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

The termination of this journey — my exit so to speak — was as peculiar as my advent.

Instantly, instead of real biliousness, 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 and 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 California starlight was visible, and a reflexion of physical exhaustion through my chest, diaphragm and abdomen that lasted several minutes. Not any digestive distress, you understand. Simply a great weariness in my torso as though I had passed through a great 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 misinterpretation, 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 outrageous fortune to make of this Earth Plane a Vale of Tears.

It was tragedy, the coming back.

Call it the Hereafter, call it Heaven, call it Purgatory, call it anyone of the Astral Planes, call it a Hyper-Dimension, call it What You Will.

Whatever it is — and where — that human entities go after being released from physical limitations, I had gone there that night. And like Lazarus of old, I had been called back — back to the anguish (in comparison) of physical existence to finish out my time in the conventional manner. Up to the time of writing this article almost a year later, I have had not the slightest inclination toward a repetition of the episode. Dreams I have had, and occasionally a fine old-fashioned nightmare, but 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 from seven to ten minutes my own conscious entity that is Bill Pelley, writing-man, slipped over on the Other Side.

There is a survival of human entity after death of the body for I have seen and talked intelligently with friends whom I have looked down upon as cold wax in caskets .

But that is not all. There is plenty of aftermath. To describe the effects of the experience however, it is necessary to intrude a few personal confidences, none of which I am eager to make.

I brought something back with me from that Ecstatic Interlude — something that had interpenetrated my physical self and which suddenly began to function in strange powers of perception.