I died for the first time in this life when I was three years old. My great aunt, the opera singer, saw my death in the bottom of a tea cup. She turned white and left the room and wouldnt talk about what she saw until after I died and did something she had not foreseen. I came back.
In the bitter winter that followed, in Tasmania, I was rushed to hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. I lost vital signs. When I returned to the little body in the emergency room, a startled doctor told my parents, Your boy died and came back.”
We didnt have the term near-death experience” back then. Raymond Moody invented that phrase long after, and like other survivors I am grateful to have some language that sounds at least vaguely scientific and respectable. But the term is not exact. What I, and legions of others, have experienced in crises of this kind is not near” death; it is death. It is also one of our most important ways of confirming that soul or consciousness is not dependent on the physical body, and of gaining first-hand evidence of what happens after death (and perhaps before birth).
I dont remember much about what happened after I died at the age of three. What I do remember, vividly, is how hard it was for me to come back and stay in the ordinary world. It was as hard for me to operate my body as it would have been for me to drive my fathers blocky Holden automobile. I seemed to be allergic to almost everything in the world around me, and all the drugs the doctors pumped into me did not change that. I was constantly ill, and would lie in the middle of the night coughing into my pillow, trying not to scare my mother. I got pneumonia again, and again, twelve times in all over eight years. Half my time was spent in the twilight of sick rooms. In sunlight, I felt alien, as if I had fallen to Earth from a distant star. On warm nights when I wasnt too sick, I would lie on my back in the grass trying to make out maps in the night sky. The names of the constellations that adults gave me did not seem right.
At nine, I died again. This time I came back not only remembering the whole journey, but a whole other life, lived among people other than human in a world that seemed like home.
In a suburb of Melbourne, in front of our modest bungalow, I am in shorts and thongs under the hot sun. I am doing what normal boys do, poking an anthill with a stick. The anthill is the size of tumulus, and its tenants are not meek little leaf-carrying ants, but large and heavily armored bull ants, whose bite is agonizing. So at nine, stirring the bull ants to a war frenzy feels less like bullying than like an act of bravado, especially with the crazy boy from across the street egging me on.
I jab harder, and the ants of the garrison rush out furiously over my feet, nipping and punishing. I jump back, using the stick to brush them off. Next I am doubled over in pain. Could bull ants pack that much poison? Strangely, the pain that crumples me is not coming from my feet, but from my lower right abdomen.
I hobble across the burned lawn to the house. My father comes out the front door and looks at me, dog at his heels.
Before he can ask, I say, Dad, I feel a bit crook.”
Griff, our corgi, whimpers and licks my feet. Dad asks no questions. He runs back in the house and phones for an ambulance. He knows I dont mention pain unless I am close to breaking. I was in hospital the week with pneumonia in both lungs, but never complained
At St Andrews Hospital, the doctors in the emergency room find that my appendix was about to explode.
How did it get to this stage?” they want to know. Robert must have told you he was in pain.”
Dad says, He doesnt talk about pain.”.
Next, the operating theater. They want to take my appendix out right away. They will put me under first, if they can. Cant put the little bugger down,” I hear someone say as they double the dose of anesthetics.
Im still in my body when the knives come out and the blood flows. I have a mild interest as I watch layers of skin and flesh peeled back from somewhere outside this boys body. Im struck by how pale this body is, in a sub-burned country. Some of the people in scrubs are gossiping and giggling. Dont they know I can hear?
I dont want to see any more. I drift out into the corridor. I see my mother in a waiting room, drawn and deathly white. I dont want to be present to her grief, knowing that I am the cause. My father sits strong and straight beside her, always the soldier on duty.
I slip by them. Now I am up on a window ledge, looking out through the grass. I see a great bird gliding on straight wings above the rooftops, and envy its freedom.
My face is pressed to the window. The glass yields under my pressure. I push a little, and its texture changes. It becomes a soft bubble, containing my head and shoulders. I butt, and the bubble of soft glass pops open, and lets me pass.
I am happy to be flying, like the eagle. I practice swooping and gliding. I can see white sand and blue water at the citys edge and the moon along the beach. The moon is the gate of Luna Park, a big round face with an open mouth that invites you to step through if you dare. Luna Park, Just for Fun, they say in the advertising jingles.I want to go through the moon gate now and ride the roller coaster and the ghost train and look at girls in summer dresses.
Quick as thought, I am at the moon gate. Nobody asks for a ticket. The park seems strangely empty, but that is fine with me. Maybe Ill go on the ghost train first; I smile, remembering how it spooked my cousin. I jump in to a car, and the train rattles off at high speed. We are going down at a steeper angle than I remember. Soon its almost a vertical descent. This is scarier than ghosts in sheets and skeletons. I am gripping the edges of the car with both hands, willing myself not to be thrown out. But I cant keep my hold. I am plummeting down and down, headfirst, through a lightless tunnel.
Dark within dark. It fills my mind. I dont know how my fall is broken, or how I re-discover myself laid out on a bed of soft ferns and grasses, but soon none of that matters, because I am surrounded by warmth and love. The people who tend me are very tall and very slender. They bend like flowers. Their skin is silvery and they glow with an inner light that radiates from the center of the chest. I dont think they are wearing clothes, but this is in no way shocking to me. They hold a bowl to my mouth and encourage me to drink. The juice is delicious; it reminds me of mangoes and passion fruit and wild berries all at once.
They are working on my body. Their fingers are very long and play me like a stringed instrument. I have the sense that they are adjusting my form. I can see my toes growing longer, like theirs, which are as long as their fingers. They are singing over me, and the music brings tears of joy. I know this song, or its sister. I know I am home.
There is no measurement of time in this world, apart from the changing colors of the great Tree of Life at the center of all. There is no division of day and night. We live in a perpetual twilight. I swim and climb and move like a flying fox through the trees with the other young ones. I sit with the elders and grandmothers. They transfer their wisdom by bringing me inside their energy fields, as within a tent, and filling me with their songs and images.
When I grow beyond boyhood, the young women take turns to teach me other things, until She Who Chooses me receives me into the sacred bed. I become a father and a grandfather among these gentle people. Life in a sun-burned country as a sickly boy is a fading dream that disturbs me less and less.
I enjoy the body I now inhabit its quicksilver ability to morph and stretch, to give and receive pleasure. Yet with long use it slows and falters, and I understand that it is time to let it drop, as a well-used garment, and travel on, through a pattern of stars the elders showed me, for which I am now a memory keeper. I choose dissolution by fire. I rise on the sweet aroma of fruitwood burning in the pyre, ready to enter the dance of the stars.
But a force intercedes. I am pulled up through the layers of earth and rock, up into a world of glass and brick and asphalt, and thrown back into the body of a nine-year-old boy with stitches on his abdomen.
His mouth my mouth is terribly dry. The people around me look like ghosts. Im not sure whether Im among the dead or the living. I feel terribly sad, as if I have lost my home.
Welcome back.” One of the ghost people is peering into my eyes, which are wounded by the hard sterile lights of this place. You went away, didnt you?”
Luna Park. Just for Fun.
I thought I would not have much of a story to share from my long overnight journey to Montpellier. no flight delays, no missed connections or lost bags, empty seats beside me on the first two flights, so no stories from people dressed like Indiana Jones or peddling bull semen enhancer or living parallel lives with two different husbands (see "On Another Plane", the introduction to my book The Three "Only" Things, for those traveler's tales.)
Then, on my last short flight from Paris-CDG to Montpellier, I took out my inflight reading, a book in French titled Les portes du rêve. A flight attendant immediately asked me if she could see the book. Leafing through it with mounting excitement, she saw that one of the driving themes is using dreams of the departed and conscious dream journeys to the Other Side to gain first hand knowledge of what happens after death.
"This is my favorite theme," she told me. "I am passionate about it. I am going to get this book!"
I now confessed that I was the author. I explained that I was reading myself in hopes of brushing up my French prior to opening a depth workshop near Montpellier titled "Faire de la mort une alliée" (Making Death Your Ally). Les portes du rêve is the French version of my book Dreamgates.
Cabin service at my end of the cabin was now suspended while the flight attendant proceeded to fire a volley of questions. "To write about these things you must have had a near-death experience, yes?"
Yes, indeed.
People around us did not seem to mind that the coffee and juice was not being poured. An older couple next to me wanted in on the conversation. Viollette, the wife, said, "We are all so hungry for first-hand information about what happens after death. I want to know what I can expect in the afterlife, and I don't want to hear it from priests or psychologists. I want to hear it from people who have been there! And I want to know how I can find out these things for myself."
I quoted Montaigne. Puisque nous ne savons pas où la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. I had forgotten that I don't speak good French as I quoted this wonderful counsel in the original version. "Since we do not know where Death will meet us, let us be ready to meet it everywhere."
There was a stir of agreement from folks around us. I realized I now had an audience of at least a dozen people.
"I can't think of any subject as important as what you are discussing," a man across the aisle contributed, writing down my name and the title of my book. A male flight attendant joined us, wanting the same information.
I observed that we have two main ways of gaining direct knowledge of l'au-dela, the Other Side. We can communicate with people who are at home there, and we can make the crossing before death, to see for ourselves.
This led to an urgent series of fresh questions, again centering on my personal experiences.
I noted that I have never been content with the term "near death experience" for what happened to me a s boy, when I died and came back. On one occasion, when I checked out of my body during emergency appendectomy, aged nine, I seemed to live a whole life in another world. "I don't think I had a near death experience. I think I died and came back."
More questions, more and more urgent.
"Do you have no fear of death?
"Do you talk to many people who have died?"
"Are there many different places where people go when they die?"
The short answer to those three, of course, is Yes, Yes, Yes. I gave highest marks to this question: "Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?"
That was a tough one. I confessed that I was so in love with the people of the other world who raised me as their own when I went away from this world at age nine that I had a hard time living in the body of a nine-year-old boy when I came back. "I suppose I was in love with Death. I have learned to make Death an ally rather than a lover. I want to be ready to meet him anywhere, everyday. I also want to use him as a conselor who can help me to make my life choices with the courage and clarity only Death can bring."
The flight attendant had returned to her regular tasks, but kept coming back to rejoin the conversation. When we landed, she was waiting outside the baggage claim with some of her colleagues. They were all very interested and wanted my website and book information.
"You see, we are making you some good publicity, so you will have to keep teaching us about l'au-dela here in France."
There was a synchronicity at play in all of this that make it a marvelous confirmation, one of those secret kisses, a bisou from the universe. An hour before I left for the airport on Friday, I had sent my favorite editor a few pages from a book-in-progress, from a chapter titled "The Boy Who Died and Came Back."