Just caught this little snippet when I logged in to check my fantasy football team on Yahoo:
Dr. Eben Alexander has taught at Harvard Medical School and has earned a strong reputation as a neurosurgeon. And while Alexander says he’s long called himself a Christian, he never held deeply religious beliefs or a pronounced faith in the afterlife.
But after a week in a coma during the fall of 2008, during which his neocortex ceased to function, Alexander claims he experienced a life-changing visit to the afterlife, specifically heaven.
“According to current medical understanding of the brain and mind, there is absolutely no way that I could have experienced even a dim and limited consciousness during my time in the coma, much less the hyper-vivid and completely coherent odyssey I underwent,” Alexander writes in the cover story of this week’s edition of Newsweek.
Well, having been comatose myself, with VIVID recollections of at least seven different events my mind invented during my 12-day nap, I’m calling shenanigans. Good book deal, if you can get it, I guess. But just not accurate.
What you do when you’re comatose — at least when your brain is working in its modified version — is trip balls. There are reality-based constructs there, and they enable a dreamscape trance which is serene but not an accurate reflection of life itself. Comparison: A friendly trip. Translation: This guy saw a heaven that didn’t exist.
This isn’t hating. I hope he’s right. Because that would mean I spent Thanksgiving in a Texas bar having a few beers with Lyla Garrity. But I think if you were to check with Minka Kelly, she’d tell you she’s never met me before, and wasn’t even in Texas during the holidays of 2008.
Which is to say that I suppose this will be the impetus to write that book y’all tell me I should have started three years ago. So, thanks for that, “doctor.”