There were many things wrong with how I woke up, for one it was unusual to wake up before an alarm began blaring from across the room, forcing me to vacate the comfort of my bed, for another I was usually in said bed.

You know that feeling where right before you fall asleep you feel like you are falling? That’s generally because your brain notices how suddenly you are losing consciousness, forgets it was trying to go to sleep, and tries to wake you up because clearly something must be wrong for you to be losing consciousness. This was like that, except I was waking up, and I was actually falling. Plummeting through the air like a stone.

Which was the next most obviously wrong thing about this situation, I was falling, and all I could see was this stupid rock, a rock falling towards the ground below me. It didn’t take long to realise I couldn’t move, or see my body, I couldn’t close one eye and see my nose, I couldn’t see anything of myself.

And it wasn’t just any falling stone, a meteor, a blazing comet wreathed in flames. It spun and tumbled, weathering the ablation as evenly as it could, but it was burning up, dissolving away into specks of light.

I screamed, and it flared, burning form exploding with light. And, it helped, the fire sloughed off like it had lost traction, falling in waves and ribbons.

When I hit the ground, it was possibly the most terrifying moment of my life, but in a weird way, it was almost calming, familiar. I had time to process on the way down, not a whole lot of time, but enough to where I basically said my goodbyes to the world and just braced myself to go splat, or crack, or whatever rocks do when they hit the ground at a much too high speed. Then I hit and didn’t splat, I just sort of struck, Boom, and then I was in the middle of a crater, or the rock was, I still couldn’t see myself, or feel, actually, there was definitely a falling sensation, but I couldn’t feel my body, not the aches and pains I was so used to they barely registered, not the pins and needles of a limb I slept on wrong, nothing.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

I felt the impact though, in an abstract, oh I guess I just hit the ground at terminal velocity, kind of way. No pain, no splat, just boom, now I’m in a crater that wasn’t there before, and didn’t it feel good to do that. The raw power of slamming into something and feeling the power behind the impact, but not being any worse for it.

I don’t really know what I did after that, just sort of lay there, which is a pretty reasonable reaction to falling from the sky, if you ask me. I did eventually snap out of it, once the sky darkened and it was night, then it was day, just soaking in everything, then I realised I had just lay in a crater for what was probably a full day, and never felt anything, no cold, no hunger, no nothing. And that was strangely what snapped me out of whatever fugue state I had entered. Because once you notice something is wrong, you start noticing everything else that’s wrong. I shouldn’t have been able to just lay in a crater for a full day, and I also shouldn’t have made said crater when I fell from wherever I fell from. Also I woke up falling from a great height, and that’s something else to notice, so yeah, I started to panic. But then I realised I couldn’t panic, not that some halfway rational part of me realised panic would get you killed in a situation like this, but because I just couldn’t do it, physically couldn’t bring myself to freak out over how messed up everything about this is. And I tried to panic over that too, but again, couldn’t panic, so I just existed in an existential state of zen, freaking out while totally calm.