Seven Minutes in Eternity

Improvement Era Vol. XXXII JUNE, 1929 No. 8 Seven Minutes in Eternity The Amazing Experience that Made Me Over By William Dudley Pelley [ This startling story by William Dudley Pelley should be read by every- one. The edition of the "American Magazine" for March, in which it origin- ally appeared, is exhausted, and we therefore asked and received permission to re-print it in the "Era." Our readers are indebted to the editors of the "American" for this courtesy. The final installment of the story will appear in the July number. The sub-headings in the article are our own. — EDITORS. 1 IN THE Sierra Madre Mountains, near Pasadena. California. I own a bungalow. When I want seclusion in order to complete a knotty job of writing, I lay in a stock of provisions, bid adieu to acquaintances, motor up to this hide-away, and work there un- disturbed. My only companion is Laska, a tawny police dog. In the month of April, 1928, I was living in this bungalow while writing a novel. The work had gone well and was nearing completion. I was untroubled mentally, feeling physically fit, writ- ing six to eight hours a day, with plenty of evening recreation. One night toward the last of the month I returned around ten o'clock and lay reading in bed till midnight. The book bad nothing to do, I am convinced, with what subsequently happened. It was a ponderous volume on ethnology, a subject that is something of a hobby with me. I felt drowsy around midnight, laid the volume aside, pulled off my glasses, and extinguished the bed-lamp. I had gone through a similar routine on a hundred other evenings: the day had been no different from a hundred other writing days spent in the bungalow. My sleeping chamber was located at the back of the house and was perfectly ventilated, with two casement windows opening toward the mountains. Laska curled on the floor at the foot of my bed — her accustomed sleeping place — and that she did not externallv motivate the phenomena in any way, I am positive. When it ended, and I was back in my body. I stumbled from the bed and my voice awoke her, bringing her over beside me. where she thumped her tail on the rug and sought to lick my wrist. * * *

b22 IMPROVEMENT ERA June, \9Z9 I do not recall having any specific dreams the first half of the night, no physical distress-, certainly no insomnia. Ordinarily, I do not use liquor and I had none on the premises or in my system on this night in question. For twenty years I had consumed from a dozen to twenty cigars daily and smoked my pipe constantly over the typewriter. But I had never observed any derogatory effects from such indulgence and was no more distressed than usual from this particular day's consumption of nicotine. The Sensation of Dying "PUT between three and four in the morning — the time later veri- -l"* fied — a ghastly inner shriek seemed to tear through my somno- lent consciousness. In despairing horror I wailed to myself: "I'm dying! I'm dying!" What told me, I don't know. Some uncanny instinct had been unleashed in slumber to awaken and apprise me. Certainly some- thing was happening to me — something that had never happened down all my days — a physical sensation which I can best describe as a combination of heart attack and apoplexy. Mind you, I say physical sensation. This was not a dream. I was fully awake, and yet I was not. I knew that something had happened either to my heart or head — or both — and that my con- scious identity was at the play of forces over which it had no control. I was awake, mind you, and whereas I had been on the bed in the moonless dark of a California bungalow when the phenomenon started, the next moment I was plunging down a mystic depth of cool, blue space, with a sinking sensation like that which attends the taking of ether as an anesthetic. Queer noises were singing in my ears. Over and over in a curiously tumbled brain the thought was preeminent: "So this is death?" No Cause for Alarm 3 AVER that in the interval between my seizure and the end of my plunge, I was sufficiently possessed of my physical senses to think: "My dead body may lie in this lonely house for days before anyone discovers it — unless Laska breaks out and brings aid." Why I should think that, I don't know — or what difference it would have made to me, being the lifeless "remains" — but I re- member thinking the thought as distinctly as any thought I ever originated consciously and put on paper in the practice of my vocation. Next, I was whirling madly. Once in 1920 over San Francisco an airplane in which I was passenger went into a tail spin and we almost fell into the Golden Gate. That feeling! Someone reached

■>"»e, 1929 SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 623 out, caught me, stopped me. A calm, clear, friendly voice said, close to my ear: "Take it easy, old man. Don't be alarmed. You're all right. We're here to help you." Someone had hold of me, I said — two persons in fact — one with a hand under the back, of my neck, supporting my weight, the other with arm run under my knees. I was physically flaccid from my "tumble" and unable to open my eyes as yet because of the sting of queer, opal light that diffused the place into which I had come. When I finally managed it, I became conscious that 1 had been borne to a beautiful marble-slab pallet and laid nude upon it by two strong-bodied, kindly faced young men in white uniforms not unlike those worn by internes in hospitals, who were secretly amused at my confusion and chagrin. "Feeling better?" the taller of the two asked considerately, as physical strength to sit up unaided came to me and I took note of my surroundings. "Yes," I stammered. "Where am I?" They exchanged good-humored glances. They never answered my question. They did not need to answer my question. It was superfluous. I knew what had happened. I had left my earthly body on a bungalow bed in the California mountains. / had gone through all the sensations of dying, and whether this was the Hereafter or an intermediate station, most emphatically I had reached a place and state which had never been duplicated in all my experience. I say this because of the inexpressible ecstasy of my new state, both mental and physical. For I had carried some sort of body into that new environ- ment with me. I knew that it was nude. It had been capable of feeling the cool, steadying pressure of my friends' hands before my eyes opened. And now that I had reawakened without the slightest distress or harm, I was conscious of a beauty and loveliness of environment that surpasses chronicling on printed paper. A sort of marble-tiled-and-furnished portico the place was, lighted by that soft, unseen, opal illumination, with a clear-as- crystal Roman pool diagonally across from the bench on which I remained for a time, striving to credit that all this was real. Out be- yond the portico everything appeared to exist in a sort of turquoise haze. * * * I looked from this vista back to the two friends who had re- ceived me. There were no other persons anywhere in evidence in the first half of my experience.

624 IMPROVEMENT ERA /«*. 1929 Somehow I knew those two men — knew them as intimately as I knew the reflection of my own features in a mirror. And yet something about them, their virility, their physical "glow," their strong and friendly personality sublimated, as it were, kept me from instant identification. And they knew a good joke about me. They continued to watch me, with a smile in their eyes, when I got down from my marble bench and moved about the portico till I came to the edge of the pool. "Bathe in it," came the instruction. "You'll find you'll en- joy it." I went down the steps into delightful water. And here is one of the strangest incidents of the whole "adventure" * * * when I came up from that bath I was no longer conscious that I was nude. On the other hand, neither was I conscious of having donned clothes. The bath did something to me in the way of clothing me. What, I don't know. But immediately I came up garbed, somehow, by the magic contact of the water, people began coming into the patio, crossing over it and going down the southern steps and off into the inexpress- ible turquoise. As they passed me, they cast curiously amused glances at me. And everybody nodded and spoke to me. They had a kindness, a courtesy, a friendliness, in their faces and addresses that quite overwhelmed me. Think of all the saintly, attractive, magnetic folk you know, imagine them constituting the whole social world — no misfits, no tense countenances, no sour leers, no pre- occupied brusqueness of physical handicap — and the whole environ- NOT long ago William Dudley Pelley came into the office of The American Magazine, after an absence of more than a year. "Man, what's happened to you?" asked the editor. "You're look- ing incredibly better than you did the last time I saw you." "You've never seen me before," replied Mr. Pelley. "Just what do you mean by that?" "I mean that the fellow who is standing before you now is a new Bill Pelley — so new that he's only about one year old. I've had an experience. * * *" On the strength of that conversation Mr. Pelley was asked to write about his great adventure. Neither the editor nor any members of the staff knew what transforming experience the author had been through, but it was evident to all that he had greatly changed, both in appearance and in manner. The accompanying article is the intimate account of his "re-birth." It will surprise and interest you as much as it surprised and interested the staff of The American Magazine. THE EDITORS.

June, 1929 SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 625 Photograph by Alfred Cheney Johnson, N. Y, WILLIAM DUDLEY PELLEY merit of life permeated with an ecstatic harmony as universal as air, and you get an idea of my reflexes in those moments. I recall exclaiming to myself: "How happy everybody seems! — how jolly! Every indi- vidual here conveys something that makes me want to know him personally." Then, with a sense of shock, it dawned upon me:

626 IMPROVEMENT ERA J™*, >vz<> "I have known every one of these people some time or other, per- sonally, intimately! But they are sublimated now — physically glorified — not as I know them in life at all." Meets Old Acquaintances IT CANNOT make anyone understand how natural it all seemed -W- that I should be there. After that first presentment of dying — which experience had ended in the most kindly ministration — all cerror and strangeness left me and I had never felt more alive. It never occurred to me that I was in "heaven," or, if it did, it oc- casioned me no more astonishment that I should be there than when, at some period of my mundane consciousness, it had occurred to me that I was on "earth." * * * After all, do we know much more about the one than the other? I had simply ended a queer voyage through bluish void and found myself in a charming place among jolly, worthwhile people who saw in me something that amused them to the point of quiet laughter. Yet not a laughter that I could resent. I had no mad obsession to go off at once in search of Deity or look up Abraham Lincoln or Julius Caesar. I was quite content to stroll timidly in the vicinity of the portico by which I had entered this harmonious place and be greeted with pleasant nods by persons whose individualities were uncannily familiar. They were conventionally garbed, these persons, both men and women. I recall quite plainly that the latter wore hats. I can see with perfect clarity in my mind's eye the outline of the millinery worn by a dignified elderly lady at whose deathbed I had been present in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1923. The big, broad-shouldered, blue-eyed fellow in white duck who had first received me, with his hand beneath the nape of my neck, always hovered in my vicinity, I recall, and kept an eye on my whereabouts and deportment. * * * Return to Earth TT PLEDGE my reputation that I talked with these people, identi- -U- fied many of them, called the others by their wrong names and was corrected, saw and did things that night almost a year ago that it is verboteh for me to narrate in a magazine article, but which I recall with a minuteness of detail as graphic to me as the keys of my typewriter are now, under my fingers. Regardless of the fact that imagination is the chief asset in one of my vocation, I am not given to particularly graphic dreams. Certainly, we never dream by the process of coming awake first, knowing that we are suffering some kind of heart or head attack, swooning, and coming abruptly conscious again in the arms of two kindly persons who

•». 12* SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 627 reassure us audibly that everything is quite all right. Nor do the impressions of a ^ream so stay with us — at least they have never so stayed with me — that after a year such an experience is as vivid as many of my experiences in Siberia during the late World War. I went somewhere, penetrated to a distinct place, and had an actual, concrete experience. 1 found myself an existing entity in a locality where persons I had always called "dead" were not dead at all. They were very much alive. The termination of this journey — my exit so to speak — was as peculiar as my advent. I was wandering alone about the portico I have described, with most of my recognizable friends gone out of it for the moment, when I was caught in a swirl of bluish vapor that seemed to roll in from nowhere in particular. Instead of plunging prone I was lifted or levitated. Up, up, up I seemed to tumble, feet first, despite the ludicrousness of the description. A long, swift, swirling journey of this. And then something clicked — something in my body. The best analogy is the sound my repeating deer-rifle makes when I work the ejector mechanism — a flat, metallic, automatic sensation. Next, I was sitting up in bed in my physical body again, as wide awake as I am at this moment, staring at the patch of window where the moon was going down, with a reflex of physical ex- haustion through my chest, diaphragm, and abdomen that lasted several moments. Not any digestive distress, you understand; simply a great weariness in my torso as if I had passed through a tre- mendous physical ordeal and my heart must accelerate to make up the lost energy. "That wasn't a dream!" I cried aloud. And my voice awoke Laska, who straightened to her haunches. There was no more slumber for me that night. I lay back finally with the whole experience fresh in my senses but an awful lamentation in my heart that I was forced to come back at all — back into a world of struggle and disappointment, turmoil and mis- interpretation, to an existence of bill collectors, unfriendly bankers, capricious editors, and caustic critics — to all the mental and physical aches and pains which combine with the slings and arrows of out- rageous fortune to make of this Earth Plane a Vale of Tears. It was a tragedy, the coming back. Call it the Hereafter, call it Heaven, call it Purgatory, call it the Astral Plane, call it the Fourth Dimension, call it What You Will. Whatever it is — and where — that human entities go after being re- leased from physical limitations, I had gone there that night. And, like Lazarus of old, I had been called back — back to the anguish

628 IMPROVEMENT ERA ■/«». /«» (in comparison) of physical existence to finish out my time in the conventional manner. Up to the moment of writing this article almost a year later, I have not had the slightest indication toward a repetition of the episode. Dreams I have had, and occasionally a fine, old-fashioned nightmare, but I have known them for such. Somehow or other, in sleep that night. I unhooked something in the strange mechanism that is Spirit in Matter, and for from seven to ten minutes my own conscious entity that is Bill Pelley, writing- man, slipped over to the Other Side. (Read the conclusion in the July number.) Thy Presence Last night I heard Thee in the distant thunder, Thy voice appealing, murmuring soft and low. I saw Thy face amid the lightning flashes Which lighted all the earth with mellow glow. 'Twas as a mother crooning to her baby At eventide when sleepy time had come, When flocks were lowing, and when heavy laden. Bees were returning with a drowsy hum. And then I heard Thee in the mighty rumbling Of thunder peal that shook the very earth, Deafening with its terrific roaring That unto one alarming fears gave birth. Then came the sharp, quick flashes of the lightning That blinded with the brightness of its glare — Until it seemed all things must be consumed As thunder clash and lighting rent the air. Yet in it all I seemed to read this lesson — With tenderness and patience Thou wilt plead, Showing to erring mortals utmost goodness: But if they fail Thy tender voice to heed, Then must Thou come in majesty and power And, by the awful presence of Thy might, Convince them of their sins; persuasion first, Then by their fears, to walk in paths aright. Phoenix. Arizona ROBERTA FLAKE CLAYTON