Speaker 1: What oh me, Oh, my gosh, there's Dave Crawford. Dave
Speaker 1: Crawford is in Scotland. Welcome to the other side of Midnight,
Speaker 1: David Crawford as a truly amazing, spiritual and an important story.
Speaker 1: You took quite a journey, David. You went into a coma.
Speaker 1: Before we find out what you found in that coma,
Speaker 1: what you saw in that coma? How did you get
Speaker 1: into a coma? What happened?
Speaker 2: Well, thanks all that for having me on.
Speaker 3: Well what happened was basically, I drank too much alcohol
Speaker 3: and ruined my liver and subsequently died twice on the
Speaker 3: operating theater.
Speaker 2: Through that, I was.
Speaker 3: Taken to a hospital, had two blood transfusions, and I
Speaker 3: was in a coma for five days and people were
Speaker 3: genuinely surprise that I survived it.
Speaker 2: So that's how I ended up there.
Speaker 1: You drank too much, you went into a blackout or
Speaker 1: did you get into an accident?
Speaker 2: No, No, I never went to an accident.
Speaker 3: I had to bleed parises in my esophagus, which is
Speaker 3: near hand fatal about fifteen percent of the time.
Speaker 1: That's terrifying. I'm just kind of guessing you don't drink anymore. No,
Speaker 1: I don't good decision. That was a good decision on
Speaker 1: your part. Excellent. Did this happen in Scotland?
Speaker 3: No, I don't live in Scotland. I live near the border,
Speaker 3: but I live in England. I live in a county
Speaker 3: called Northumberland, which is in England, but it's on the
Speaker 3: border of Scotland.
Speaker 1: And were you in a hospital or you at home? No?
Speaker 2: I was in a hospital.
Speaker 3: I'd gone into hospital, my wife had taken me there
Speaker 3: and basically I was sitting in the waiting room I
Speaker 3: collapsed and one of the receptionists had seen this before
Speaker 3: she knew exactly what was happening. Luckily, I was next
Speaker 3: door to the accident emergency that took me straight in
Speaker 3: and basically operated on me within half an hour.
Speaker 1: What was the operation that they performed?
Speaker 2: If I may ask the operation?
Speaker 3: I don't know what it's like in the US, but
Speaker 3: in in England, in Britain, they're quite cagey about.
Speaker 2: Telling you what they've done.
Speaker 1: So I had to really.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: It's it's not traveling, it's not non available so much.
Speaker 3: You know that they'll fix you up, but you really
Speaker 3: have to ask them what they've done. So I had
Speaker 3: an operation of the varises, which are the other blood
Speaker 3: vessels do from your It's from your esophagus, which it durst.
Speaker 3: So basically I was coffin of black blood. So they
Speaker 3: have to bind them back together and then all of
Speaker 3: the sorts of things after don't pump you. They have
Speaker 3: to do all sorts of that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: But there was.
Speaker 3: I know that I had two blood transfusions. My wife
Speaker 3: got the call from the surgeon saying it's unlikely Lad,
Speaker 3: he's going to make it. So she had to leave work,
Speaker 3: come straight away and have you know, the chat with
Speaker 3: the surgeon that I'm probably not going to make it,
Speaker 3: but obviously I did.
Speaker 1: Is she still with you, Yes she is. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: a very patient, brave woman.
Speaker 2: Yeah she is.
Speaker 3: She's a great woman. She she looked after me when
Speaker 3: I tried to go sober and I did it, you know,
Speaker 3: without any help. And I did that for about five days,
Speaker 3: just lying in bed, which is one of those stupid
Speaker 3: things you could possibly do, but that's exactly what I did.
Speaker 3: But she she stayed with me the whole time.
Speaker 1: You're both lucky that you're still alive. Now, please share
Speaker 1: with us. David Crawford what happened when you slipped into
Speaker 1: a coma, how that feels, What the hell does a
Speaker 1: coma feel like? And then share with us the experiences
Speaker 1: that you encountered in the comma.
Speaker 3: Okay, this is not difficult to talk about because emotionally
Speaker 3: it's difficult to describe, because if you haven't done it,
Speaker 3: then it's quite difficult to put it across. But I'll
Speaker 3: tell you briefly. What happened was I didn't know that
Speaker 3: I was in a different state. We'll just put it
Speaker 3: that way. I was in a different state. I felt fine,
Speaker 3: and it wasn't a case of leaving the body or
Speaker 3: turn around seeing my body, but I had I was
Speaker 3: walking around the hospital as it is geographically the same,
Speaker 3: and I felt great. You know, at the time, I
Speaker 3: had catheters in, I had you know, lines in my
Speaker 3: arms and all that sort of business.
Speaker 2: But I felt great.
Speaker 3: And I saw a nurse who was basically in anapronism.
Speaker 3: She looked like she was the night from the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 3: She had like a bonnet and you know the way
Speaker 3: they dressed in the fifties and not like today's medical.
Speaker 2: Staff.
Speaker 3: And I asked her if she could help me and
Speaker 3: she could just let me out because I wanted to
Speaker 3: go home, and she said, no, you can't. You have
Speaker 3: to rest, you have to sleep. You're not well. But
Speaker 3: I feel great. I really did feel fantastic. I felt
Speaker 3: like I could rout a marathon and I never felt
Speaker 3: like that for for years because of the heavy drink.
Speaker 3: And she she says, look, you just have to just
Speaker 3: accept that you're not well. You need the light down,
Speaker 3: you need to go to sleep. And I didn't do that.
Speaker 3: So she was going around doing a rounds on the ward,
Speaker 3: looking after patients. And it's a very difficult thing to
Speaker 3: describe because she was very vivid, whereas everybody else was muted.
Speaker 2: Like say, you had I don't know.
Speaker 3: A mist in your eye or a cateract.
Speaker 2: Everything else is sort of muted, whereas she was very
Speaker 2: very vivid. And what happened was towards the end.
Speaker 3: Of a shift, I noticed that she was quite annoyed
Speaker 3: with me. But I didn't take her advice. I didn't
Speaker 3: lie down, I didn't go to sleep. I just followed
Speaker 3: her around, keep asking if I can just go home,
Speaker 3: and she wouldn't let me go home. And it basically
Speaker 3: goes from her She handed me over to somebody else,
Speaker 3: to a doctor, and again the doctor was very, very
Speaker 3: different to what you see as a normal doctor. He
Speaker 3: repeated the same things, you know, you have to lie down,
Speaker 3: you're very sick, and keeps saying over and over again,
Speaker 3: I feel fantastic. I just want to go home, and
Speaker 3: you can't go home. Nobody's going to discharge you. And
Speaker 3: it became very very frustrating. And then that was the
Speaker 3: point when I realized I'm no longer alive in this
Speaker 3: sense that we think we're alive. Right now, I thought,
Speaker 3: now there's something fundamentally different here.
Speaker 1: Yes, go ahead, So oh wait, wait a second, wait
Speaker 1: a second. Let me just say say one thing. It's
Speaker 1: thirty past the hour. You and I are on WGN
Speaker 1: in Chicago, and we're talking to David Crawford who's on
Speaker 1: the border of Scotland. David went into a coma after
Speaker 1: a unfortunate medical event. He went into a coma, and
Speaker 1: while in that coma, he died and he saw the afterlife,
Speaker 1: and he's right about at that point to share that
Speaker 1: story with us. David, go ahead, please. I love your
Speaker 1: voice and I'm mesmerized by this story.
Speaker 2: So please, there's millions of people who speak like me
Speaker 2: up here.
Speaker 3: But yeah, it was very very disoriented. It's not scary.
Speaker 3: It's not like you know, a horror movie scary. It's disoriented.
Speaker 3: It's uncomfortable and you don't quite know where you are
Speaker 3: and how what the rules are You just don't. You
Speaker 3: have to figure it out quick, which hopefully I managed
Speaker 3: to do in the book, the second part of the
Speaker 3: book that is about how to navigate this, you know,
Speaker 3: this alien terrain that you find yourself in.
Speaker 1: And what was the most surprising thing about this alien terrain?
Speaker 1: Did you realize that you were that you had died?
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it didn't come quick. It was a slow,
Speaker 3: very slow kind of revelation that I was no longer
Speaker 3: physically alive. It didn't come as as a lightning bolt,
Speaker 3: like you know, I'm dead. It was slow, slowly revealed.
Speaker 3: Put it that way, and then once you're in that position,
Speaker 3: then you can maybe do something about it. But it's
Speaker 3: it was very slow to me. Maybe it isn't to
Speaker 3: other people, but it was very slow to me because again,
Speaker 3: like I said, I felt absolutely great.
Speaker 1: Did you feel you were in a good place or
Speaker 1: that you were going to hell?
Speaker 2: No?
Speaker 3: I didn't feel I was going to hell. I didn't
Speaker 3: feel I was going to a good place either. It's
Speaker 3: it felt to me very much like the processing plant.
Speaker 3: I was being processed for something, maybe a rebirth, I
Speaker 3: don't know, but there was.
Speaker 2: There was.
Speaker 3: It's very different to most near death experiences. And this
Speaker 3: wasn't the subject that I ever really looked into. It's
Speaker 3: not my It wasn't my thing. It isn't my thing.
Speaker 3: It was simply my recollection of what happened to me.
Speaker 3: I wrote it down, No, no notion of publishing it.
Speaker 3: I wrote it down for me. Is a recollection for me,
Speaker 3: and I just describe what happened to me. That's not
Speaker 3: to say about anybody else is wrong, and I'm right.
Speaker 3: It's just I didn't see any tunnels of light. I
Speaker 3: didn't see any religious icons. I didn't see anything, you know,
Speaker 3: like past relatives or friends who have died.
Speaker 1: So what did you say anything? What did you say?
Speaker 3: All I saw was people who were passing me on,
Speaker 3: who got pretty annoyed with me, keep asking questions, and
Speaker 3: I don't. I don't I use the term of the
Speaker 3: book psycher pomp. I don't use the term guide a
Speaker 3: guide in you know, in our Western so is kind
Speaker 3: of benevolent there for your help. I use the term
Speaker 3: psycho pomp, which is a Greek word, because it's not
Speaker 3: loaded with that kind of benevolence. They had a job
Speaker 3: to do. I don't know who pays them. I don't
Speaker 3: know why they're there. I haven't got a clue. But
Speaker 3: I was passed up the chain to various various psychopomps,
Speaker 3: and they kept telling me the same thing. They kept
Speaker 3: repeating that I needed to lie down, I need to
Speaker 3: go to sleep, I need to rest. I'm very sick.
Speaker 3: But you know evidence, I saw with my eyes and
Speaker 3: I heard with my ears. I felt fine. I felt
Speaker 3: really really good. And all I wanted to do was
Speaker 3: get out of that hospital.
Speaker 1: All right. This is David Crawford. What's the name of
Speaker 1: the book.
Speaker 2: It's called A Manual for the Dead.
Speaker 1: A Manuel for the Dead, A Manuel for the Dead
Speaker 1: by David Crawford. Well written, great story. Man went into
Speaker 1: a coma, died, went to heaven or someplace and lived.
Speaker 1: How long was the comma?
Speaker 2: Five days?
Speaker 1: Five days? And when you were in it, did you
Speaker 1: have a sense of a passage of time in the
Speaker 1: traditional sense? When you came out after five days. Were
Speaker 1: you surprised?
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what it was?
Speaker 3: The sun comes up, the sun goes down, and the
Speaker 3: moon comes out exactly as in real time. There was
Speaker 3: no quickening of time. There was no slow en of time.
Speaker 3: Twelve hours feels like twelve hours.
Speaker 1: As you've gotten away from that event in time when
Speaker 1: you look back on it and think about it. Was
Speaker 1: there a lesson something valuable you got from that that
Speaker 1: you couldn't see right at that moment, but you do now.
Speaker 3: I wouldn't say it's changed my perception on death, but
Speaker 3: it changed what I thought might might happen. I did
Speaker 3: on honestly think when you die that there'll be people
Speaker 3: who meet you, maybe past relative of friends who've died.
Speaker 3: I've lost two good friends in my life and I
Speaker 3: did think maybe that would happen, and it didn't. Is
Speaker 3: that a good thing or a bad thing? I can't say.
Speaker 1: Got it. Has it made you more religious or less religious?
Speaker 3: That's that's a difficult one, really, because you know I've
Speaker 3: I've always been kind of religious. I've spent two years
Speaker 3: as a zen Buddhist monk. Wow. So I went to
Speaker 3: a monastery when I was twenty years old, and I
Speaker 3: came out of twenty two. So I was interested in
Speaker 3: lots of different religions. My dad raised me, probably not
Speaker 3: in the you know that the more sort of orthodox
Speaker 3: style of Christianity. He was very interested in stuff like,
Speaker 3: you know, the Early Church, the Gnostic Church right right,
Speaker 3: and so on. So I've always been interested in religion, theology, etc.
Speaker 3: But I've always come ated from a from a Buddhist
Speaker 3: bed of Like I say, I've spent two years in
Speaker 3: a monastery, and I've been very many many monasteries in
Speaker 3: my time looking at the Buddhism Zen Buddhism, especially in
Speaker 3: shin Gun Buddhism.
Speaker 1: David Crawford, author of.
Speaker 3: What's the Name of What's the Name of the Manual
Speaker 3: for the Dead?
Speaker 1: Manual for the Dead, thank you very much for being
Speaker 1: on the other side of Midnight,