Before you can even finish speaking, you are no longer there.
It is as if someone, some force, has ripped your consciousness out of your body and transported it, in an instant, somewhere else. Disembodied, serene, you float in an endless blue sky filled with moving images. A deluge of information swamps your retina, scene after scene after scene acting themselves out all around you amid the cerulean abyss. The moving images shift and distort, bleeding into each other, sometimes in two dimensions and sometimes in three. There are far too many scenes for you to take them all in, but a small number of them manage to impress themselves on your consciousness.
You see two figures swathed in thick layers of fur, alone in a blizzard on a desolate mountainside high above the earth, struggling into the wind, every step bringing them closer and closer to death.
You look down on a small motorboat from the perspective of a bird suspended on a thermal high above. The boat listlessly chugs away against the current, fighting its way up a wide green river, the banks choked with overabundant jungle vegetation.
You see another boat, this one much larger—a tramp steamer moored to a wharf in an East Asian city, rusting and decrepit and unreliable, with the word Semiramis painted on its hull.
You see the interior of a juke joint back home in the US: a scuzzy, smoke-filled bar in a bad part of town. On the stage sits a young African American man, finger picking an acoustic guitar and singing his pain with an intense, anguished expression on his face. He holds the audience in rapt attention.
And lastly, you see the image behind all other images—the image to which all the others lead. A rocky island in a tropical sea. A battle is raging on the shore while hellish red light erupts from every fissure and crack in the mountainside, turning the sea to blood.
And then you black out.
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