Dark World, Light World, Anne Rice World

I finally viewed Fahrenheit 9/11, followed the next day by Control Room, followed the next day by Shawshank Redemption. I am a big fan of DVD extras. I stuffed my brain not only with the movies, but with all the commentary and interviews.

From Fahrenheit 9/11, I learned all about the art of making propaganda, which is both to say how the Bush administration made propaganda and how Michael Moore made propaganda about the Bush administration propaganda. In any event, a lot of people are getting killed.

From Control Room, I learned that less of the world’s people are buying American journalism. Remember growing up learning about how great our free press is? This arresting documentary cautions us that perhaps the truest press comes from all the world over, not just the hand-picked few in the USA who puppet the PR version of the news.

From The Shawshank Redemption, the ten-year anniversary DVD, I learned that this riveting movie was a mediocre financial performer in its first-run stretch. While it was getting all sorts of raves, the movie was panned by five influential critics, smashing its box office. Nevertheless, it often tops popularity polls. I felt some comfort in this considering how hard it is to find a literary agent savvy enough with woo-woo fiction to even read my novel, let alone represent it. (I know you’re out there!)

Then…

On Saturday I attended Seattle IANDS (International Association for Near-Death Studies) and listened to a few more people talk about the experience of almost dying. A young teenager accompanied by his mother told of his NDE when he was a six-month-old baby. He told of being out of his body, racing toward the light at the end of a tunnel, feeling ageless, and meeting up with a light being with a male voice who told him he had to go back to the physical planet. The boy began telling his mother about this when he was three years-old and could finally talk.

Later that day, an intensive care nurse told of her own visit to the operating room, this time as a patient. While she was “dead” on the table, as in flatlined, she watched the operation from her unlikely seat on a light fixture. She eventually discovered that she could flit around the operating room just by thinking herself there—a very liberating sensation. Then she, too, found a tunnel and a loving being of light at the other end.

As you may sense, the DVDs that I absorbed were much different in tone from the talks I listened to. Wars and politics and life in a penitentiary are happening on one level of life based on one set of rules, the laws of physical nature as we know them and the laws of humankind. Popping out of the body and visiting with light beings in another dimension happen at another level, one science hasn’t proven but that comes up repeatedly in my life as I attend IANDS meetings.

Since I have not experienced my own NDE or OBE, I can only imagine what these experiences must be like. However, I am pretty good at imagining what people go through who are met with incredulity, humiliation, even rage for suggesting that they’d stepped out of their bodies for awhile. I can imagine what it would be like to know that death does not exist and have to dwell in a world where much of society didn’t get it. Both my first and second novels play in this sandbox.

Meanwhile, we also learned at the IANDS meeting that superstar author Anne Rice will be appearing with NDEr Howard Storm on the Today Show on Tuesday, March 15. Anne wrote the foreword to Howard’s book. While the hardback book just came out, it’s been around for a few years as a trade paperback. If Anne Rice climbs aboard the NDE choo-choo, it could be a shot in the arm for woo-woo fiction.

She writes in the foreword to this U.S edition, "This is a book you devour from cover to cover, and pass on to others. This is a book you will quote in your daily conversation. [Howard] Storm was meant to write it and we were meant to read it."

I wonder what would happen if she attended IANDS!