You can close your eyes and pretend you’re somewhere else. You can try to remember songs you haven’t heard in years or count backward from a thousand. It won’t work. Your brain will keep reminding you that you are inside a tube. You are lying very still with no room on your left or right and very little space over your face. You are in what is essentially a coffin and there is nothing you can do about it.

Much fuss has been made about the confining horror of an MRI. There are people who cannot tolerate the claustrophobia of the procedure and others who can do so with only ghetto levels of a sedative.

I appreciate their suffering now. I understand the clawing panic they have battled.

My first five minutes inside the machine were long ones. I had told myself I would mentally write a chapter for a new novel while in the throat of the monster. What I mustered was this: “Were it not for the pale moonlight coming through the window, Stephen Boone might never have seen the… OH MY GOD, I’M IN A TUBE! GET ME OUT! LET ME OUT OF HERE, FIENDS!”

Ironic is the fact that the organ causing all of this distress is the organ that’s being examined by the fearsome machine. Your brain, a wondrous ball of flesh that’s been steering you from trouble all your life, is now tormenting you with its strobe light pace of thoughts.

Me, I could not stop thinking about Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” which I’ve read dozens of times with a level of discomfort that is almost pain.

“To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality… We know of nothing so agonizing upon Earth – we can dream of nothing half so hideous in the realms of the nethermost Hell.”

The rigid embrace of the narrow house, yes. The unendurable oppression of the lungs, absolutely. The beating heart, the runaway thoughts, the jackhammering sense of panic that rises and rises the more you try to combat it with insipid mental tricks. Poe knew: No horror can be greater than the body entombed while the mind is left alive to grapple with the terror.

I lay in the grip of the machine exploring the narrative possibilities of the experience. I might get a short story out of this, I reasoned. Maybe a novel. Certainly, I’ll write about it in a column. Why, I could begin the thing with a recollection of how I attempted to pretend I was … OH, MY GOD, IT’S LIKE A COFFIN IN HERE! I BELIEVE I’LL PRESS THIS PANIC BUTTON RIGHT NOW! I DON’T CARE IF THE PRETTY NURSE THINKS I’M A SISSY!”

The human brain is an astounding thing. It comes bundled with imagination so we can create poems, music and art. With imagination, we fall in love, become passionate and generally live our lives with enthusiasm.

The imagination also exists to assess dangers by allowing you to imagine scenarios that might present peril. What if the power goes out and I’m trapped in here? What if the pretty nurse is really a maniacal wench who is this very moment bricking up the exit at the end of this loathsome machine? What if it’s all a trick and I’m left inside this straw-shaped tomb to go insane and die a slow, confining death?

All very dramatic, I know. A testament to the power of the brain and the variety of ideas it can conjure. But lest you think I’ve come here only to whine about my experience, guess again. Another funny thing happened on my way to good brain health.

My father died at 35. He collapsed on the roof of our house one October afternoon while he was putting up shingles. An undetected brain aneurysm – just a tiny weak spot in a blood vessel – had burst inside his head. He was there and then he was gone, and who knew that something so small could cause such gigantic grief?

I have no idea what kind of technology was available in 1973 to detective such a tiny thing as a brain aneurysm. If it existed at all, it was probably more involved than a mere 20 minutes of lying comfortably in a state-of-the-art machine designed to detect things that can cause problems inside your head.

And so, as I remained inside the tubular gadget, my brain began to develop gratitude, another bundled emotion not exhibited often enough. I shouldn’t be griping about my experience, I reasoned, I should express elation that such a magic machine exists.

With that, I became calmer. I began to explore the sounds of technology around me, photographing my head. I began to appreciate that there was light in my little tube and a friendly voice not far away. How bad is 20 minutes of lying prone, when you get right down to it? When you get right down to it, aren’t there far worse things to endure?

And so, what began as a hellish ride on the carnival attraction called Imagination ended up a dose of gratitude and another lesson learned. It’s a lesson we learn over and over but never pause to grasp. Everything is relative.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. Visit his blog at www.sunjournal.com.

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