* * *
It happened in just an instant, I was dead.
My consciousness kept me alive for a second, my lungs started crashing, it was difficult to breathe, my vision was getting blurry, my heart was beating slower, and blood was pooling from my side.
I was hyper-aware in these final moments.
Feeling everything, every single bit of pain crushing through my body, every single cell rushing to save the form, my consciousness drifting, my ability to think blurred by death.
My brain produced mammoth amounts of Dopamine, to the point where reality bent around me.
What I'm about to say next, is going to sound crazy.
From the top of my vision, a white line started cutting through the volume of our three-dimensional space. What
I can only describe as a portal started opening. To where exactly? I wasn't sure. My first guess, in my current situation, was the other side. The gods were already calling to me.
I could hear their siren calls. Music I've never heard before. Their songs calling forth, just for me.
Bells ringing, choirs singing, their voices in a language I yet did not understand.
At this point, the realization hit me, I wasn't going to make it. The semi had hit hard, a freak accident in the middle of the day, the driver had been working more than eighteen hours, and he had hit his limit. When I stepped on the street, that girl was frozen, I alone had seen her walk into the avenue, no one raised their head from their phone.
Inside the truck, the motorist was woken up by a proximity alert.
The driver tried to brake, but the load he carried just pushed the truck forward. The momentum carrying it onward. The tires broke, and the truck just skidded along the road. The bumper hits the ground, sparks flying everywhere.
I pushed her so she rolled onto safety, a stuffed animal between her arms.
The semi hit me head-on. There was no time to get up and get out of the way.
Everything went black.
When I woke.
My legs were now trapped in between the bumper and the street, broken in several places. In the confusion, the driver crashed into the side of an office building. Pinning me in between construction seams, metal rubble, and the truck itself. I could see the driver from my position.
The airbag had activated already, he was unconscious. But I knew he was going to make it.
People around me stared in shock, someone was already calling 911.
I breathed in, my lungs started filling with blood, and it was getting harder and harder to fill them up with air. My breath shortened. Slowly, I was dying.
My hearing sharpened for a moment.
A woman screamed, was it a passerby who had seen the accident, I tried to look but I just couldn't move my neck.
"Someone call 911!" she screamed. A man assured her he was already on the line with the paramedics.
"Yes, I'll hold…" he said.
I closed my eyes.
My whole body wasn't responding.
I couldn't move any part of my frame, my spine was fractured. My nervous system had been disconnected, I wasn't feeling anything anymore, it just felt numb. Like static on a screen.
Had my brain prioritized this final moment in favor of life over pain?
Or had it been shot in the moment of impact?
I couldn't know.
Oh - the portal!?
It was still there, light fractured as it entered into what I can only describe as an endless abyss of stars. It almost looked like what we would know as space.
Ah, is my brain making me hallucinate in the final moments before death? Happy Place, think of your happy place!
A sunset clinging on its final moments as it goes down on the horizon, mountain forest as far as the eye can see, my dearly beloved next to me, cuddling me as the chilly night air hit our skin.
Dearly beloved?! Yeah, that was never going to happen now.
The portal of white light just kept opening beckoning me harder. I could see what was beyond the other side now.
Galaxies spanning and folding over each other it was a space that I couldn't recognize, I couldn't make sense of its heads or tails. Then it sort of made sense, but madness started creeping in. I saw a Tesseract fold over another.
Was it another dimension?
Brains also produce naturally occurring DMT, a drug that makes you hallucinate, some people say they've seen god. Maybe this was the same. In my final moments, my brain would snapshot my life and make me believe I was being sent off to heaven.
Why wasn't anyone coming close to keep me company?
Someone call my mom, tell her I love her.
I looked down, my ribs had cracked through my skin, and the exit wound was bad. Vast amounts of blood already pooling in the street.
A sensation few get to observe. Electrical circuits disconnecting rapidly, my brain was left with nothing but itself, my consciousness. Was this my soul?
Someone call my dad, tell him I'm proud of him.
Then, my heart just stopped, and I let out my last breath.
Yet, I remained. Trapped in a skull. A bat in the brain.
A deep profound silence took over me. I couldn't hear the voices of the people around me, I couldn't hear the busy sounds of the city.
Then from the portal in the sky.
Hands started coming out of the white rippling exit. Towering towards me at a fast pace, like they were all competing to get me. I heard the laughter of children, but with the music of heaven playing, it sounded more creepy than it should have. Like ravenous beasts laughing at me, all just for dying.
I felt how they touched me, not my body, but my soul. Me, my whole existence. My energy.
I felt no pain, no sadness, in that moment, they pulled back, they extracted me from my body, and my soul left. It felt like the stories I've heard a million times from people who Travel the Astral Realm and do Out of Body Experiences.
At least that's the only way I could rationalize this.
Released from my mortal coil, my body was impaled still between the truck and rubble.
I had a moment to look at the scene as I was taken into the now massive open portal, it was as tall as the sky itself. I flew through the sky, the city getting smaller and smaller.
The girl was safe. She was crying, policemen were already swarming around her. Covering her with a blanket. It's not her fault.
Why did I jump to save her? I don't even know her. She's a stranger.
The hands feeling me up, felt disgusting, they had no remorse.
Enough!
I shouted, electricity crackled through me and created a circular halo around me. The hands left, quivering in fear.
I couldn't stare any longer.
I turned towards the open white rift and crossed over, flying was intuitive, I could push with my legs and I would move forward.
I was in space or this version of it. The white hands appeared from what seemed like a rift in the void itself, they seemed apologetic. Maybe finally seeing my resolve.
I pushed forward a couple of feet, then from behind me the portal closed, it made a muffled sound. It's not like I'm coming back.
I flew for a couple of minutes, the galaxies and space clusters were all uniquely packed in my vision.
This space made me dizzy. Human brains are not made to travel through a higher dimensional plane.
But then the strangest thing happened, a door appeared in front of me, its frame made of pure white light. The door itself is made of varnished wood. It was strange, but it was the same door that lead to my apartment in the city. A familiarity crept over me.
I couldn't help but go towards it, it opened automatically like it was waiting for me,
What I found on the other side was a white and black checkerboard room, full of antiquities, clocks, and pendulums that swung back and forth. It felt like the space had transformed into a Dali painting.
Gravity kicked in and gently placed my feet on the ground. The room spun, and my vision blurred, it took me a couple of seconds as my mortal coil remembered I was put pure energy, my body was no longer a body, just a projection that I clutched onto from the past.
Bottles with dead fetuses, fingers froze in a weird liquid vile. I had no idea what any of those items did or what they were for.
Sea urchins and angels fix in a makeshift aquarium.
In the far end corner of the room, sat three figures. All sitting down in quaint Victorian chattel each unique to the one sitting on them.
A lady dressed in old Victorian clothes, she seemed to fit in this room quite well, a businessman - old. Wearing a suit and a gold ribbon on his left chest pocket.
He looked comfortable in his skin but his body language read people, pleaser.
And a skinny dude with what I can only describe as eye implants. He was sprawled, his legs wide open, sitting badly in his chair, which didn't look comfortable, he dangled a slice of pizza over his mouth. Uninterested in me.
They looked like the most basic representations of different Earth eras.
The Victorian woman made a come here motion with her fingers, and my shirt got pulled up by an invincible force, and forced me to go towards them at an incredibly fast speed. It put me down with elegance and grace.
For a moment they looked at me in awe.
Then the three of them spoke.
"Welcome to the space in-between spaces," they all said at the same time. Some are more enthusiastic than others.
"The veil with which you cover your eyes," said the Victorian Woman.
"The truth that lies hidden in plain sight," said the old man.
"What good are the eyes if the mind can't see," said the cool dude.
"This is where you'll learn the truth," all of them spoke once more.
I couldn't help but feel like wanting to know more. Yet a tingling sensation froze from my spine, which was weird because I didn't have a body that could house a nervous system.
* * *