ventilator – the bunker

Of all my hallucinations while I was intubated, this was one of the most extensive and longest that I experienced; however, it’s also the hardest one for me to remember the details.

I was in an auditorium that had red seats and a screen in the front of the room – like a movie theater. This auditorium had two aisles going from the front to the back. The walls of the room were concrete, and the lighting was dim. In the back right corner (when facing the front) there was a a set of stairs, with a black railing, that led up to a door – there was no other way to get out of the auditorium, except through those doors.

I wasn’t alone in the auditorium – there were a couple of other people. None of the people that were in the room with me were people that I knew, but we were all in the room together. I don’t remember how we knew, or how we discovered it, but we were trapped in the auditorium and couldn’t get out. The auditorium was actually a room that was located in a nuclear survival shelter and bunker that was built during the Cold War, and it was built by the United States government. It was in Washington DC.

There were people on the outside, and we knew that they knew about us – they were a few people (I distinctly remember two men) in the government that knew about the bunker and they were monitoring it. They had no control over the doors and couldn’t do anything to help us escape. They weren’t the reason we were in the bunker and they weren’t trapping us there, but they were unable to do anything for us. For some reason, at least in my memory, when it came to the people on the outside, my perspective changed to the third-person – I remember seeing them looking at a black and white video screen at what was going on in the bunker. I remember them being extremely worried because there was only a limited amount of air in the bunker and they knew that the longer we stayed in it the more likely it was to run out.

Somehow, in the auditorium, we managed to get the door open. However, instead of being free, the door opened up to another level, and another auditorium. All of our efforts only led to us still being trapped in the bunker. However, instead of stairs that led to a normal door, there was an escalator that led to a gray metal door with a porthole – like one that you would see on a ship. All of us that were trapped ended up on the escalator, and a few people were able to make it out; however, because something in the bunker tripped after the door opened (thinking that there was a nuclear attack – something I learned from switching perspective to the people that were on the outside), the door slammed shut and locked, with no way to open it.

I was one of the people that was still trapped in the bunker. While I could move, unlike in other hallucinations, I was filled with despair and hopelessness. I remember sitting in one of the chairs in the second auditorium knowing that I was trapped, and that I was going to die. The air was running out, there was nothing anyone could do about it, and there was no way to escape. At this point, my perspective changed once again, to the people on the outside – they were talking about how they couldn’t do anything, and you could see the bunker filling up with something (I don’t remember what – either water or grain) that would kill everyone that was trapped in it.