Speaker 1: Around. This is the seventy seven WABC Mini cast.
Speaker 2: What oh me, Oh my gosh, there's Dave Crawford. Dave
Speaker 2: Crawford is in Scotland. Welcome to the Other Side of Midnight.
Speaker 2: David Crawford as a truly amazing, spiritual and an important story.
Speaker 2: You took quite a journey, David. You went into a coma.
Speaker 2: Before we find out what you found in that comma?
Speaker 2: What you saw in that comma? How did you get
Speaker 2: into a coma? What happened?
Speaker 1: Well, thanks all that for having me on. Well what
Speaker 1: happened was basically, I drank too much alcohol and ruined
Speaker 1: my liver and subsequently died twice on the operating theater.
Speaker 1: Through that, I was taken to hospital, had two blood transisions,
Speaker 1: and I was in Nicoma for five days and people
Speaker 1: were genuinely surprise that I survived. So that's how I
Speaker 1: ended up there.
Speaker 2: You drank too much, you went into a blackout or
Speaker 2: did you get into an accident?
Speaker 1: No, no, I never went to an accident. I had
Speaker 1: to bleed parises in my esophagus, which is near hand
Speaker 1: fatal about fifteen percent of the time.
Speaker 2: That's terrifying. I'm just kind of guessing you don't drink anymore.
Speaker 1: No, no, I don't.
Speaker 2: Good decision. That was a good decision on your part. Excellent.
Speaker 2: Did this happen in Scotland?
Speaker 1: No, I don't live in Scotland. I live near the border,
Speaker 1: but I live in England. I live in a county
Speaker 1: called Northumberland, which is in England, but it's on the
Speaker 1: border of Scotland.
Speaker 2: And were you in a hospital or you at home? No?
Speaker 1: I was in a hospital. I'd gone into hospital, my
Speaker 1: wife would take me there and basically I was sitting
Speaker 1: in the waiting room I collapsed and one of the
Speaker 1: receptionists had seen this before and she knew exactly what
Speaker 1: was happening. Luckily, I was next go to the accident
Speaker 1: emergency that took me straight in and basically operated on
Speaker 1: me within half an hour.
Speaker 2: What was the operation that they performed, if I may ask.
Speaker 1: The operation? I don't know what it's like in the US,
Speaker 1: but in England, in Britain, they're quite cagey about telling
Speaker 1: you what they've done, so I do really yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not prevalent, it's not not available so much.
Speaker 1: You know that they'll fix you up, but you really
Speaker 1: have to ask for what they've done. So I had
Speaker 1: an operation on the varses, which are the other blood
Speaker 1: vessels do from your It's from your esophagus which had burst,
Speaker 1: so basically I was coughing of black blood. So they
Speaker 1: have to bind them back together and then all other
Speaker 1: sorts of things. After stomach pump you they have to
Speaker 1: do all sorts of that kind of thing. But there
Speaker 1: was I know that I had two blood transfusions. My
Speaker 1: wife got the call from the surgeon saying it's unlikely Lad,
Speaker 1: he's going to make it. So she had to leave work,
Speaker 1: come straight away and have you know, the chat with
Speaker 1: the surgeon that I'm probably not going to make it,
Speaker 1: but obviously I did.
Speaker 2: Is she still with you?
Speaker 1: Yes she is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a very patient, brave woman.
Speaker 1: Yeah she is. She's a great woman. She she looked
Speaker 1: after me when I tried to go sober and I
Speaker 1: did it, you know, without any help. And I did
Speaker 1: that for about five days, flying in bed, which is
Speaker 1: one of the most stupid things you could possibly do,
Speaker 1: but that's exactly what I did. But she stayed with
Speaker 1: me the whole time.
Speaker 2: You're both lucky that you're still alive. Now, please share
Speaker 2: with us, David Crawford, what happened when you slipped into
Speaker 2: a coma, how that feels? What the hell does a
Speaker 2: coma feel like? And then share with us the experiences
Speaker 2: that you encountered in the comma.
Speaker 1: Okay, this is not difficult to talk about because emotionally
Speaker 1: it's difficult to describe because if you haven't done it,
Speaker 1: then it's quite difficult to put it across. But I'll
Speaker 1: tell you briefly. What happened was, I didn't know that
Speaker 1: I was in a different state. Well, we'll just put
Speaker 1: it that way. I was in a different state. I
Speaker 1: felt fine, and it wasn't a case of leaving the
Speaker 1: body or turn around seeing my body, but I had
Speaker 1: I was walking around the hospital as it is geographically
Speaker 1: the same, and I felt great. You know, at the time,
Speaker 1: I had catheters in, I had you know, lines in
Speaker 1: my arms and all that sort of business. But I
Speaker 1: felt great. And I saw a nurse who was basically
Speaker 1: in anapronism. She looked like she was nine from the
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. She had like a bonnet and you know
Speaker 1: the way they dressed in the fifties and not like
Speaker 1: today's medical staff. And I asked if she could help
Speaker 1: me and she could just let me out because I
Speaker 1: wanted to go home, and she said, no, you can't.
Speaker 1: You have to rest, you have to sleep. You're not well.
Speaker 1: But I feel great. I really did feel fantastic. I
Speaker 1: felt like I wrote a marathon and I never felt
Speaker 1: like that for for years because of the heavy drink.
Speaker 1: And she she says, look, you just have to just
Speaker 1: accept that you're not well. You need to lie down
Speaker 1: to go to sleep, and I didn't do that. So
Speaker 1: she was going around doing a rounds on the wad
Speaker 1: looking after patience. And it's a very difficult thing to
Speaker 1: describe because she was very vivid, whereas everybody else was muted,
Speaker 1: like say, you had I don't know, a miss in
Speaker 1: your eye or cateract. Everything else is sort of muted,
Speaker 1: whereas she was very, very vivid. And what happened was
Speaker 1: towards the end of a shift, I noticed that she
Speaker 1: was quite annoyed with me, but I didn't take her advice.
Speaker 1: I didn't lie down, I didn't go to sleep. I
Speaker 1: just followed her around, keep asking if I can just
Speaker 1: go home, and she wouldn't let me go home. And
Speaker 1: it basically goes from her. She handed me over to
Speaker 1: somebody else, to a doctor, and again the doctor was very,
Speaker 1: very different to what you see as a normal doctor.
Speaker 1: He repeated the same things. You know, you have to
Speaker 1: lie down, you're very sick, and it keeps saying over
Speaker 1: and over again, I feel fantastic. I just want to
Speaker 1: go home, and you can't go home. Nobody's going to
Speaker 1: discharge him. And it became very, very frustrating. And then
Speaker 1: that was the point when I realized I'm no longer
Speaker 1: alive in this sense that we think we're alive right now,
Speaker 1: I thought, now there's something fundamentally different here.
Speaker 2: Yes, go ahead, So oh wait, wait a second, wait
Speaker 2: a second. Let me just say one thing. It's thirty
Speaker 2: past the hour. You and I are on WGN in Chicago,
Speaker 2: and we're talking to David Crawford who's on the border
Speaker 2: of Scotland. David went into a coma after a unfortunate
Speaker 2: medical event. He went into a coma, and while in
Speaker 2: that coma, he died and he saw the afterlife. And
Speaker 2: he's right about at that point to share that story
Speaker 2: with us. David, go ahead, please here. I love your
Speaker 2: voice and I'm mesmerized by this story, so please.
Speaker 1: There's millions of people who speak like me up here.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it was very very disoriented. It's not scary.
Speaker 1: It's not like you know, a horror movie scary. It's
Speaker 1: disoriented and it's uncomfortable, and you don't quite know where
Speaker 1: you are and how what the rules are? You just don't.
Speaker 1: You have to figure it out quick, which hopefully I
Speaker 1: managed to do. In the book. The second part of
Speaker 1: the book is about how to navigate this, you know,
Speaker 1: this alien terrain that you find yourself in.
Speaker 2: And what was the most surprising thing about this alien terrain?
Speaker 2: Did you realize that you were that you had died?
Speaker 1: Yeah, but it didn't come quick. It was a slow,
Speaker 1: very slow kind of revelation that I was no longer
Speaker 1: physically alive. It didn't come as as a lightning bolt,
Speaker 1: like you know, I'm dead. It was slow, slowly revealed.
Speaker 1: Put it that way, and then once you're in that position,
Speaker 1: then you can maybe do something about it. But it's
Speaker 1: it was very slow to me. Maybe it isn't two
Speaker 1: other people, but it was very slow to me because again,
Speaker 1: like I said, I felt absolutely great. Now.
Speaker 2: Did you feel you were in a good place or
Speaker 2: that you were going to hell?
Speaker 1: No, I didn't feel I was going to hell. I
Speaker 1: didn't feel I was going to a good place either.
Speaker 1: It's it felt to me very much like the processing plant.
Speaker 1: I was being processed for something, maybe a rebirth, I
Speaker 1: don't know, but there was there was. It's very different
Speaker 1: to most near death experiences. And this wasn't the subject
Speaker 1: that I ever really looked into. It's not my It
Speaker 1: wasn't my thing. It isn't my thing. It was simply
Speaker 1: my recollection of what happened to me. I wrote it down,
Speaker 1: no notion of publishing it. I wrote it down for me.
Speaker 1: Is a recollection for me, and I just describe what
Speaker 1: happened to me. That's not to say that anybody else
Speaker 1: is wrong, and I'm right. It's just I didn't see
Speaker 1: any tunnels of light. I didn't see any religious icons.
Speaker 1: I didn't see anything, you know, like past relatives or
Speaker 1: friends who have died.
Speaker 2: So what did you say anything? What did you say?
Speaker 1: All I saw was people who were passing me on,
Speaker 1: who got pretty annoyed with me, keep asking questions, and
Speaker 1: I don't I use the term of the book psychopomp.
Speaker 1: Don't use the term guide a guide in you know,
Speaker 1: in our Western so is kind of benevolent there for
Speaker 1: your help. I use the term psycho pomp, which is
Speaker 1: a Greek word, because it's it's not loaded with that
Speaker 1: kind of benevolence. They had a job to do. I
Speaker 1: don't know who pays them. I don't know why they're there.
Speaker 1: I haven't got a clue. But I was passed up
Speaker 1: the chain to various various psychopomps, and they kept telling
Speaker 1: me the same thing. They kept repeating that I needed
Speaker 1: to lie down, I need to go to sleep, I
Speaker 1: need to rest. I'm very sick. But you know evidence,
Speaker 1: I saw with my eyes and heard with my ears.
Speaker 1: I felt fine. I felt really really good, And all
Speaker 1: I wanted to do was get out of that hospital.
Speaker 1: All right.
Speaker 2: This is David Crawford. What's the name of the book.
Speaker 1: It's called A Manual for the Dead?
Speaker 2: A Manuel for the Day had a Manual for the
Speaker 2: Dead by David Crawford. Well written, great story. Man went
Speaker 2: into a coma, died, went to heaven or someplace and.
Speaker 1: Lived.
Speaker 2: How long was the coma?
Speaker 1: Five days?
Speaker 2: Five days? And when you were in it, did you
Speaker 2: have a sense of a passage of time in the
Speaker 2: traditional sense, when you came out after five days. Were
Speaker 2: you surprised?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what it was? The sun comes up, the
Speaker 1: sun goes down, the moon comes out exactly as in
Speaker 1: real time. There was no quickening of time, there was
Speaker 1: no slow of time. Twelve hours feels like twelve.
Speaker 2: Hours as you've gotten away from that event in time
Speaker 2: when you look back on it and think about it.
Speaker 2: Was there a lesson something valuable you got from that
Speaker 2: that you couldn't see right at that moment, but you
Speaker 2: do now.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't say it's changed my perception on death, but
Speaker 1: it changed what I thought might might happen. I did
Speaker 1: honestly think when you die that there'll be people who
Speaker 1: meet you, maybe past relative of friends who've died. I've
Speaker 1: lost two good friends in my life and I did
Speaker 1: think maybe that would happen, and it didn't. Is that
Speaker 1: a good thing or a bad thing? I can't say.
Speaker 2: Got it. Has it made you more religious or less religious?
Speaker 1: That's that's a difficult one, really, because you know, I've
Speaker 1: I've always been kind of religious. I've spent two years
Speaker 1: as a zen Buddhist monk. Wow. So I went to
Speaker 1: a monastery when I was twenty years old, and I
Speaker 1: came out at twenty too, So I was interested in
Speaker 1: lots of different religions. My dad raised me, probably not
Speaker 1: in the you know, the more sort of orthodox style
Speaker 1: of Christianity. He was very interested in stuff like, you know,
Speaker 1: the Early Church, the Gnostic Church right right, and so on.
Speaker 1: So I've always been interested in religion, theology, etc. But
Speaker 1: I've always come at it from a from a Buddhist
Speaker 1: bed of Like I say, I've spent two years in
Speaker 1: a monastery, and I've been very many many monasteries in
Speaker 1: my time looking at the Buddhism Zen Buddhism, especially in
Speaker 1: Shinong Buddhism.
Speaker 2: David Crawford, author of What's the.
Speaker 1: Name of What's the Name of the Manual for the Dead?
Speaker 2: Manual for the Dead, thank you very much for being
Speaker 2: on the other side of Midnight,