Oh, he's in a coma, and he has been all along. He's probably never going to recover, though it's entirely possible that the "messages" he was receiving during this series were an attempt to bring him back. Except what he thought was "going home" wasn't; he was just swapping one dream for another. In the end, this realisation forced him to choose which dream he wanted, and he chose 1973 over 2006.