When Time Slowed Down
I recorded myself telling these near death stories and then fed the transcript to AI. Using a custom series of prompts from my latest book, it used my words to create a cautionary tale that is true to my own unique voice.
I’ve had a couple of experiences in my life where everything suddenly shifted… where time slowed down and something inside me just took over. They happened years apart, in completely different situations, but they both taught me the same thing: when survival is on the line, the human brain can do remarkable things.
The first one happened when I was still at UBC, driving my old 1962 Dodge Dart. That car was a piece of work. My dad bought it for me for $200 after it had been rammed by a garbage truck. It had a slant-6 engine that just ran forever and a push-button automatic transmission, which I thought was the cat’s meow. That car got me everywhere… out to the field sites for my thesis, around the city, back and forth to the mountains. It was reliable, until the day it wasn’t.
I’d been out at the beach near Tsawwassen doing fieldwork with my friend Dan. We were working on our undergrad thesis about the feeding calls of glaucous-winged seagulls. We would set up a speaker system running off the car battery and drive out to various spots to play the recordings and count how many gulls showed up. These spots usually involved a city dump with lots of resident seagulls. It was good science, but it was also a bit of an adventure.
One time, we took the Dart out onto this sandy beach with small dunes. The sand turned out to be way too loose, and we got bogged down. We actually had to build a set of tracks out of driftwood… spaced exactly the width of the tires… and I drove the car out along those makeshift rails. It worked, but in the process, I pushed too hard on the emergency brake and the cable snapped. So after that, I didn’t have an emergency brake. I figured I’d get it fixed eventually. I just didn’t realize how soon I’d need it.
A few days later, I was driving home from UBC, heading down E 12th Avenue toward Kingsway. It was a busy afternoon. Traffic was heavy. I came up to the intersection and there was a red light. All the cars were stopped ahead of me, lined up and waiting.
I pushed on the brake.
Nothing.
I pushed again. Still nothing. No resistance. No slowing. The pedal just went to the floor.
And that’s when everything changed.
It was the most amazing sensation. Time didn’t speed up… it slowed way down. I was still moving, still rolling toward that line of stopped cars, but I could see everything with perfect clarity. My mind was working fast, but the world around me felt like it was moving through honey.
I remember thinking, *I can’t crash into those cars.* That was the first decision. I looked to the right and saw a street lamp pole on the sidewalk. I thought, *I could aim for that.* But as I got closer, I realized I could just barely squeeze past it if I went up onto the sidewalk.
I must have seen that there were no pedestrians, because what I did next would have been insane otherwise. I steered up onto the sidewalk, threaded the car past the pole, turned right onto Kingsway, and rubbed my tires hard against the curb until the car came to a stop.
I sat there for a moment, shaking. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. I hadn’t crashed. I hadn’t hit anyone. I hadn’t killed anyone. It all felt surreal.
Then I got out of the car, still trembling, and there were these kids sitting at the bus stop. They looked at me and said, “Hey, you can’t stop there. That’s a bus stop.”
I just stared at them. I couldn’t believe it. That was the last thing I was worried about. I’d just survived a near-death experience, and these kids were complaining that I’d pulled over in the bus stop.
I don’t remember what I said to them. Something like, “Don’t bother me. I just barely made it around that corner.” I was too shaken to care.
But what stuck with me wasn’t the kids or the broken brake… it was that moment when time slowed down. When my mind shifted into a different mode and I could suddenly see options I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It was like a switch flipped, and survival took over.
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