7 Minutes is the story of a death—charting the progress from cardiac arrest, the brain's release of its massive reserve of endorphins, through the unravelling of personality, memory, and identity, as the brain's consciousness-generating areas are hit by a tidal wave of opioid neuropeptides while simultaneously being starved of oxygen.
Self-told narratives unfold and are re-contextualised, fears awaken, desires awaken, time is warped and regresses as the mind is trapped inside a dead husk, unable to communicate, lost to those it has loved and been loved by.
Those who have experienced so-called 'near death' experiences have described bright lights, meeting loved ones: but no one has returned from behind that light to describe the process of dying. And so, we are left with either a gospel of redemption and condemnation, or its opposite, a gospel of cosmic resignation and the final extinction of personality.
One day, perhaps not too far away, we will know—or, then again, perhaps not.
7 Minutes is the collage of stories and half-truths that our protagonists' collapsing neural networks narrate as the brain asphyxiates—light and dark, fact and fiction, actuality and narrative—until the final arrival at the truth of an earthly existence.
7 Minutes is a head fuck. But after you've read it, I hope you can celebrate being alive.