First, a gray dimness, a hovering free-floating colorless barely conscious awareness that merely exists, unattached, empty, devoid of duration, extension or memory.
Then nothing.
Not the experience of nothing. Just nothing.
Awareness again, a lighter gray, longer this time, stronger, but still lacking subject, content or place, with a smoky memory floating through it, the ghostly sense that this is happening again, is lasting longer this time, is stronger, a feeling that consciousness is a rupture in oblivion.
Then nothing.
A sensation of ascending that feels like a retreat from death. Then sudden awareness of arms, legs, torso, head, hands, feet, face, bladder pressure, an itch, pain, all felt as if that’s all there is. And a sense of continuity, a sense that this is the same consciousness as before, that oblivion is an interruption of identity. Then consciousness of inner and outer, of a me lying on my back in a bed with sheets under and over me, an IV needle in my arm, a tube up my nose down my throat, a tube inside me between my legs, an itch so far down my leg I can’t reach it. I sense that this I is female. And a dimly felt but insurmountable weakness and a slow thumping pulse of pain deep in my deepest muscles and bones.
Hurt so much. Where am I? So weak. So tired.
Voices. People.
What? Can’t understand. Who? What are they saying?
My foot being moved.
Ow!
Where am I?
Smell: a hospital.
Panic.
Where’s Amelia?
Then nothing.
Awareness again.
Less pain.
Whole body itch, as if I’m in Baba’s hen-house, hiding under a laying rack, burrowed deep into dusty, musty, shitty straw, making myself small, invisible, inert.
Why?
A tsunami of memories, land-falling simultaneously. I’m sitting in Baba’s kitchen. I don’t want to be here but I have the day off school and Mama has to work. Baba is treating me like a baby. I’m eight, not three. It was my birthday last week. I hate it here. I hate Baba.
A pan clanging on the floor. Baba looking weird.
“Baba?”
“??? ??? ??? ???” The words are heavy-tongued, slurry, incomprehensible.
“Baba!“
Her eyes go blank, her face contorts, her legs give way and she topples, cracking her forehead on the corner of the stove, hits the floor hard, thump, sighs all the breath out of her body. A line of blood trickles down into her eyes from the gash on her forehead.
I call for Daddy. His eyes accuse me of killing Baba. I hide in the hen house.
The pain intensifies, deep, all-body pain.
I’m at the funeral home. The cut on Baba’s temple is hidden under makeup so her face looks strange, not scrubbed and shiny like normal. The adults say she looks lifelike but all I can think of is she looks dead.
Am I dead? Will I see Baba?
Then unconsciousness.
The voices sound very far away. Blurry. I think I hear, “Doctor, I think her eyelids fluttered.“
What does that mean?
I think I hear, “Let’s take a look.” A male voice.
Someone pulls on my eyelid. I feel painful flash of brilliant light. Ouch! Don’t do that!
The male voice again. “There’s definitely something going on in there.”
“Will she …?”
“Too early to tell.”
Will I what? Too early to tell what?
A different voice: “Is she going to be okay?”
Bill!
I’m driving a car. No, not a car, Bill’s truck. His jacked-up pickup. It’s threatening to snow. I’m heading for home after seeing a lawyer. I don’t remember why. I found expensive lace panties, not mine, tangled in his shirt. His dump truck is out of control, heading right for me. God damn you, you cheating bastard!
I experience a crystal clear memory of an unseasonably warm October afternoon. The hazy air has settled like gauze on the gold-leaved poplars around the football field. I’m in the bleachers, paralyzed to near panic by the certainty that the boards vibrating under my feet are going to snap and the whole flimsy structure is going to crash to the ground and I’ll die. I’m blocked in by other students. I can’t move.
Where’s Amelia? I have to go to Amelia! I need to pull the IV out but my wrists are tied. I shout, Nurse! I need to get the IV out but I can’t get my hands free, but no words come out.
More pain, but no relief in oblivion.
I see Bill walking off the football field. Filthy. sweat-soaked uniform. Shiny, wet hair plastered against his head, with droplets of sweat hanging from errant strands. Smell of liniment. Bruised helmet dangling from his hand. Bloody knuckles. Bill’s exhausted elation. We won the provincials! Bush party! The fight happens so fast I barely see it. Bill drives his fist hard into the side of the boy’s face, jumps him, lands hard on him, sits up, his knees pinning the boy’s arms, drives two hard punches into the boy’s shocked face, right, left. Blood sprays from the boy’s nose and mouth.
I feel the boy’s pain. Bill hurt me too. I want to die.
The male voice again.
“Christie, I’m Dr. Johnson. I don’t know if you can hear me, but in case you can I want you to know that you’re in the ICU at the University Hospital in Edmonton and you’re receiving the best care we can give you.”
I understand that.
“You’re in the hospital because you were in a car crash and you sustained a very bad bump on your head. You have been in a coma for four weeks. You may be feeling some pain because you were bruised quite extensively, but you didn’t break any bones and the bruises are healing well. The pain will go away. Your baby is okay. Your mother and your Aunt Flo have been here every day.
“Now, I would like to see if you and I can talk to each other. I know you can’t speak out loud but if you can hear me I want you to try to send me a signal. Like maybe you could squeeze my hand a bit or blink your eyes—anything that will tell me you’re waking up in there. What do you say? Can you do that for me?”
That’s so complicated. What did he say to do? I hear him, but what does he want? Okay, he wants me to squeeze his hand. I can do that. Come on, hand, squeeze. Just a bit. Please.
“I think you’re trying to squeeze my hand, but it’s very faint, Christie. You may be trying too hard. Don’t concentrate on tightening your hand. Just say ‘Yes’ and let your hand speak.”
Okay, don’t try to make my hand tighten, just try to say ‘Yes’. Omigod, it worked! Yes! Yes! Yes!
“Christie, I think I felt I your hand squeeze mine. Just to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, would you do it again please.”
You weren’t imagining it! I’m in here, I’m alive. Let’s see, don’t concentrate on squeezing, concentrate on saying yes. Yes. Yes. Damn it, yes!
“Welcome back, Christie. That’s enough for now. I want you to rest. We’ll talk more later, okay?”
I’m alive. But who am I? Who is Christie? Where’s Amelia? Where’s Bill? Who is Flo? How did I get here?
So tired.
© 2026 Paul McLaughlin
I didn’t write this piece from scratch for this lesson. It’s drawn from scenes in my novel, Butterfly Turbulence, which starts with Christie emerging from a coma. The memories are drawn from other incidents in the novel, rewritten to fit the narrative developed for the lesson.
I think the essence of this lesson is that in extremis, thoughts and emotions escape from characters’ unconscious minds and flood their awareness. A character bringing to consciousness previously unrecognized elements of their psyche is a powerful story arc. Writers find pure gold in the unpredictable results of this process.
This lesson linked in my mind to some thoughts I have had recently about building characters. It seems to me that all characters, even minor characters, need to have a shadow, in the Jungian sense of an unconscious, often irrational region of their mind that drives their thoughts, emotions and behaviour in ways that the character is not even aware of. IOW, every character needs an emotional backstory containing the repressed and forgotten, often very dark, elements of the character’s psyche. A character without a shadow is often an insubstantial cartoon figure whose total existence consists of shallow clichés and stereotypes. Dialog becomes infinitely more interesting when it is a kind of shadow-boxing, with the reactions of both parties springing, not from their logical analysis of what the other party says, but rather from their unconscious reactions to the other party’s unconscious reactions.
This also raises a POV option within the TP limited POV. The narrative voice may have access to the character’s conscious mind and the character’s shadow, which the writer can use to explain or justify the character’s behaviour. Or, the narrative voice may be denied access to the character’s shadow, in which case the character’s behaviour may be as much a mystery to the narrative voice as to the character, and the writer’s job is to leave breadcrumbs to help the reader to figure out the mystery of why the character acts the way they do.
Note: The narrative voice in a FP limited POV necessarily does not have access to their own shadow, though they can in the course of the story gain limited access to it.
These ruminations recently led me to write a story called The Strange Story of the Man Without a Shadow. It is an interesting and at times disturbing exploration of the shadowlands of mind.