Heaven Sequence

Dr. Christian Alexander is a world renowned cognitive neuroscientist working at a neurological research center in New York City. He is driven by a childhood obsession to find his father who disappeared before his birth. As a child he believes his father Douglas left for a paradise beyond the horizon. As an adult this leads him to continue his unknown father's research into human near death experiences. He begins to suspect that the brain, or at least a part of it, lives well beyond death. He hypothesizes that there is considerable cognitive activity within the human brain for several minutes after death, and that it can be measured scientifically. His post-death experiments with humans' closest relative, the Gorilla, confirm his suspicions. Obsessed to the point of hallucinations, Dr. Alexander conducts clandestine research looking for human post-death cognition which, his inner child tells him, is the realm where his father lives. In the process he comes upon a revelation of what the human brain is actually capable of well after all life has left the rest of the body.

Dr. Christian Alexander is a world renowned cognitive neuroscientist working at a neurological research center in New York City. His father, a well-published research psychiatrist who specialized in the study of human near death experiences disappeared before Christian's birth. Following the discovery of some photographs one day as a child, Christian is driven by an obsession to find his father who he believes left to live in a far off paradise. From that point on Christian is consciously and unconsciously driven to find his father, which means he has to first discover the realm where he lives - a place beyond the near death experience. After measuring electrical activity in human brains during near death experiences, Christian begins to look at what happens in the brains of our closest relative the Great Ape after they die. His hypothesis that there is considerable cognitive activity within the human brain for several minutes after death is bolstered by what he finds going on in the brains of Great Apes after they die. Driven by his inner child, he begins to conduct clandestine human post-death experiments even though he has no approval for human testing, and his grant funding specifically excludes it. Regardless of being pursued by grant administration officials after his last and failed human experiment, Christian presses on. Obsessed to the point of hallucinations, Christian continues to conduct clandestine human post death research looking for that realm beyond death which, his inner child tells him, is where his father has gone. In the process he comes upon a revelation of just what the human brain is actually capable of well after all life has left he rest of the body.

Dorian McClenahan has a long-standing professional involvement with aviation and planetary space exploration, both of which inspired the Heaven Sequence. Beginning as a charter pilot in Florida and the Bahamas, Dorian continued his aviation career as an airline pilot based in Philadelphia. Bowing to an interest in the works of Dr. Carl Sagan, Dorian joined the NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) as an Operations Control Chief in the JPL Space Flight Operations Center, managing real-time spacecraft data operations for the Voyagers 1 and 2 missions to the outer planets, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, two Mars Rover missions and the Cassini mission to Saturn. His JPL career also included the development and implementation of technical training programs in JPL's Ground Data Systems network and enterprise business systems. During his time at JPL Dorian developed a keen interest in the scientific search for life beyond Earth, which also served as an inspiration for the Heaven Sequence. Dorian holds Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in Aeronautics from Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and a Doctoral degree in Adult Education Theory and program development from Arizona State University. His principle research focus was the degree to which space science degree programs in the nation's ten top universities included in their curricula the social implications of humans' ability to travel in space directly or via robotics. Throughout his career Dorian has been inspired by the works of Carl Sagan, James Michener, Herman Melville, Jack London, Robert Louis Stevenson and Polynesian anthropologist Christina Thompson.