by Daniel Gauss
Did you ever read Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”? If not, it starts as the story of a man who is going to be hanged. As the trap door opens under him, he falls, the rope tightens around his neck but snaps instead of bearing his weight, and he is able to escape from under the gallows. For several pages he wanders through a forest truly sensing the fullness of life in himself and around himself for the first time.
He feels he is now completely free and begins to experience intense joy. Perhaps, deep down inside, he even determines to reform his life and…oops, his neck finally breaks. It turns out that as a gesture of kindness to his body, or as an act of cognitive desperation or neuronal panic, his mind has been imaging a wonderful new life as he is falling through the trap door.
This slows his experience of time down considerably so that within the short time it takes for his neck to break, he experiences several imaginary hours of intense life, freedom and bliss.
I believe this could occur. Actually, I think this kind of thing is happening to me right now. But hold on, I probably still have time until I drown to death.
So, I was three years old. This is real, this really happened. My family – dad, mom, sis, brother and I – are driving west from our home in Chicago to Colorado. My brother spots a lake where people are picnicking and swimming. The car gets pulled over and everyone changes into swimming apparel in a changing area.
My family explained to me, “Dan, don’t go into the water, OK? This isn’t a swimming pool with a shallow end. This is a lake. Everything is deep. OK?” I had just learned the words “shallow” and “deep” – my older sister aspired to be a teacher and was always teaching me something. “OK,” I said, “Too deep. Don’t go in.”
My mom and sister went to lie down in the sun while my father and brother started jumping off rocks and piers and splashing around in the water. What my family had not accounted for was the hubris of 3-year-old over-confidence.
Swimming looked so easy. So, I walked to a pier, took a running start and flew into the water, whereupon I started sinking. I recall going deeper and deeper. The more I tried to swim, the deeper I went. I could see the sun shimmering through the water above me. The sun was getting smaller. That’s when this memory stops.
Now, we pick up with my mother’s narrative a couple years later. She is telling a group of friends at our house how I almost drowned to death one day near Colorado. “His sister saw him running down the pier and shot after him. He flew into the water and right behind him she flew into the water. She fished him out of there or he would have died.”
Now, I don’t think this really happened, neither my sister jumping into the water nor my mother talking to her friends. Why not? That first memory just stops. I don’t recall my sister grabbing onto me, being pulled out of the water, my parents expressing joy that their kid was still alive…I just remember sinking and seeing the sun through the water above me. So, frankly, that’s probably where I am right at this moment.
Our brains are so powerful, more powerful than we can imagine. In an unprecedented effort of neural firing, from a three-year-old brain that was protesting its early end and demonstrating its creativity and resourcefulness before it vanished, I have been creating or imagining a life while I am drowning to death.
Neurologically, this is easy to explain. The phenomenon where time distorts dramatically in near-death moments is called time dilation. It is often reported during traumatic events. The brain gets flooded with stress hormones like adrenaline and enters a hyper-alert state.
The amygdala kicks into overdrive, and the thalamus and sensory cortices begin processing information at a turbo-booster rate, prioritizing high-resolution memory encoding. What feels like years of lived experience could be the desperate, millisecond-by-millisecond construction in the brain’s final moments, stretching each sensory fragment into a coherent narrative of an emergent alternative future.
As the body fails, the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN), the system responsible for self-referential thought, daydreaming and autobiographical memory, can become intensely active. With sensory input shutting down, the mind turns inward, weaving together stored memories, hopes and learned concepts into an extended, believable reality. It is a final, profound act of rebellious consciousness seeking to preserve the self against all odds, constructing a story where there should only be an ending.
This is the most parsimonious explanation for the nature of that first, real, memory and then the gap. The stark image of sinking, of sunlight filtering through water, is a classic example of how high-arousal trauma is encoded: as isolated, vivid sensory fragments. The brain, in its ultimate act of life-affirming synthesis, may then use these fragments as the seed from which to grow an entire imagined life.
The feel of dry land, the story my mother told, graduating from the University of Wisconsin, almost dying of a tooth infection in China, having a monkey steal my bottle of water in Bali, drinking deep, dark, rich coffee in Hanoi with my friend Trang…all of it is probably an elegant, desperate fiction. It is but a three-year-old brain’s magnificent, tragic and final attempt to answer a tragedy with a story…to make my death easier to accept.
Here, however, is my somewhat terrifying concern: my brain and body are working together now to coordinate my drowning with my imagined death. When it’s time for me to really drown, I will imagine a different type of death, instead of like the Bierce story, where I would just go poof. In any case, I have constructed a life and a world and a cosmic history as I am drowning. Let me share some of it with you; you, who are fictional pigments of my deluded hyper-driven 3-year-old intellect.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Then something happened, my brain never explained exactly what, but then we became farmers and this was bad news, because farming led to cities and cities led to social and economic stratification, environmental pollution, massive wars and then my brain created these things called nuclear weapons.
You can kind of predict where certain stories are going, so I think what’s going to happen is that this guy in Russia I invented named Putin is going to go nuts. The names I come up with are fascinating in their own right. Putin. Poo-tin. How did I get that? It doesn’t even sound Russian (further evidence). To put in…what’s the neurological origin of that name?
Anyway, I created this maniac in Russia named Putin who starts a three-day war on a continent my brain calls Europe that will go on for a very, very long time (I know where that concept came from), and he’s going to feel frustrated one day while feeling a little depressed and maybe he’ll learn he’s got some incurable illness and then he’ll decide that if he has to go, we all have to go.
He’ll lob lots of nukes at the USA (I am pretty certain this country exists). A couple months ago I created the concept of hypersonic nukes which we can’t stop. I also recently created the Kuiper Belt beyond Pluto. I decided Pluto is not a planet, but I gave it water.
Now, I also created our own maniac to counter-balance Putin, and they became frenemies. Our leader is a real estate huckster who has gone bankrupt several times. He rose to fame through self-promotion and manipulation of mass-media. He’s all bluster and hate. He’s a blow-hard elevated to power. He has zero insight into his own motives or emotions, no impulse control, no higher values. He has orange skin.
Hateful, embittered White people in the country voted for him (despite his skin color). He validated and encouraged the belief in trashy Americans that their prejudices, biases and unexamined malicious inclinations were right and supported by Jesus (a messianic figure).
In Euripides’ Trojan Women a character states that the “powerful” are just as base and vulgar as the “nobodies.” This makes sense as, in a “democracy,” some racist and hate-filled nobody is not going to vote for a highly educated, kind-hearted, gentle, good person. The base and vulgar can elevate others who are base and vulgar into power. Frankly, it’s often embarrassing what my end-stage brain is creating.
So their nut and our nut destroy the world, just at the point where I really drown – that’s my guess. I just hope my brain doesn’t get really creative and make me survive the nuclear conflagration. That would be totally unnecessary and I would really resent that. In fact, I resent what my brain has been doing anyway, because toward the end now, things are getting really absurdist.
None of this story makes any sense. How did I get to Wisconsin and then Columbia? Nobody in my working-class family had ever left Chicago for school or work. Then I move to China to teach? I wander throughout Asia? I pray to Shiva for justice at the Prambanan temple in Java? I drink a lot of black coffee?
According to my brain, we once had real presidents. We had a guy named Teddy Roosevelt who liked saying “Bully! Bully!” and then his nephew Franklin. I am guessing there are lots of “family” elements in my imagined life because I am probably dying in front of my entire family right now. I don’t like this, no reason for my brain to be doing this to me. It’s running out of good ideas and giving me clowns as president now? Is it like a too-long-running TV series running out of ideas and using and stretching implausible concepts?
Also, my brain is turning the oceans to acid and the atmosphere is so polluted with CO2 that the temperature of the entire planet is heating up. I don’t like this at all. Why is my brain so sadistic as to be giving me all this negative stuff? There’s lots of racism for example. Many American cities are racially segregated and people are suffering purely because of their skin color.
Our orange-skinned leader is violently rounding up immigrants who integrated into the country during past administrations, and have established roots here. He sends some of them to Uganda if they speak English. His immigration agents sometimes act like Brownshirts and seem to delight in roughing people up. They sometimes kill people.
Where does my brain get this stuff? I’m really not happy about this. We have prisons where we put poor people lacking adequate education because they were not given opportunities to live in humane circumstances. We have some folks of the wealthy classes living in isolated luxury instead of sharing excessively hoarded wealth to make human life better.
This is either my brain pathology or a collective brain pathology. It can’t be collective, though, people wouldn’t do this. This has to be me, I think. I created this world under the extreme anxiety, and perhaps bitterness, of facing death as a three-year-old, through drowning.
People wouldn’t do this, there’s something causing my brain to produce these painful and sadistic things. As I am dying, my brain is predisposed to create these horrors. My country dropped two nuclear devices on Japanese people before I was born. I just lived through a world-wide pandemic. There are over 50 wars going on around the world.
My brain keeps me alive in my dream world until it can coordinate a death with my body in the lake. I am pretty confident I am still drowning. I am experiencing time dilation on a massive scale. I guess writing this isn’t going to help get the word out, is it? Well, it’s therapeutic.
My brain couldn’t make me frolic through pristine forests with hippies and poets and gurus eating mushrooms and drinking from coconuts? In my improbable travels, I’ve seen people suffering in dictatorships, where the leader has a billion dollars. I’ve seen all kinds of depressing suffering in my imagined world.
I once knew a certain sweet, kind guy in high school. During my senior year he and I didn’t mix much because of different academic schedules. Once, however, I got on a Western Avenue bus to go home after school and saw him sitting there unexpectedly, and he smiled widely at me. I was so surprised to see him that I did not smile back, my face just froze and I walked by him. I never saw him again. His second year out of high school he died in a B-52 explosion in North Dakota. Impossible. I read about it in the newspaper.
He was quite smart, self-motivated, widely read, another working-class nerd, like myself. He had enrolled in a university, but he died in a bomber explosion in peacetime? I keep wishing my brain could create a time machine to let me go back to that bus and smile back at him (I really wish I had smiled) and maybe tell him, “Look, don’t ask questions. Just stay in college, please. Really. Please! But if you leave for whatever reason and are fixing a military plane, do not flip any circuit breakers if there might even be a small chance there is fuel vapor in the fuselage.”
So, you are all smart people. Can you help me? I’d really like to know whether I am going through my own Owl Creek Bridge incident or not. If you could please prove your mind exists and is independent of mine, that would do the trick. But we can’t do that, can we?
The philosopher Pierre Gassendi once said that Descartes might have been right and our lives might be dreams, but Gassendi also said it didn’t matter. He said you could live and love and be ethical in your dream life too. Basically, he said, “Love, in and out of your dream existence. Just love everywhere you are or you think you are.” That’s what I’ve been trying to do. It’s all I can do.
If you have just read this, you must be real, but how can you reach me and convince me of that? Who knows, maybe I will get rescued and wake up and experience a real and better world and then chuckle as I realize this pathological world never, ever, could have happened. In lieu of that rescue and awakening, the default is to continue as if this is a dream, but that we can love and take moral action to better our lives, even in a dream.
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