Everything was just as it had been when this happened to me for real eleven months before…and then the dream took on a mind of its own. A hole opened in the ceiling, and I found myself being pulled into it, down a tunnel of white light. Yet this wasn’t the comforting white light you hear about from people who’d had near-death experiences. There was no feeling of overwhelming transcendent love, no sense of connectedness to all of creation. Instead there was only terror like I had never experienced and never knew existed, terror that stripped me to my bones. Because there was a presence in that white light. It was waiting for me. I couldn’t see it, hear it, or smell it, but it was there, and it was waiting. And it wasn’t God, or at least not the benevolent one to which Christians and Muslims and Jews prayed. It was pure evil. And when I reached it, when it enfolded me in its embrace, it would never let me go. I would spend all eternity—the afterlife, heaven, hell, whatever you wanted to call it—in absolute, unrelenting pain.

7

I came awake with a start. I wasn’t dead. I was in the gondola in Xochimilco, seated at the long picnic table, my head on my arms.

I sat straight, still waking up, and rubbed my eyes. I was shaken from the nightmare, disorientated. The first part of it—when I was in a gondola, and maybe a doll—wasn’t too bad. That was almost fun in a trippy sort of way. But the second part, when I was dead in the ER, floating down the tunnel of white light, toward whatever it was that awaited me, that was not fun at all.

I’d been having similar dreams two or three times a week since the accident. Sometimes I’d just float around the ER watching the doctors and nurses work on me. Sometimes I’d leave the ER and zip around the hospital, invisible to the patients and staff. Sometimes I’d watch my physical body wake up in the ICU, and I’d freak out because I realized there was no getting back into it; I was going to be trapped outside of it forever, doomed to haunt the hospital. And then there was the dream I’d just had, which was the worst by far.

The tunnel. The white light. The thing in the light.