 2021, that Karen and I had a heart-to-heart about these dreams. I asked her to sit next to my bed. “I’m going to tell you some things, and I need you to tell me if they really happened.”
A few days before, the walls of my alternate reality had already begun crumbling. My brother had come to see me in the hospital and mentioned his last visit to my house. In my version of reality, he had never been to my house. That unnerved me.
I had to carefully consider anything I said about my alternate reality. My fear was if folks thought I had lost my grip on reality, they’d start taking away privileges. So, I had to figure out what was true and what was not without letting folks know that I was lost.
“When was the last time you visited my house?” I asked my brother.
“Last month when you were on the ventilator” he replied.
“Tell me about your visit” I inquired.
In my reality, I lived in a completely different home – a fictitious home that had a patio, with ten-foot cement walls. In the middle of the seam of the ten-foot cement sections was a little flower with the petals formed in the cement. In the center of the flowers were three-quarter inch holes. And in the holes lived little birds that had endured much heat to survive there.
As he started talking about hiking in the preserve behind the house, I started remembering my home of 17 years. I realized that my mind had taken me to different realities. And it was time to reacquaint myself with the real world.
The brain is an amazing instrument. For months it concocted elaborate tales. The early dreams were greatly divorced from reality. They mostly centered around me taking joy rides in exotic cars. At one point I drove Michael Jordan’s Ferrari. Then I was nearly charged with grand theft auto for joy-riding a Bentley. But after that dream, my dreams started reflecting reality.
As I’ve gone through Karen’s journal that she kept throughout that ordeal, I’ve been able to map most of my dreams to specific spots of my journey through the hospitals.
Karen’s journal is reality. And My dreams are an interpretation of reality.
For example, on September 20th, 2021, I was in a weird medical commune in West Virginia in my dream world. I knew I had been sick and needed medical care. The medical center was in a Victorian house with lacy white curtains and yellow-tinted lights. They put a willow reed down my throat that was supposed to make me better. But it was uncomfortable and kept me from talking. They were harsh and handled me roughly.
Eventually, they rolled me into another room and Karen approached me on my right. I begged her to get me out of there. What was happening there was not good.
A year later I asked Karen if she sat on my left or on my right when she visited me in that room. She said she always visited on my left. So, I asked about this day – September 20th. She said she was shocked to see me sitting up in bed and “alert” and she rushed immediately to my right side.
The willow reed represented my trach, it kept me from talking, and was uncomfortable. Before she visited, they did physical therapy (PT) which was the rough treatment from my dream.
So, this is an example of where my dreams reflect reality – but through a weird lens of interpretation.
The ICU rooms had dual monitors in each room. One monitor was for me, and the other monitor was for the patient in the adjacent room. This allowed the nurse to monitor the vitals for both of her patients. During my stay in the ICU, the name on the monitor for the adjacent room changed twice. These were people who died and were replaced by another patient who also died.
Coincidently, I had multiple dreams where people died around me – including the dream at the beginning of this introduction. And the number of death dreams almost exactly matches the number of patients Karen noticed dying in the adjacent room. I’m assuming I overheard the discussion of a third death, accounting for my third death dream I experienced during that time. Based on that dream, I think it happened when they transported me to the operating room to remove the feeding tube from my nose and replace it with a peg tube in my stomach.
Folks in comas can hear you. I heard specific things Karen said, as you will soon read.
I’m so thankful that Karen insisted on visiting me while I was on the ventilator. She came every day and sang to me and prayed over me and spoke words of encouragement.
She touched my shoulder and said “Craig, this is Karen. I am your wife. You’re going to be OK.” From my dreams I remember that touch (on my left shoulder) and I remember those words. They encouraged me.
I also heard the medical staff. But they were saying very different things.