Once I awoke I could not walk, talk, read, write. I could not recall any of the details of my life. I died that day. I'm riding in an ambulance and curl up into a fetal ball, like a balloon with the last bit of air wheezing out, I felt my energy lift and my spirit surrender. In that moment I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. The doctors might rescue my body and give me another chance at life, or else this was my moment of transition.

I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye, a caustic pain like the kind you get when you bite into icecream, and it gripped me and released me and gripped me and released me. It was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain so I just thought "ok well I'll just start my normal routine." So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio-glider which is a full body full exercise machine. I'm jamming away and realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar and thought "well that's very peculiar" and I look down at my body and I thought "whoa I am a weird lookin' thing" and it was as thought my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality where I am the person on the machine having the experience to some esoteric space where I am witnessing myself having this experience. It was all very peculiar and my headache was just getting worse so I get off the machine and I'm walking along my living room floor and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down and every step is very rigid, there's no fluidity to my pace and there's construction in my area of perception so I'm just focused on internal systems. I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower and I can actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying " ok you muscle you gotta contract and you muscle relax" and then I lost my balance and was propped up against the wall and I looked down at my arm and I realized that I could no longer define the boundaries of my body because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. All I could detect was this energy, energy, and I'm asking myself what is wrong with me? What is going on?

On that morning it was a pure mapping experience. As soon as I was having a problem with the volume of the water as it hit the enamel face of the tub and there's an incredible amplification of the sound, well I immediately have a visualization of the circuit of the sound system through my understanding of amplification, understanding that I'm passing information through my brain stem and I'm having problems at that level and brain stem is the potential for death. This is now a do or die situation. So yes I'm mapping as I'm losing circuit by circuit. At the same time I'm going "what is wrong with me" because of course I've never had an experience like this before. It was remarkable, not completely horrible.

I didn't know how severe it really was. People always ask me "was it to your advantage to be a researcher of the mind or not" and I think on that morning it may not have been an advantage because I was fascinated instead of panicking. So I was like "ok ok I've got a problem" and then I immediately drifted right back out into that peculiar state of consciousness which I affectionately refer to as lalaland, but it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world. So here I am in this space and my job and any stress related to my job was gone and I felt lighter in my body and just imagine what it would feel like to lose 33 years of emotional baggage. I felt euphoria and in that moment my right arm fell totally paralyzed by my side and I realized "you're having a stroke." Then the next thing my brain says to me is "wow this is so cool." How many _____ have the opportunity to study their brains from the inside out? And then it crosses my mind, "well I'm a very busy person and I don't have time for this."

My mother would ask me what I wanted for lunch and it was file opening time. She would say "do you want to have a peanut butter sandwich" and I would go hunting ya know, "where is peanut butter," is there a file in my brain that understands peanut butter and if there was then I would say "ok," and then she would say "how about tuna fish" and I'd go hunting for the file in my brain that understood what tuna fish was and as soon as I hit a file that I could not go in and hunt for and find some kind of association to then we would relive that, so then she would give me tuna fish so that I would have that experience and I had to learn everything. We didn't know if I would have language again because of the pressure put upon the fibers running between my ability to create sound-language and those creating meaning through language. I had to learn vocabulary from the beginning. I had to learn what emotions were. I had to be able to describe to my mother what I was feeling inside of my body which required constant care and boy it took a lot of sleep and that was key to my rehabilitation.

The way I look at this is a new character has come online. My color scheme that I like to dress in is different. Before you would look in my closet and all you would see is black and white and red, stripes, polka dots, any version but it would be red, white, and black because every day I would get up and I would want to wear red, white or black so why would I keep the other stuff in the closet. Uh, today I'm sitting here, I'm in blue jeans which I never wore before, I always wore corduroys, and I'm in fluorescent green. I love fluorescent colors. So this never would have happened with that other character. So, no I see myself as a very different person with a very different value structure than I had before. And, um, there was a lot of pain in my past that got relieved and wasn't that a lovely thing to be able to hit the reset button on my emotional circuitry so that I'm then capable of functioning fresh and new without any antagonism towards anybody. I didn't know if there was anybody I was supposed to be mad at because it was all gone.

Ya know there are hundreds of thousands of artists who can do the work I was doing in the studio but for me to be able to have this internal experience of watching my own brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process its own information and then to go through the experience of surgery and recovery has given me such an insight into my own workings of my brain and fortunately an insight into... what does it take in order for a person to actually recover from brain trauma? Now we understand that there is neurogenesis, we do grow some new neurons, we know that there is neuroplasticity. People are capable of recovering from brain trauma and that's a completely different perspective than 15 years ago.