Clear, restrained, and quietly courageous.
Bosscha offers a rare and unsettling account of life inside a fractured mind in this powerful memoir. The author’s life before collapse is deliberately ordinary: an independent man renovating his condominium when seizures abruptly dismantle his physical and cognitive stability. What follows is a three-month hospitalization marked by misdiagnosis, restraint, confusion, and neurological decline. Instead of recounting this period as a conventional medical ordeal, Bosscha builds the book around his encephalopathic dreams—the only memories he retains from that time.
The book alternates between factual accounts of hospitalization and these dream sequences. Each chapter extends the portrait of cognitive disarray and recovery, while shaded commentaries offer reflective pauses that ground the dream logic in lived experience. Across these layers, illness emerges as both an existential crisis and a medical one. By tracking four versions of himself—the man before collapse, the silent patient, the dreaming consciousness, and the survivor who narrates—Bosscha examines what remains of identity when awareness fractures. Part medical memoir, part exploration of consciousness, the book treats neurological illness as both bodily rupture and existential reckoning.
A perfect read for readers drawn to memoir, neuroscience, and the fragility of identity.
FriesenPress
Pub date July 11, 2025
ISBN 978-1038342041
Price $31.45 Hardcover, $19.99 Paperback, $4.99 Kindle edition
