I Am a Miracle

The paragraph just before today’s passage ends by saying the members have been “rocketed into a fourth dimension of existence of which we had not even dreamed.” Bill W. wrote that chapter in 1938, one of the first two chapters of the Big Book, and he had already used the phrase in the other, his own story, which he wrote first. There, in the chapter that opens the book, he looks back to the weeks after Armistice Day 1934, when he was about to be “catapulted into what I like to call the fourth dimension of existence.”

The book never defines it. Pass It On, AA’s biography of him, says only that when he wrote it he “had meant it in all sincerity.”

Twenty years later the Grapevine of December 1958 printed a letter under the headline “Beyond the 4th Dimension.” It came from a member in Miami, sober “almost exactly seventeen years,” who had been taken to hospital that Easter Sunday with pneumonia; by the Thursday it wasn’t certain he would live through the night. At the worst of it, he wrote, he remembered the Eleventh Step and called on God, and what followed took him pages to describe. He got well far faster than anyone expected, and wrote it all down for Bill.

Bill put a few lines of his own at the head of it. His own experience, twenty-four years before, had been “lightning fast,” he wrote: he had got in months what most members got in years, and he didn’t think the difference mattered much. Then he asked members who had had sudden experiences to write to him, “for the historical record.” December 5 tells of the appendix the Big Book added in 1941 for everyone else, whose change came slowly.

More on the letter from Miami: Beyond the 4th Dimension, in The Educational Variety. On Bill’s own sudden experience: Hot flash, in The Educational Variety.