I dreamed I died. I saw my body lying on its side on a gurney. I was wearing a blue hospital gown. I was sort of in the fetal position, but my arms and legs were positioned unnaturally. I’d been turned and folded into myself after my death like someone trying to fit more garbage into a can.

I watched myself from above trying to figure out what happened. My mouth was partially closed around a laryngoscope. A tube had been inserted partway down my throat. Then I felt it: the heart attack that killed me. I remembered the shock, the pain, the flooding warmth like contrast dye used in CT scans, my belt-tightened chest, the last wild hoofbeats of my heart, then nothing.

The staff didn’t try to revive me. This one’s not worth saving, I heard one of them say. They rolled me into a side room that wasn’t monitored and left me there, where I was now watching over my corpse.

I don’t know how long I’d been dead, but the part of me that was disembodied began to feel cold. Everything went starry and black. Time wasn’t gone, but it was everything together all at once, not sequential. There was no past, present, or future. And it wasn’t a human time scale time. It was the universal time scale.

I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to be cold forever, and I was pissed that the doctors and nurses let me die. I fought my way back to the hospital room where I was lying. The next step was to get back in my body the way I’d always done in lucid dreams when my consciousness became untethered. I laid down inside my corpse, but I wasn’t connecting with it. When I moved, it was just my disembodied self that moved, effortlessly and mass-free. Finally, with great concentration, I was able to move my arm. Nobody noticed because the room was empty. My heart began beating, but there where no monitors to alert the staff.

I was pretty fucked. I knew I didn’t have much time before I died again. I used all my inner strength to throw myself off the gurney and drag myself to the nurse’s station using my fingers. Boy, we’re they surprised. They immediately picked me up and fussed over me. “We did everything we could,” they told me as they dusted me off. I knew they hadn’t.

I knew then that I cared more about staying alive than anyone else cared about keeping me alive. Even when I was dead, I wanted to live, so I did.

I also knew I couldn’t tell the staff I remembered what they did. If a knowing look even momentarily hardened my face, they’d see it, and I’d never get out of the hospital alive. I had to pretend they tried to save me when they actually discarded me. I had to let devils be angels.

There was one hitch. I’d been dead long enough that I could no longer speak or write without every word being replaced with a different one. No matter how careful I was when I communicated, the wrong things came out of my mouth or appeared on the screen. That’s when I realized I should have stayed in All-Time rather than returning to Earth. Living is nothing if it’s gibberish, if every important word is replaced with a meaningless one, like vole when you mean love or oval when you mean love or leave when you mean love.