Did they feed him Miracle Gro brain food?

This was Eben Alexander on Oprah. He looks awfully articulate for someone without a cerebral cortex.

Proof of Heaven is far from it. But I'm going to take a different tack from the Esquire expose of Eben Alexander. To me, what Eben Alexander claims to have experienced was nothing more than a coma-dream. Certainly, fraud comes to mind when you consider his indefensible assertion that his cerebral cortex was basically dead. As neuroscientist Sam Harris said in a cogent blog post, that would imply that his brain grew back. Now that would be a miracle. Though Alexander continually asserts that he's a man of science, his approach to his own case shows that he's anything but.

If he could acknowledge that his brain was still functioning during his near-death experience, he might be able to see patterns that parallel my own coma-dream. When I began reading Proof of Heaven, I was immediately struck by his description of the continual, deep, rhythmic pounding that rang out in his Earthworm's-Eye View segments, which he likens to a distant blacksmith pounding an anvil. That blacksmith must get around, because I heard him too. But then, I imagined the sound coming from as a giant bell that slowly struck out the melody of "Rocky Mountain High." Usually, that is. Sometimes it would lose the beat, but if I listened long enough, it would eventually pick up the melody again. (I was of course imagining the pattern in the first place.) I would often focus on the sound as I attempted to lull myself back to sleep. As I mentioned in my Skeptical Inquirer article "Covert Cognition: My So-Called Near-Death Experience," a running theme of my coma-dream was that I was in suffering through a miserably sleepless night. That sound was undoubtedly the machinery keeping me alive. But this supposed man of science never considered that as a possibility. I had my own personal production of Stomp performed in my honor, with my ventilator, heart monitor, feeding pump, and dialysis machine, all rhythmically whooshing, clicking, and beeping, punctuated by the frequent wailing of alarms. It's no wonder that I dreamed I couldn't sleep.

Coming up in Friday's blog, the rest of the low-down on Alexander's so-called Earthworm's-Eye View segment of his NDE and what it has in common with my coma-dream.

Scenes from My Coma Recovery: The Awakening

I’m reading, “Writing Life Stories,” by Bill Roorbach, in preparation for writing my memoir. It’s an excellent book, and as a plus, it also deals with personal essay writing. I’ve already done pretty well on that score, with two essay sales under my belt, but there’s always room for improvement. At any rate, he teaches memoir writing, so he has a bunch of useful writing exercises in the book. One of them is to write vignettes about your past experiences. I could write about my childhood—there’s plenty of material there!—but I’ve decided instead to write about my recovery. These little stories, after all, will undoubtedly wind up in the memoir (although not in the same form), so writing them now will give me a head start. I’m calling this recurring series, “Scenes from My Coma Recovery.”  I thought the logical place to start would be my awakening.

  

Here I was, finally studying to become a paleontologist, as I had always wanted to do. Of course, when my class gathered to study in the noirish, 30s-era back rooms of the American Museum of Natural History (a place I’ve always dreamed of visiting), I didn’t expect that the vacuums and other machinery scattered about would suddenly spring to life and start attacking everyone. [No one expects the mechanical inquisition.] I had just managed to blockade the room I was hiding in from the rampaging Hoover, when the drill left in that room also went berserk. [Don’t ask me how it moved.]  How would I get out of this dire situation? I never got a chance to find out. Instead, I woke up to another improbable situation.

I opened my eyes and thought, “Goddamnit, I just fell back asleep.” (A recurring theme in my coma-dream was that I was having a miserably restless night’s sleep. Every time I started to drift off, something would wake me up again.)

But this time it was no dream.

“You’ve been in a coma for six weeks,” my mother told me. “You nearly died.”

“Seriously?” I said, or rather tried to say. I was so weak I could barely lift my head.

“Don’t try to speak,” she quickly added. “You won't be able to. You have a tube in your throat to help you breathe.”

It took a few minutes for it all to sink it. How could this be true? I was just sleeping….

Slowly, I pieced together what had happened. The doctors, I soon learned, had told my loved ones that I was profoundly brain damaged. I spent the rest of the day emphatically shaking and nodding my head at every comment and question, trying to make sure everyone knew I was fully awake and still me.