My Dream

I dream vividly, I dream a lot and I usually remember what I dream. Some are profound, some recurrent, some adventurous and fantastical. Their mood usually sticks with me for a long time throughout a morning. The night before last there was one moment that I kept thinking about in the morning. It was the 19th century and after a whole series of adventures I sat down with Nigel who was working on experiments in clinically putting someone to death and then reviving them using the anaesthetics of that time. He asked me to be his subject along with another doctor and patient. He said I could trust him. I sat in the chair while he reassured me everything would be okay. He would initially give me ether to relax and take me into a semi-unconscious state followed by lethal injections to stop my body from living. It wouldn't hurt and it wouldn't last longer than a moment. I remember I trusted him with my life implicitly. He put the ether soaked cloth close to my nose and I began smelling the fumes and drowsing off a bit. I closed my eyes. Then he injected two needles into the gums in my mouth and I waited to feel death come as he rubbed my arm and reassured me. I opened my eyes for one last look at him before I died and saw that he was crying uncontrollably. I imagined he was thinking about what it might be like if I really was dying. I felt my veins burn a bit as the serum travelled around my body and my breathing slowly stopped as I drifted backwards down a long dark space. I waited to suddenly be brought forward towards the light and see him immediately, but I kept moving backwards into the darkness. Something had gone wrong. I wasn't going back. I wasn't breathing. I was dead. Then slowly I felt a little bit of a breath catch in my chest and my blood moved again. I felt transformed through another tunnel but in a different direction and a different time. I slowly became aware of where I was as my breathing steadied and I slowly awoke. I was in present day real life lying next to the present day Nigel. I was both relieved and grateful to be alive and still with Nigel, but also grieved for the Nigel that was left in the last century, with what I knew was a dead wife.