My coma was nothing like those I’ve read about since: I’ve heard of people who fell into a coma in the middle of telling a joke and forty-two years later woke up and told the punch line. For them, those decades of oblivion were an instant of nothingness, as if they had passed through one of Sagan’s wormholes, time had curled around on itself, and they had flown through it in a sixteenth of a second.

Describing the thoughts, visions, and sensations I had inside that coma is near impossible. It wasn’t the nothingness, because there was quite a bit of somethingness (when you’re in a coma, even anyness is good), but I was too young to make sense of the experience. I can say, though, that I had as many dreams and visions as if I’d consumed a canyonful of peyote.

No, I won’t try to describe the indescribable, only so much as to say there were sounds I heard that I could not have heard and things I saw that I could not have seen. What I’m about to say is going to sound insane- or, worse, mystical, and you know I’m not that way inclined- but here it is: if you look at the unconscious mind as a big barrel, in the normal run of things the lid is open and sights, sounds, experiences, bad vibes, and sensations pour in during the waking hours, but when there aren’t any waking hours, none at all, for months or even years, and the lid is sealed, it’s possible that the restless mind, desperate for activity, might reach deep into the barrel, right down to the bottom of the unconscious, dredging up stores of things that were left there by previous generations. This is a Jungian explanation and I don’t even know if I like Jung, but there’s very little else out there on the shelves that could go any way to explain the things I saw that I could not have seen, to justify the things I heard that I could not have heard.