Charles could hear the surgeons talking, one of them angrily. They were going to start cutting. There were fingers at his abdomen. Next there would be a knife. This couldn't be. He must tell them. Don't cut. I'm still awake. Please, not yet. The words formed in his brain but their passage to the vocal apparatus was blocked. He lay motionless and mute as the blade sliced his flesh. The pain flung him from his body. Looking down on the scene from the ceiling, he saw that the angry surgeon was still complaining. How was he to get back?
The experience left Charles with a post-traumatic stress disorder-flashbacks, nightmares, panic attacks. Now he was seeking compensation. Intra-operative awareness is an acknowledged problem. Effective anaesthesia requires the judicious mixing and matching of drugs to patients and conditions. It is not just like flicking a light switch. Different operative procedures demand different depths of anaesthesia and patients vary in their response. There is no wholly reliable method of detecting awareness. Perhaps one or two patients per 1,000 operations are able to recall events occurring during surgery. The figures are higher for obstetric and cardiac procedures, which require lighter anaesthesia. This does not include those who may be aware at the time but who subsequently fail to recall. But while intra-operative awareness is a recognised complication of surgery, the out-of-body experience (OBE) is not. I didn't think it would help Charles's case. He'd be labelled a fantasist, which would be unfair because OBEs, too, are relatively common-around 15 per cent of the general population admit to having experienced one. I didn't think that Charles's soul left his body-because I don't believe in detachable souls-but I could accept that he had experienced an extraordinary hallucination. There are many forms of intermittent psychosis.
I spent my first term at university lodging with a rather dour working-class family on the outskirts of Manchester. I'll call them the Fancys, although their real name was less plausible. Mrs Fancy fed me porridge for breakfast. Sometimes I'd get back late, the worse for wear, and sometimes I didn't come back at all. I think she found me difficult. Breakfasts were bleak. We didn't find much to talk about. Then one morning she started telling me about Aunt Judith, how she was always welcome to drop in, of course, but dear oh dear how she picked her times. She had turned up in the middle of the night again. Three in the morning. Third time this week. It was tiring, especially for Mr Fancy, who was on the early shift. Aunt Judith was lonely. She would chat for an hour or so, then she would go home. I said I hadn't been disturbed, which was true. I hadn't heard the doorbell-or perhaps she had her own key? Aunt Judith had no need of doorbell or key, I was told. She had a gift. She could project her spirit. And three times that week she had projected herself through the night air to the foot of Mr and Mrs Fancy's bed. She lived in Scotland.
A day or two later, Mr Fancy raised the matter again. I wouldn't have dared. He knew I was in on the story. "You've heard about our Judith, I gather. It's a bit of a nuisance," he said, and then carried on assembling his son's train set on the flowery carpet. The four-year-old lay supine. Nothing more was said.
Just before I left the Fancys, I had an unsettling experience. I woke in the early hours, aware of something glowing faintly in the corner of the room. My heart thumped an offbeat. When I looked, it wasn't Aunt Judith I saw but a Christmas tree. I had got back late, let myself in, helped myself to a snack, and gone straight to bed. I hadn't noticed a Christmas tree. I got out of bed for a closer look. I brushed a branch and caught the scent of the pine needles. Returning to bed, I was soon asleep but something else disturbed me. Perhaps it was voices in the street, I can't remember. I got up to shut the window and saw that the tree had gone. It appeared from nowhere then, silently, it disappeared. It was there. I touched it. I could smell it.
I slept in. Winter sunshine filled the room. The Christmas tree looked splendid, red baubles and silver tinsel splintering the light. So there was a tree. I tried to get up but found I was paralysed. I looked at my arm and willed it to move. I commanded it to move. It stayed put. When I tried to sit up or roll over, nothing happened. I felt panic. On the inside I was a twisting fury but the shell of my body remained motionless. I gave up the struggle, overwhelmed by an intuition that if I tried any harder I would break through the shell and float away. I closed my eyes. When I opened them again the room was still a block of sunlight, but there was no tree.
I now recognise this as a lucid dream, one of those strange, hallucinatory states in the hinterlands of slumber where the mind is alert, but the body is bound by the paralysis of sleep-the intersection of dream life and reality. Perhaps intra-operative awareness is like this. It's happened to me several times since, and each time I found myself restrained by the same intuition. Next time I'll grit my teeth and let myself go. Don't be alarmed if at three in the morning...
