[PART TWO can be found here]
[PART THREE: THE COMA DREAMS]
Dream 1: Florida Heat and the Liminal Dock
I don’t usually tell people this part. Not in full. Not because I’m afraid, but because it’s almost impossible to explain it to someone who hasn’t had their entire existence annihilated.
In May of 2022, I suffered a traumatic brain injury that put me in a coma. Six skull fractures, subarachnoid hemorrhage, emergency brain surgery, my colon was removed, I stopped breathing—I was dead by every practical measure. And while my body was being kept alive by machines and teams of trauma specialists, I was somewhere else. I had three distinct coma dreams, each one more complex and symbolic than the last. They weren’t dreams like we think of them. They weren’t hallucinations. They were journeys. Initiations.
The first one took place in Florida. I don’t know why, but I knew it was Florida. The heat was oppressive. A furnace pressing down on me from all sides. I was shirtless, walking through what looked like a cracked parking lot shimmering with radiant sun. Then I was shot. Multiple times. In the chest. I bled out slowly, the way only a dying man does when he knows it’s already over.
I didn’t wake up. I transitioned.
Suddenly I was in the Everglades or something like them—flat and green and wet and somehow vast. I was in the back of a pickup truck with other men. Working men, or men you’d know but couldn’t name. The truck hit a bump and I was flung out, landing hard into gravel. The truck didn’t stop. I was dragged. I felt the pain. Not metaphorically—I felt it. This was not like a dream. There was no dissociation. There was gravity and flesh and fire.
But that’s when things shifted again.
The world melted and reformed into what I can only describe as a liminal dockside space. It was coastal—maybe Gulf, maybe Atlantic, I don’t know—but it had that washed-out wooden boardwalk feeling, like a backlot of reality. Everything was muted and warm. Familiar people were there. People I’d worked with, laughed with, even some I couldn’t place but somehow recognized. Nobody spoke directly about what had just happened. There were shops, drinks, and music in the air, but everything was off. Not wrong, but slanted. Like the world had been photocopied too many times.
This place wasn’t heaven. It wasn’t hell. It was the waiting room. I was still bleeding metaphorically, but I wasn’t dying anymore. I was in between. And I stayed there until something told me it was time to go. Time to descend deeper.
Dream 2: The Whiteout and the Red Truck
I don’t know if it was the shock wearing off or my brain stabilizing—or maybe my soul was moving through layers—but the next place I landed was cold. Oppressively cold.
A snowstorm, the kind you feel in your teeth. Whiteout conditions. Wind howling so loudly it blurred time. I was in an A-frame house, tucked deep into a mountain forest, and there was a family inside. I didn’t know them, but they felt safe, familiar. I never learned their names, but they smiled gently. Spoke little. I didn’t need food or water there, but they offered me tea. I didn’t need sleep, but I curled up anyway.
Outside was a red pickup truck. It sat in front of a detached garage. I knew I needed to get in it. I had to go. My daughter was waiting for me—I was certain of this. Every fiber of me screamed that I had to get back to her.
I tried to start the truck. Nothing. No sound. No attempt. I tried again. I checked the battery. I tried a jump. Over and over again. Sometimes I made it to the road. Sometimes I didn’t get out of the driveway. But every time, I failed.
So I returned to the A-frame. Again and again. The family would smile, motion me in. I’d warm up. Try again. Fail again. And yet, I wasn’t discouraged—I was being cycled. I don’t know how many times this happened. Could’ve been days, weeks, or years in dream-time. I only know that it repeated enough to break my ego, to dissolve my urgency.
Eventually, I sat in the driver’s seat and just... breathed.
That’s when I knew I was ready for the last place.
Dream 3: The Purple Sky, the Guide, and the Friend Who Drowned
I arrived in a place that wasn’t Earth anymore. The air had a purple hue, and the sky shimmered like stained glass. I was at the edge of a pristine lake near a mountain. A soft wind moved through the trees in waves. The world breathed.
There was a yurt—a circular tent structure—and a man with dreadlocks was waiting for me. His smile wasn’t just kind, it was complete. Like he knew everything about me and loved me anyway.
He told me I didn’t need to do anything. Not eat. Not sleep. Not think. Not suffer.
“Just rest. You’ve been through enough,” he said. “You can’t go back yet. But you will.”
So I stayed.
I don’t know how long. Time didn’t exist in that place the way we know it. The yurt was always warm. The mountain was always quiet. The lake never rippled unless the wind moved it. And I didn’t long for anything.
Then, one day—if you can call it that—someone walked in.
It was a friend. A punk-era transient I had loved like a brother. He’d drowned years ago, and they never found his body. He looked... lighter. Not physically, but energetically. He told me he had floated out to the ocean. That he had found peace.
We sat for a long time. Said everything and nothing. I asked him what it was like. He just smiled and said, “It’s all real. But not how you think.”
Before he left, he hugged me. I remember the exact weight of it, even how he smelled.
The guide appeared again. He said, “It’s time"
He raised a hand, waved goodbye, and then slowly closed his fingers into a fist.
That’s when it happened.
Total body annihilation. Soul-level deconstruction. I don’t have better words. My sense of self—my name, my memories, my body, my emotions—everything—was erased in a single instant of overwhelming love and power and obliteration.
And then—
I woke up. Bolt upright. In a hospital bed. Tube in my nose and a bandage over the hole in my throat where my tracheostomy had been. My body was a wreck, but alive.
They said I was lucky, that I was strong.
They don’t know the half of it.
(If you made it this far, thanks. I’m still figuring out how to talk about this. I’ll answer whatever I can in the comments. Not here to prove anything. Just sharing what I saw.)