54  Encountering my own death

When I was a postdoc in Berkeley around 1976, I had a vivid hallucination. I rarely hallucinate – in fact, I remember hallucinating only once in my life.

I was sitting quietly in a Morris chair in our cottage, possibly attempting to meditate. Instead, I hallucinated, and that hallucination seemed real. And, no, I had not taken either drugs or alcohol.

My vision was that I was sick and being ambulanced to a hospital. Doctors and nurses scurried around me, trying to keep me alive. My consciousness was outside my body, just watching and feeling no pain and no anxiety. I was dispassionate observer of my own self and of the activity around me.

Then I died. That is, my body died. I stopped breathing, my heart stopped beating, and my body became inert. I was still conscious, but my consciousness remained outside of my lifeless body. I was not sad about dying and found it interesting. I watched as I was bundled in a shroud and taken to a crematorium. Everything seemed appropriate and straightforward.

I watched as my body was cremated and my ashes were transferred to an urn. Someone carried the urn to a small plane, which took off into the skies.

Once we reached altitude, the pilot opened the plane’s side window and took the lid off my urn. I was still objectively watching this process – just observing an interesting progression of events.

Then the pilot tossed my ashes out the open window. At the exact instant that my ashes were dispersed by the onrush of fast-moving air, I ceased to exist. I was dead. It was abrupt but peaceful. I awakened and found myself relaxing in my Morris chair.