"Something was wrong. When the coffin sank, it started filling up, so I let out my air and as soon as I did that I sank the rest of the way down."

On Halloween, 1983, Dean Gunnarson was chained, put inside a coffin, and thrown into the Red River. The young escape artist was attempting something that had never been done before. But something was wrong. Dead wrong.

"So I was caught down there with no oxygen. I got out of the chains, and then I realized that I wasn't going to have enough time to get out of the coffin, so I said relax, stay calm, put my hands on my goggles and went into a form of meditation, and waited for them to pull me out."

Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, the coffin was pulled out of the chilly autumn waters. Gunnarson claims he looked a lot bluer than the water.

"What I do," he said later, "is not an illusion."

What Dean Gunnarson does is escape. He escapes from jails, handcuffs, leg irons, ropes, milk cans, duffel bags, straitjackets, car crushers, body cages and shark cages.

"I'm searching for something I can't get out of," he says, sitting on top of a trunk in his cluttered office in downtown Winnipeg.

And the funny thing is, he gets paid to do it.

"A truly happy man is a man who can make a living at his hobbies," says Dean, quoting George Bernard Shaw. "I like to travel, I get paid to travel. I just got back from Vegas and L.A.; this summer I go to Miami, and back to the Caribbean."

Dean also just got back from being chained inside a car while a car compactor, reminiscent of scenes from Batman, James Bond or any other cliff-hanging thriller, drew slowly in on him. But when he talks about it, it might just be another vacation in the sun.

Dean recalls elementary school with fondness.

"My friends used to tie my shoelaces in knots, and I'd get out of them; we'd play Cowboys and Indians games, and they'd tie me up with skipping rope."

It was the humble beginning of a career that Dean was destined for since childhood.

"Every night after dinner my father used to tie me up with 50-100 feet of rope to chairs. I'd keep bugging him -- tie me up, tie me up -he'd say, all right, what do you want to get tied up to tonight?"

Eventually, he saved up enough money to buy a straitjacket, and his long-suffering father finally believed he'd never have to tie him up again.

Ten minutes later, when Dean reappeared with the straitjacket in his hands, his father realized he would be tying him up for the rest of his life.

"I did it, and I still do it," says Dean, "because of the great feeling of accomplishment in doing what everybody says is impossible."

Gunnarson finds the ability to achieve these seemingly impossible feats comes more from the mind than the body.

"I'm not very flexible," he says. "I can't even touch my toes. But the power of the mind is an amazing tool. The normal person uses 3-10% of their brain power. That made me decide early in life I wasn't going to smoke, drink, do drugs -- that I would enhance my mind as much as possible."

The 25 year-old Winnipeg-born Gunnarson believes that man is evolving towards using his mind more and that someday, telepathy might even replace the Manitoba Telephone System. But in the present, Dean says that his mental powers are an integral part of his routine.

"In this business you have to train yourself not to panic, and not to fear. I used to be terrified of drowning, and terrified of heights before I hung by my ankles from buildings."

In the same manner, Dean looks at his failed escape attempt in the Red River as a learning experience. While he learned some technical aspects of underwater escape, he also realized the importance of mental readiness.

"I knew I wasn't going to die when I was down there," he says calmly.

If the scenario is starting to sound a bit like the famous Houdini's escapades, it's no coincidence. Gunnarson highly respects Houdini. At the age of nine, he got his first book on Houdini - which is in his office now, tattered and worn from the years.

Now, Gunnarson has 3,000 books on Houdini, some at home, some in his office, which he refers to as his mini-museum. There are countertops strewn with handcuffs, some dating from the 1800's, a giant milk can with places for six padlocks, paintings and pictures of friends, of the great escape artist, and a particularly prized pair of thumbscrews that used to belong to Houdini.

"When people saw Houdini getting out of these bonds, they saw something within themselves. He was 5'5", and was the same height as me, a scrawny guy, telling people you can do whatever you want, you can beat the system, beat the odds."

Another great escape artist saw Dean's ability to beat the odds. The Amazing Randi, now semi-retired and given to exposing so-called psychic phenomena. James Randi took Gunnarson on a television show with him. When Randi injured himself minutes before the live broadcast was to air, Dean took the mantle from his shoulders and performed the escape -- from a water-filled milk can.

He stunned the audience and host William Shatner when he successfully completed the escape. The Amazing Randi has officially named Dean as his successor.

After all this publicity, Dean still locks his key in his hotel room, and has to suffer through oft-heard jokes by desk clerks before he can get a key.

But it's all in a day's work. And really, desk clerks aren't all that much of a challenge.

"People are blind a lot of the time; they go through life without seeing anything. That's the funniest thing, seeing people smoking and drinking with a high cholesterol level, sitting in front of a TV, saying, ha, you're crazy, you're gonna kill yourself! Well, I'll choose my own destiny.

"Sooner or later, we're going to die, whether we lock ourselves in a closet and throw away the key or not. So we have a decision to make: we can go through life being afraid to death of dying, afraid to take chances and risk what we want to do - or we can go through life and live it to its fullest. You may not be able to experience life until you've walked the fine line of death."