On a sunny April afternoon in 2013, while my dad was driving home after work, a 26-year-old man in a Toyota Camry broadsided him. The impact sent my dad’s Cadillac careening into a brick retaining wall. Paramedics had to saw off the door to extract him from the vehicle.
When I saw him several hours later, he was conscious but had no recollection of the crash. His blood pressure was so low doctors could barely detect a pulse. They thought they were losing him. Then something strange happened.
“I could feel myself slipping away as the nurses probed for a vein to give me blood,” he told me the next morning. “All of a sudden, I was overcome by an eerie silence. There was no sound at all. I saw myself on the gurney, and then an amorphous shadow crossed the wall. I can’t describe what happened or why, but from the moment the room got quiet, it was as if I was in another dimension.”
