I was visiting my friend Chuck at his parents' house. When we got back to the house, we had steak for dinner, and then played chess. My feet never did warm up, and by the time we were finished with our game of chess, I was shivering, and having hot flashes. So I went upstairs to bed, and got under a big pile of blankets (warm at last!) and went to sleep. 

I woke up after a while, and had to go to the bathroom, and after that I never really did go back to sleep. I had dreams, but I didn't completely enter into them. I didn't completely wake up, either, not even when I had to go back to the bathroom again. If I had been fully awake, I would have realized that it's not normal to lose your sense of balance in the middle of the night. As it was, I just kept banging into the walls and falling over, and thinking what a bother it was to try to get to the bathroom that way.

When I finally got back to bed, something different happened. I had a vision, not a dream. When I closed my eyes, the drowsiness left from my mind, and I knew who I was, and where I was, but I wasn't paying attention to that because I was seeing something extraordinary. Stars.

Not ordinary stars, though; these stars were people, the people who were closest to me—Chuck, my parents, my brothers and sister, and other friends and relatives. Each star was a person, and the arrangement of the stars told of the relationship of each person to each of the others, including me. I was a star too, in that constellation. Everything was there, out in the open, all of our histories, passions, and fears. It was all clear, all understandable. I finally understood my mother's relationship to her father, and mother. I saw how that relationship interacted with me, and with my own relationships with my mother and everyone else, because everything affected everything else. It was all one pattern.

It was beautiful. My ability to think was just knocked right over by the beauty of it. I just watched, and understood, and gloried in it. As I watched, I began to see more--more stars, more relationships. People I knew, but who were not as close to me began to appear-- people like my teachers, the waiters and cooks at Pete's restaurant, people from my soccer team in high school. It was like watching a show at a planetarium, except that it was a show where the shapes of the constellations were so packed with meaning that all the books in existence could not have expressed it all. And still I kept seeing more. It was the meaning of my life, yes; but it was also the meaning of everyone else's life. There is one pattern, and it is the meaning of everything. I was seeing part of that pattern.

Finally, the development stopped; there were thousands of stars, each one a person, each one related to all the others. I saw each one, and all the relations. I comprehended, for a moment, as much as I could ever comprehend.

"More," I desired. "I want to see it all." And someone answered.

"This is your limit. This is all that you can understand." The words somehow communicated more than they said. I was given to understand that there are many types of beings, and the vision I was having was tailored to my type-- to me personally, in fact. I was at my personal limit of comprehension, of a world which surpassed my ability to understand it in ways which were themselves beyond my ability to understand.

Somehow, I was excited by this, not dismayed. "I still want to see it," I responded. And, understanding myself as I did then, I was not at all surprised to discover that I wanted something impossible, even when I knew that it was impossible.

I received in response something like humor, and a sigh, although I knew that the response was again something tailored for me personally, a presence constructed out of the materials of my own mind, because the source of that response was outside the range of my comprehension. I heard, "We will do what we can..."

Then more stars started to appear, at first slowly, then faster. I lost the sense of the whole pattern, no matter how hard I tried, and as the sky filled up with more and more stars, I gave up trying to comprehend the whole, and just let myself be inundated with an influx of meaning too rich to grasp. 

I was seeing everyone I had ever known, then everyone I had ever encountered, even people who I had just passed once on a city street. They were all there, all parts of one whole, all related to me personally. The vision exploded into a size and richness beyond any accounting, and then it disappeared. 

Nothing was left but blue, a rich cerulean blue with no borders. I was moving through it, and I understood that although it had no borders for me, it was still a kind of passage. I realized, at last, that I was dying. It was very peaceful, very calm, and I had a sense of something wonderful ahead. It was like the night before Christmas, when you're five years old, only with all the excitement smoothed out into a deep, calm happiness. I had a sense of someone present there, and I spoke with that presence, but I don't remember now the details of what was said. I asked questions; some were answered, some were not. But suddenly a quixotic mood popped up in me, and I asked, "What if I don't want to die?" almost as a joke.

Up until that moment, it hadn't occurred to me: the whole thing was wonderful. I was enjoying it immensely, and I could think of no good reason to stop dying. But sometimes I do things for no good reason, just because I can, just because I want to see what will happen.

I became aware that I had choices, and that I could choose not to die. But there was only one kind of life that had any real attraction for me. The satisfaction and beauty of dying outweighed everything else, except that only a life of Trying To Do Something Important was attractive. But I had nothing important to do. I had no great quest, no cause. Up until now, I had been just floating through life, like a log floating downstream. The whole thing seemed very funny. In my mind I was laughing about the very idea that I might choose not to die.

But then I was seized again by that quixotic mood, and I chose: I chose the life of Trying To Do Something Important, even though I didn't know what was important. My quest would begin with trying to figure that out. I chose to live, and not to die.

Instantly everything went red, and I was in pain, everywhere. I was back in my body, and it was a mess. I was still awake, though; in a way, I was more awake than I've ever been, before or since, and I used that awareness to stay alive. I put a stop to thinking in words, or visualization of anything, and I concentrated on what was going on with my body. I just WAS my body for the rest of the night, willing and working to stay alive.

In the morning, I felt better. The pain in my muscles was less intense, and I could walk to the bathroom without falling over. Chuck's mother took my temperature; it was 106. 

After this experience, I stopped drifting through life without direction and began to seriously think about what has value, and how one can know about that. I needed to find an answer to the question, "What is worth doing?" An answer I could trust. I spent hours almost every day just thinking, and I began to read widely, including a lot of science and philosophy.

Eventually I went back to college, graduating at the age of 36, and then went on to graduate school in philosophy and a career in teaching and academic advising. Now that I am retired, I am writing, not for other academics but for anyone who might be pursuing a similar quest. I have a simple answer to my question, by the way, although of course the simple answer is just the beginning of a more complete story. The answer is "All good things."

I would also say that the experience changed the way I see other people, and all living things, although that effect was not instantaneous but a gradual shift over several years. Maybe it would have happened anyway, but perhaps not to the same degree—it’s hard to know. In any case I became less self-absorbed, more empathetic, and less likely to experience my own thoughts and desires as more interesting, more correct, or more valuable than anyone else's. I became a good listener, and I always taught through discussion, never lecturing. As an advisor I was able to establish strong connections of trust with students who were struggling, including many who were depressed or anxious. But perhaps the best thing of all has been my ability to build and maintain a wonderful relationship with my wife of forty years.