by S Bond Herndon

Created on: September 22, 2007

From deep within the realm of sleep, the dream I was in seemed interrupted by a breaking news announcement: something is up. . . The machine is in trouble.

"It is time to make a big decision. . ." The still-small-voice-within told me.

Then, I noticed the first real sign of wrongness: I could not seem to get a good breath. The regular, steady rhythm of my breathing was not working like it should; sort of like when a spark plug fouls in a small engine, the rest of the apparatus has to work harder to keep going; it's easy to feel that something is wrong with the engine's performance but it'll take some time and thorough examination to find the true culprit.

Inexplicably, I felt pulled; not down, or up, or sideways, just pulled from where ever it was I existed in the dream-world of my mind and imagination, to someplace else. Someplace that held a steady calm, like the lobby of a library; it felt like a place where hushed silence was called for.

This all could have taken place in seconds, a flash of brain wave activity that sent an instant electrical download of information to my mind and was simply interpreted the way it would anything else that slipped into my imagination's mechanism. It could have been hours as well; there was no way to tell for sure since, I think, time isn't really relevant in that lobby. . . Everything was suspended there.

Without opening any doors, I was eased along, by what, exactly, I don't know; but I had the explicit understanding that I was not to fear. Then, as I moved there were suddenly screens that were replaying my life slipping past; this was, I realized, why I felt like I was in motion. It was suddenly weird and a little disorienting; something like car-sickness, but I was weightless and there was nothing physical to revolt and resist.

My body was struggling to breathe. . . I could feel it, far away from me now, like the end of the longest string-can-telephone imaginable. Between breaths, the drum of a heart sounded like it had already been packed away in a cotton-filled box; I could only just make out the sound of it and identify what it was, more by understanding than feeling, really. I wanted to be afraid then. My brain, having been exposed to a household in which a surgeon lived and died, understood what signs came along with the coming of death. . . But that brain had no idea, beyond my own, long, hopeful faith in God, what to expect.

There was fight inside me. I could detect the will to fight against all this; Only, I wasn't

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