When I Was Four

When I was four years old, I learned that I could be unconscious and yet, at the same time, still possess a strange kind of consciousness: an awareness that was too unreal to be reality and yet too real to be a dream.

When I was four, my tonsils were removed. The surgeon knocked me out with ether. Unfortunately, he administered too much ether. He gave me an overdose. If you’re a doctor, how do you know you’ve administered too much ether? Does your patient stop breathing? Probably. That’s what happened to me. On the outside, I was very peaceful — a little too peaceful, in fact. On the inside, it was quite another story.

I was unconscious, and perhaps my breathing had stopped, but I felt anything but unconscious. I could feel myself lying on the operating table in a dark room. Although I could not see them, I could sense around me the presence of others who I assumed were doctors and nurses. Above me in the blackness was a mighty, glowing spiral. It glowed with an intense white light as it slowly rotated. The spiral was ineffably intense and seemed to burn its brilliance into my brain. I struggled to get off the operating table. The unseen beings around me fought to keep me on the table, but I lashed out at them with all my strength: kicking, flailing my arms, thrashing, fighting. They held me down on the table while the burning white spiral spun slowly in space above me with an intensity words cannot express.

When I awoke from surgery, I remembered how I fought to get off the operating table. I hoped my struggle had happened only in my mind, but I couldn’t be sure; the struggle seemed so real. I knew the spiral had existed only in my mind, and therefore wasn’t “real”, but the memory was extremely vivid. For many years afterward, whenever I remembered that spiral I re-experienced its intensity.

And now, many years later, I wonder if, on some level of reality, might it have been real. Maybe something happened that my young mind tried to make sense of in the only way it could. With an overdose of ether in my brain, was I subconsciously fighting those who were administering it? Or was my soul about to leave my body, and the beings around me, the beings I assumed were doctors and nurses ... perhaps they were other-worldly guides and teachers – angels, if you prefer – working to keep my soul in my body to keep me alive. Perhaps it was simply an extraordinarily intense, ether-induced dream and nothing more.

I don’t know why I saw the spiral, but the spiral shape is surely a fundamental part of the Cosmos. From the design of a seashell to the shape of our galaxy, spirals are everywhere. That is a clue to something important.