Master Wu, here are some examples of 'hallucinations' from Sartori's book.
I was lying in ITU on the bed with the nurse looking after me and the doctors were there. Then I just sort of…saw myself for a long time lying on the bed. Then there was like a warm air, warm air and a light and I just drifted into the warm air, towards the light…Lovely, lovely place there…so serene and calm…oh it was lovely up there is was..It was like something from um, what’s that kid’s book called? My Little Pony, it was full of glitter and rainbows, lovely it was, beautiful where the kids were.
I thought that people were trying to make me take drugs, I could feel myself slipping…I was just slipping and then I was telling myself that everything was alright and the feeling tends to repeat itself as well. It wasn’t just a once off, it was a game, these people were publicly trying to force drugs into me.
P: So these dreams were different from normal dreams, is it?
45: Yes, yeah.
P Did they seem real?
45: Oh, it seemed very real yes, yes.
P Was it like any other experience you’ve had, like hallucinating or other drugs that you’ve had – medicines that have made you feel like it?
45: No, no. It seems like I was there – it was happening. I was actually afraid sometimes.
P: What sort of things made you afraid?
45: Well, that [a story he’d previously described] trying to run home on time, um being taken to prison in a helicopter, I couldn’t understand that and the helicopter pilot was the Dr. that introduced that new drug wasn’t he. He was selling drugs to me – I must have seen him see before I went to sleep.
…
45: I actually watched the surgeon taking the scar off here, you know it was a dream but it was the same doctor who came up to see me on the ward then. [ITU consultant did not remove any scar]. You know this was the first time I was meeting him but I actually watched him with the scalpel taking the skin off and putting it onto the table…
P: And you watched that?
45: I was watching it all, yeah.
P: Well, you’d have definitely been unconscious.
I was going from hospital to hospital. There was this different hospital the one and there was loads of stuff, like an avalanche. Um, we were being pulled around by reindeers. Un, the ice had got to a certain bit and if we went any further we’d crash.
P: So what was the first thing that you remembered about being in ITU?
53: Well, paranoia I suppose. I was reminded of that um and the subsequent things like the pending doom and on some occasions my mind just went uh crazy, silly, no not crazy it just went off at a fast speed as I told you the other night that uh, I’d be lying back in bed but suddenly I could see what was nice. Bright red and yellow lights that were comforting um, and then fast speeds as if in a helicopter which took be across landscapes – some which I obviously recognized – not recognized, seemed that could be Middle Eastern deserts uh, other landscapes were then more dark, more ugly or frightening. I particularly remember seeing small creatures without faces.
Anyway they moved me to another ward, a quieter ward in the same place and um…I still didn’t get any sleep and I could see writing on the walls, moving on the walls and things like that and early in the morning I looked through the window, one of the windows and I could see this beautiful picture. I was a huge lake and at the back of the lake was…uh, a typical Wales scene. A beautiful lake and a hill a big hill at the back with sunshine….When the nurse came to give me my bath she closed the curtains. It would be about twenty minutes before she pulled them back, all that was there was the ward next door (the main unit) and all the nurses that were there. No sign of the lake or signs of the most beautiful picture.
I remember dreaming but not believing I was dreaming because I was awake. And I believed that I was edging nearer death. It was…in front of me. Eventually I came to feeling that death was a certainty. I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But when I woke, I was astonished to find that I was in bed. I’d though surely that I had gone on, so the second night something very similar happened and this night I was dea again. And I was in the, I could hear my wife and my daughter in funeral service in a chapel that doesn’t exist. And there was a gospel choir, you know and there were um, there was a Pakistani shop behind. There was no wall between the Pakistani shop that was selling curtains and what have you and the Chapel.
Each paragraph is from a different patient. "P" is Penny (Sartori) and the number is the subject number for that patient. Square brackets represent information Penny is adding. The first account is from an "NDE", and the remainder are from the section she calls "hallucinations" in the non-NDE patients. I just took the first excerpts from the first six, but they represent a tiny portion of all the descriptions and I didn't seek out weird or crazy excerpts.
Linda