by Gremlin
In August 2004, a poster named Gremlin shared this account on alt.consciousness.near-death-exp. He had been catatonic in a hospital bed — doctors did not expect him to recover. What he experienced in that coma was not a tunnel, not a light, not a life review. It was a series of false awakenings and nested dreams that slowly converged on the truth of his situation: he was still in that hospital, suspended between worlds.
The narrative turns on a precise phenomenological moment: a dream-within-a-dream in which the inner dream perfectly mirrors the outer reality. He is lying in a hospital bed. He unplugs himself from the machines. The nurse and doctor come but cannot hear him. He walks out. Outside, in the dark, a barefoot figure sits in a tree.
The figure knows he is still inside. He tells him to go back in and lie down until someone notices him. He does — and wakes up.
Gremlin prefaced his account with Poe's "A Dream Within a Dream" (1827), and the choice is exact. Poe's poem asks whether anything we perceive is real or all a dream within a dream. Gremlin's account answers it in the only way it can: by surviving the test.
A Dream Within a Dream
(1827)
by Edgar Allan Poe
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
Something changes inside a man, when death looks into his soul and he is forced as well to take a look at himself for the first time. It is a reality everyone gets the chance to experience, but not many get to tell the tale to their children. I have stepped close to that brink many times. I had the chance to contemplate death before in the end it came for me.
I didn't see any white lights, or hear any Angels beckoning me. In reality I was catatonic in a hospital bed. Could have been the traumatic life I had led that got me there, or some chemical that entered my body. The doctors haven't told me what led up to my hospital stay and I can't remember. At the time no one expected me to ever recover... and there is only so long they will feed you through a tube.
I was unconscious, and at times I was dreaming dreams. I remember them too. I remember dreaming that I was in school again. I remember going on vacation. I even remember the false awakenings. That is where it all started.
The first one wasn't in the hospital bed. It was in my bedroom where I'm still living now. I woke up, or I thought I did, and I walked out to the bathroom in the dark. When I looked into the moonlit mirror I could see myself standing there without my shirt on. My body started changing in the mirror. It was growing hair, and fangs. I was turning into an animal and it frightened me. Then I realized that I couldn't be awake and this had to be a dream I was having.
In the outside world they knew I was probably never to awaken. I thought perhaps that I would wake up soon... Instead though I forgot it was a dream, and rose into a non-dreaming but still unconscious state.
These false awakenings would happen again, or I would realize I was dreaming some other way. When I had these moments of lucidity the reality began to creep up on me that I couldn't remember when I had last woken up.
At some point I began wondering, and to some degree believing, that the dream world I was living in was the only one there was. The crucial change came when I had a false awakening and I turned back over and went back to sleep, inside of my dream. And that is when it happened. That is when I had a dream within a dream. In that hour, I wasn't really dreaming any more than you are dreaming now. The dream I was having perfectly reflected the reality I was actually in. I was in a REM state, and in that state I was dreaming through the mental process of entering another REM state within the reality of the dream.
When I entered that dream, I was lying in a hospital bed. Not floating outside of my body, but unplugging myself from the machines. I was alone in the room, but a nurse rushed in and called for the doctor. She said the patient was speaking. When the doctor came into the room he spoke to me, said my name. I responded, but he couldn't seem to hear me, and they both left the room.
This seemed to be a dream to me, and I didn't like it much. I imagined a more peaceful place, but it didn't come. So I walked out of the hospital and no one seemed to notice me. I traveled outside, and tried to look at my watch but it wasn't on my wrist. It was night out though and there wasn't much traffic on the street.
Someone noticed me then, once I was outside the hospital. He was sitting in a tree, and I could only make out his silhouette in the darkness and the moonlight reflecting off his eyes.
"Not many people come out of there, you know."
I suspected he meant the hospital, but then he spoke again.
"No, not the hospital. You are still in there, at least in a way."
This was the first dream I had that made any sense.
"I want to go home."
The figure in the tree jumped down from the branches, and I could see him in the street light. He was dark-skinned and wearing a dark wardrobe, but barefoot.
"Then go back inside, and lie back down on your bed until someone notices you."
I did exactly as the man instructed me to. After I had rested there for a few minutes, I began feeling like I was in two places at once. I started seeing I had two arms. Then I started feeling like I was seeing through two sets of eyes. I yelled for help.
I woke up that night. And life goes on. The lesson I learned I suppose can't be taught. You have to live them for yourself.
Colophon
Written by a poster known as Gremlin. Posted to alt.consciousness.near-death-exp on August 27, 2004. Gremlin described himself as having stepped close to death many times; this account is his record of what he experienced during a coma from which doctors did not expect him to recover. The post is the only substantial standalone essay he left in the archive.
Preserved from the Usenet archive for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Original Message-ID: <[email protected]>.
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