peter
“I had a little hump inside my cheek and I didn’t do anything about it for a year or two. When a second started to grow I went into the hospital to get it checked. They kept me in and didn’t let me go home from then on. It was cancer. While I was in the hospital, one of my cheeks swelled up so much I could hardly breathe so they tried to slice it, but it went wrong, and the cancerous cells entered my bloodstream and caused lung cancer. They put me in a coma for two weeks and I was paralysed for another six weeks on morphine. I was conscious the whole time after the coma but I couldn’t move, talk, hear or see anything. I was in and out of reality. When there is nothing happening to your body, your brain tries to keep itself active so I had lots of very long dreams. Some of them lasted a week. They were so real that I basically lived there for those six weeks. I remember all of them like it happened in real life. I never had such vivid dreams before. I only know they were not real because they were just too ridiculously awesome. I travelled all over the world. Some of the dreams had a very fun aspect to them. For some reason, Hugh Hefner, the playboy millionaire, was a regular guest of my dreams. I never had any connection to him in real life; I just knew who he was. In my dreams, we became very close friends. He was also much richer than he really is so I guess he probably represented complete freedom. We met (in my dreams) for the first time when I was getting on a plane in England to go to LA but the plane was full and I couldn’t board. In the waiting room he invited me onto his private jet instead and from then on we went everywhere together. I can definitely say that I lived my most interesting moments of my life paralysed, lying on a hospital bed.”