Fascinated by a newspaper article about illusionist David Blaine being buried alive in a perspex coffin for several days in the middle of New York City, as well as the article's outlining of an immobilising condition by which people have been mistakenly buried alive only to awake in a tomb, Gordon began conceptualising his first serious written piece.

"I hadn't seen anything published in a newspaper that was so graphic and sounded so much like an Edgar Allen Poe story." The clipping lead him to wonder how anyone could, in this age of technology and advanced medical knowledge, be buried alive by accident - and further still, what it meant for someone to attempt it on purpose.

Catalepsy , written in 2001, is the story of a young man on his way to meet a friend with the hope of expressing for the first time his love for her before she moves permanently to New York. Before he can make it to the meeting he is struck by a car and knocked unconscious and presumed to be deceased. Rather, he is suffering the condition after which the story is titled, whereby a person is paralyzed but completely aware of their surroundings. "It's an adventure story as much as anything else. It asks the audience to suspend their disbelief more than anything else i've written. I'm assured by people who work in the industry that this sort of thing could never happen."

"I read true accounts of people with Catalepsy, just lying in their coffin listening to their own funeral, or gravediggers opening coffins to find scratch marks and broken fingernails, etc. and the images were so startlingly that i just couldn't resist them. I love the metaphor of being completely immobile and not being able to tell someone you are 'friends' with that you have deeper feelings for them."

© 2001 R. W. Gordon. All rights reserved.