throat, and the policeman struggles to make out the words she says. But he understands enough to catch the meaning.
The deathly pale woman is telling him that she wishes to report a murder. Her own. A name is almost spat out, but it is coherent. Then the woman drops dead. Or so the policeman thinks.
A police doctor is called, who quickly examines the body and asserts that the woman is, indeed, dead. But the doctor is puzzled and adds another diagnosis.
The corpse is taken away and because there is some confusion, if not mystery, about her condition, a post- mortem is swiftly carried out.
The pathologist confirms the doctor’s first conclusion: at the time the woman had walked into the police station, her body was already in the first stages of rigor mortis, indicating she had been dead for at least forty-five minutes.
How so? Later.
5
I continued to have those OBEs. Sometimes they were vague, like a partially remembered dream, while at other times they were perfectly clear yet somewhat unreal in their flow, like movies that have been badly producer-edited. There were gaps in the order, you see, as if I’d reverted to my sleeping body for a while where even my subconscious seemed to be in repose.
The thing is, they no longer needed to be sparked off by any sort of trauma, they started to happen of their own volition when I was near to sleep, body and mind completely relaxed. They occurred only perhaps once or twice a year at first, but then I began to control them—at least, I tried to control them. I’d lie in bed alone and concentrate on leaving my body at will, but nothing transpired at those first clumsy attempts, either because I wasn’t relaxed enough, or was trying too hard. I learned that OBEs are not something that can be controlled entirely at will.
I also realized that between the hot potato incident when I was seven and the motorbike accident when I was seventeen, there had, in fact, been a few other OBEs, when I’d wandered through empty darkened school classrooms, visiting my own desk, or flights when I seemed to be high over the city, with thousands of lights below, many of them moving traffic headlights. I’d put these down to dreams, very, very clear dreams. What did I know? I was just a kid. But dreams always fade with time, if not on awakening, and these excursions or “flights” never did. I nearly always remembered them.
As I got older I began trying consciously to put myself into the OBE state, lying in bed at night and imagining I was looking down at myself from a corner of the ceiling. At first, I’d choose a point above me, think of a small bright light glowing there, then I’d will myself to join it. Nothing really happened though, at least not for a long while. I even used doped—marijuana only, nothing hard—to see if it would help, you know, put me into a relaxed state, free my mind, transcend the norm, but it never worked. I almost gave up until one day in my last year at art college I was bored and listless—a hand-lettering class, I seem to remember, always a drag for me—when suddenly and without warning I was gone.
This was weird phenomenon (I agree, it must always sound weird to anyone—which means most people— who has never been through it themselves) because it was daytime, the sun shining gloriously through a window —maybe its warmth enhanced my drowsiness—and nothing physical had jolted me; no trauma and certainly no accident. One moment I was trying to get the curve on a Century Old Style cap “S” right with my 3A sable paintbrush, next I felt a kind of shifting within me, as if I were being gently hovered out of my skin, and then I was floating above my own head.
Now on this occasion and after the initial surprise—oddly, there was no apprehensive shock involved—I decided I was going to examine the experience rather than just live it. It was as calculating as that. No alarm, no concern that I might not be able to re-enter my body again, no panicky thoughts about death. I could see myself with exquisite clarity, my figure and everything around it finely defined. I noticed the tip of my paintbrush was poised about a millimetre above the letter “S” and my arm—my whole body, in fact—was perfectly still, as if I’d been frozen there. Other people in the artroom were moving: the girl student next to me was wiping her T-square with a clean rag, while on another table, a friend of mine was carefully dipping his brush into an inkpot as our tutor, a thin dandified Swiss with a wispy blond moustache and slicked-back hair, was turning the page of a typeface book opened out before him on the desk top, unconsciously tucking an overspilling cream handkerchief back into his breast pocket with his free hand as he did so. A round clock with a dark-wood frame ticked on the wall. Someone sneezed. Someone else said, “Bless you.” A putty rubber fell off a table and a student bent to retrieve it. All was normal. No one was taking any notice of me.
I wasn’t scared. I guess I was too curious for that. I just felt cool about the whole situation. And because of that lack of anxiety I was able to examine my situation calmly.
I decided to see if I could move about and instantly I could. Just by willing myself I floated to the other side of the artroom, observing the heads and hunched shoulders of the students at work as I did so. I half-expected some of them to look up as I passed over, perhaps disturbed by the breeze I must be creating, skimming along like that. I thought my tutor might bark, “You there, True, come down from zat ceiling and get back to your pless!” in that prissy accent of his, but he continued to study his book, one finger of his hand dipped deeply into his breast pocket as he settled the silk hanky. I could see myself—I’d stretched both hands out in front of me like some ethereal Superman and they were plainly visible—so why couldn’t the teacher and students see me? (At that time, of course, I hadn’t yet come to understand that it was my mind filling in what it expected to see.)
Hovering over a bright window, I turned back to the class. The notion of passing through the window glass had occurred to me, but while remaining perfectly level-headed, I was a little anxious about wandering too far from my natural body. I really did not want to lose sight of it, and I think that was quite reasonable. What if I got lost outside? What if there was a point where the spirit (or whatever I was up there, hovering inches away from the ceiling) became too separated from the physical body and something, some invisible connection, snapped, making re-entry impossible?
Anyway, during that time in the artroom I was, as mentioned, pretty cool about the situation, even if I was reluctant to let my material self out of sight. I looked around, took notice of things, considered how I felt about my condition, then, and only after several minutes, I became eager to get back into my body. (It was like resisting one last chocolate from the box because you’ve already had too many.) And the moment I felt that way I was back.
I don’t recall any journey across the room, nor dipping myself into my natural form; I was just there, looking at the world through my physical eyes once more. Only then did I begin to feel some panic, but it was mild. I think I was too stunned to experience overwhelming anxiety. Soon I was plain curious as well as elated. I’d gone through something rare—at least I thought it was rare, because I’d never heard of this sort of thing happening to anyone on a regular basis, although I’d read of one-off dream-flying and of survivors who claimed they had left their bodies while close to death.
I sat there bemused, worrying that my cracked skull had its aftermath, that the impact had messed with my brain and was creating hallucinations, fantasy trips. But I’d been too passive during the experience and observed too much too clearly for this to have been and illusion. Besides, everything else in the room had been quite ordinary and the other students’ behaviour perfectly normal.
Laying my paintbrush down, I sank back into my chair. What the hell was going on? I remembered the hot potato incident, then the immediate consequences of the motorcycle accident. I’d told the doctors of my out-of- body experience and they’d just smiled benevolently and explained that when the head—the brain, more specifically—took such a hard knock, it often went into some kind of seizure, perhaps losing control for a short time, so that visions in the unconscious state might seem like reality. Nothing to worry about, but a few tests would be in order.
Scans showed nothing amiss as far as my head was concerned; fortunately, the fracture had been minimal, the bone barely penetrated, and the brain itself revealed no evidence of swelling or injury. Rest up, give yourself time for the leg to heal and the skull’s light fracture to knit together. Any trauma to the head could be dangerous and cause concern, no matter how light the blow, but in this case, there appeared to be no such problem. A little surgery on the leg was all that was required.
It was some months after the artroom OBE that I began to think back and re-examine some of the “dreams” I’d had from the age of even onwards, dreams that had not gradually faded from memory as they were supposed to,
