At one point I ended up passing out. Because apparently that’s what your body tends to do when you’re stuck in a smoke-filled airplane cabin. You know how I was talking about near-death experiences, Christians claiming to go to heaven, all that jazz?
None of that happened to me.
But something did.
I’d like to say I had a dream because that puts it into a neat little easy-to-define category that everyone can relate to. I mean, who hasn’t ever had a dream while they’re asleep?
Except I really couldn’t call it that. Not while maintaining any sense of literary integrity. Imagine a dream that’s even more real than the physical world. Where the moment you’re in it everything flips around and you realize that the world you’ve always called real is actually the dream and you’ve never been truly awake until that very moment.
Then imagine that love isn’t just some esoteric emotion or a word you use to describe how you feel about your family or your dog or your favorite vegan tapas bar. Imagine that in this real world, the one that makes everything you’ve ever known seem like the dream, love is an actual, tangible force. And that force is pouring into you, like the most powerful waterfall you could ever imagine, except instead of drowning it makes you feel like for the first time in your entire existence you’re actually alive.
And part of you doesn’t want to wake up and go back to the real world because this power you feel is so tangible, but you also know you’re not ready to leave the dream yet. There’s more you have to do.
If you can picture all of that, and if you have what could be called the most active imagination out of every human who’s ever lived, you might be able to grasp at least the smallest fraction of what I experienced.
And then the feeling was gone. The dream was done.
And all that was left was terror and fear and pain.
And smoke. So much smoke …