Out of Body Experience

I 'woke up' to find myself on the ceiling.

That sounds crazy I know, but I was high up, looking down on the room below me. Looking down on my own body, prostrate on the bed below me.

I knew what this was, I'd heard of the phenomena, an 'out of body experience'. It's not uncommon when you're in a coma and my body was in a coma. Just look at it, lying there doing nothing. 

I look peaceful, I thought. 

I look contented, I thought. 

I'm very quiet, I thought.

I'm quiet boring, actually, I thought. I mean, what point was there to an empty husk of a body with 'me' sitting on the ceiling. 

I tried moving. A little. It made me giddy, but I could move around. I circled my body, viewing it from every angle; peaceful, contented, quiet. Dull. 

I should explore, I thought. Get to know my surroundings.

But the room was very small, dominated by the bed and body. I moved over to the window. It was daytime outside, a sunny early-Spring day. There was sunshine, flowers, birds in the trees. It looked much more fun than hovering over my comatose body.

I pushed myself towards the window and entered the glass.

Because I am a soul and give life and meaning to that which I embody, for a moment I became a pane of glass, the glass became alive. It had a purpose, a meaning, it lived to give light to the room, but also to protect the room from the world's winds and rains and weathers and little wordly creatures.

I passed through the glass. It lived no more. I fell.  I plummeted at great speed towards the ground. I shouldn't have I know, I'd been floating before, but I wasn't used to being outside, to the heat of the sun, the wind, the world. So I fell, and I landed in something.

Oh fuck, I'm a squirrel. I'm a squirrel. I'm a squirrel. I'm a squirrel.

The squirrel I had landed in fled, startled, and scampered up a tree. With me still inside it.

"Oy. What you doing," said a disembodied voice within the squirrel. The squirrel's 'soul' I assume. "This is my squirrel. Get your own."

"Sorry," I said, "I fell through the glass."

"You're just trying to find out where I've hidden my nuts, aren't you?" said the squirrel's soul.

The squirrel I embodied leapt from one branch to another, on a neighboring tree. Wheeee that was fun. Like nothing I'd experienced before. A life's worth of theme park rides in one jump.

"I said you're trying to find my nuts, aren't you."

"No," I said. "I was a window pane for a while, then I fell, then I was in a squirrel. This is fun, isn't it. The leaping about. My body doesn't do any leaping about."  It's hard for me to explain the sheer, undeconstructed joy of being a squirrel.

"You're not a squirrel," the squirrel's soul reminded me. "I'm the only squirrel in this squirrel's body."

"You were," I said. "But I'm here now."  

We fought. Briefly. I lost. I was flung out. 

I floated without meaning for a while. A disembodied soul without so much as a window pane to give life and meaning to.

I decided to return to my body. I say decided, but 'I' had no control over the decision. It was an uncontrollable urge to return to myself. 

I floated back through the window, again briefly giving life to a window pane. I floated over towards my body, but it wasn't my body. It was a stranger, an imposter, and worst than that, there was another soul hovering over it. Was I about to get into another fight, like with the squirrel? I didn't need that, this soul looked a lot bigger than the squirrel's soul.

"Are you lost?" it asked me. Very polite, and helpful it was, not at all like the squirrel.

"I'm looking for my body," I said. "It was here when I left."

"Are you in the right room?" she asked, for I could tell that the soul was female, as indeed was the body below. "This is H45."

"Ah," I said. "I'm in H46." I don't know how I knew, I'd been in a coma when I was wheeled in.

"That's next door. The shortest way is through the wall."

I was a brick, briefly, a sturdy, dependable brick, helping hold the whole building together. Then I was  another brick, then very briefly a thin layer of paint. 'Paint' I was told in no uncertain terms, 'does not need a soul'. I'm not sure who told me that, or why, but in no time at all I was back in my room.

There I was. Dull, quiet me, just lying there, unaware that anything had happened. The physical me, the one who had never been a squirrel, never been a brick, never even tried to be a layer of paint. Comatose, perhaps dying, perhaps recovering, perhaps just lying there doing nothing at all.

I felt drawn towards it.  

I entered my body. I was where I belonged. 

I was conscious, perhaps for the first time, of how tedious I was. I just lay there, doing nothing. 

I tried to leave, to go an explore, but couldn't. There was no way out. I would never a be a squirrel again. I would never experience the delight of flying through the treetops. I'd never even be a brick again. 

I was me. Comatose, useless, dull me. 

I was trapped here for the rest of my life.