While I Was Sleeping

This tale is the recorded memory of a man who recently experienced a remarkably strange journey after being admitted to the intensive care unit of a Houston medical facility with a severe case of pneumonia and septic shock. I know the story so well because I am that man.

Although spending eleven weeks in hospital, six of those were in an induced coma, which I believe is the period when the story takes place. It is, I know, the questionable experiences of a grown man on another level of consciousness in a world that, after reading it, a close friend of mine commented, resembles something from the television series The Twilight Zone. The difference is that this is true.

The story of my experience starts in an office above a liquor store in Houston, Texas, in the USA, moving to Washington State, where I suffer a tremendous injury and am subsequently and mysteriously transferred to an island in the Irish Sea for rehabilitation. My troubled journey takes me around the strange island and for a short spell, also to Offenbach am Main in West Germany, where I had actually previously lived and worked.

Finally, I arrive back in Houston, Texas, troubled, unsure, but overjoyed to be finally rid of my demons and to be reunited with my family and sanity.

I know that I must record this before I forget, lest the details should lose their clarity.

by Anthony Booth

In stores now!