See you in my dreams

It was like the foyer of a quiet hotel.

There were brown mahogany panels, bedecked with white lace curtains. The lighting was mellow, even dimmed, coming from lamps that were not obviously placed.

The furniture was modern, usually beige in colour and there seemed to be quite a lot of it round the room.

There were other people sitting round the room, but when I wandered in, I seemed to know nobody. I was alone. I staggered almost to a very large sofa and sat down. Everything seemed strange and remote, but not totally uninviting. I was though increasingly conscious of being in pain, in fact the need to stretch out on the nearest of the sofas was overpowering. The people remained in the room, but nobody spoke to me, there was an enomous sense of being alone .....

At this moment I woke up. As your subconscious often clears out the rubbish from your brain in the form of a dream immediately before you wake up,  at this moment it was doing so again. Usually the dreams are there and gone before you know it. This one I remember still.

It was the end of May or the start of June 2008. I was in a hospital bed in the Uniklinik in Frankfurt. They had operated on me for the second time. I had been unconscious for two days. It had been so dark, and so peaceful, and so painless. I was there awake and suddenly aware of excruciating pain and the sense that I could not breathe. I realised that my mouth was blocked out with something and reached inside with two fingers from my right hand. I moved the object, blood started pouring out, two nurses and a doctor were on top of me before two seconds had passed.

And then it was dark and peaceful and painless again.

What that thing in my mouth had been (obviously to aid breathing - apparently I had nearly died on the operating table) I never did find out, but it did not seem too clever. When I awoke again, it had gone. There was merely a surgeon telling me (in German) that they were going to operate again, and that my wife had okayed the operation.

That dream I always will remember. It was definitely a dream, something from inside my head, not delivered by an outside force. It was extremely vivid though.

But as I have pointed out to enough people over the years since, when you are that close to death, your brain is also affected. Your rational control is weakened, your ability to assess and work things through clearly is definitely affected (the brain lacking oxygen maybe?). The subconscious mind is all powerful, its illusions can even scare you.

And it gives some people IMHO the illusion that they think that they have seen the after-life! The dream is reality, the illusion actuality. At this point, without the ability to assess the difference between the two states an illusion of God might become apparent.

But illusion it is! When you start to recover, and your brain feeds more and more conscious information into your mind, you are again aware that all this stems from you - internally, not from some force external to your body. It is your illusion, your dream, your subconscious at work.

Which is why I will politely inform any believer of any faith who wishes to go on about the death bed conversions of atheists, that they do not understand the circumstances in which very sick, dying people find themselves. At the end your awareness, the conscious part of the brain, is not fully operative, illusions take over, and you are not thinking clearly. It is not proof of any conversion, it is merely an indication that your dying anatomy (including the brain) is no longer operating normally.

And if I should eventually die like that, do not for a second believe that I have abandoned my atheistic commitment. Rather put it down to the illness that is killing me. There is no God, there will be no after-life, and on my death bed I would hope that people respect that that is my conviction and no illusory statements to the contrary will be valid.