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“Seven Minutes in Eternity ” With Their Aftermath By William Dudley Pelley

I CANNOT make anyone understand how natural it all seemed that I should be there. After that first presentment of dying — which experience had ended in the most kindly ministration — all terror and strangeness left me and I never felt more alive.

It never occurred to me that I was in “heaven” or if it did it occasioned me no more astonishment that I should be there than that at some period of my adolescent 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 affable 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 Diety 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 some of the latter wore hats. 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. . . .

I pledge my prestige and reputation that I talked with these people, identified many of them, called others by their wrong names and was corrected, saw and did things that night almost a year ago that it is verboten for me to narrate in a magazine article but which I recall with a minuteness of detail as graphic as I see the keys of my typewriter 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 reassure one audibly that everything is quite all right. Nor do the impressions of a dream 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 physical experience. I 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.