Dying is a strange thing to experience. Well it was for me at least, as I didn’t have the slow decline in health that most others have before they are taken by disease, or age. I died in an car accident, I was just riding my bike to my crumby job like the broke millennial I am. Well the broke millennial I was, when this truck came barreling out of side street and crushed me against the minivan I was riding beside. My legs and most of my torso had been crushed between the two metal objects. My body instantly went into shock and I luckily went unconscious before I could feel anything from my destroyed body.
A short time later I regained awareness, but not consciousness, as my body had died and my soul now floated above the wreckage that had taken my life. When my awareness returned to me I found myself floating above the crash. My physical body was left in between the two cars and had been replaced with a translucent blue copy of my body with a tiny blue star in the center of my chest. As I am examining my soul body I feel a force grab hold of me and it begins carrying me up and away from the ground.
Turning my attention away from what I can only assume is my soul, I look towards where I am being pulled. Ahead of me much higher in the sky is a great river of different colored lights of differing brightness. Around the river of lights stretches small streams of lights flowing into and out of the mass of lights. When I join one of the light river’s tributaries I see the souls of others around me, both human and animal. They have the same small stars glowing in their chest but they differ in color and brightness. Some souls have red stars while others have green and even white stars. Some souls are so dim I would miss them were they not made from strange colors while others are so bright they hurt to look at.
As the stream of light comes closer and closer to the great river of light it becomes thicker as it joins with other small streams. Surrounded with even more souls I can see that those with brighter souls often had the shapes of larger bodies around them, like those of humans, tigers and elephants.
As time passes and I get bored of just looking at all of the differently colored and shaped souls around me I try to grab the small soul of a squirrel near me. As my translucent hand reaches out the same force pulling me towards the river of lights moves me back away from the soul I am trying to grab. Pulling my hand back the force returns me to my previous position in the stream. Trying once more I quickly shoot my hand out only to be moved back at the exact same speed and fail to get any closer to the squirrel.
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Now bored and only able to look at things around me I float along grumpily until my soul reaches the great river of lights and the force pulling along pulls me deeper into the nearly blinding mass of souls.
Once the force stops pulling me deeper into the river I see that I am surrounded by other souls as bright as mine is. Some of the souls are from large mammals like dolphins and apes while most had human shapes just like mine. As the force places me into the depths of the river I felt the current carrying the river forward grow stronger and the bright souls like my own were swept along.
As my soul was moving faster than the dimmer souls that were arrayed around the center of the river I had the unique experience of watching a great parade of multicolored animal souls sped by in a dazzling array of colors and shapes. Entranced by the unique sight I loose track of time and reach the river’s destination before I can get over the experience. At the river’s end it splits into two smaller rivers, the first brings all of the dim souls and a portion of the souls as bright as mine back down to Earth, the second splits from the center of the river where I am and carries bright souls away from Earth.
When I reach the part of the river where the path splits I am stopped and know I must make a choice. The choice is a simple one: to return my soul to Earth and be reborn, or I leave Earth’s cycle of reincarnation and join another cycle. I briefly debate but realize if I stay on Earth I would forget about everything I would be staying to experience agian. My choice made my soul splits from Earth’s great river of souls as I head off to be reborn in another world.
As my soul travels away from Earth I watch it fade away behind me unitl it is no more than a tiny blue dot. After the Earth fades from view I turn around to see the stream entering a giant hole in reality with another planet on the other side. As my soul gets closer to the other planet I see that it to has a river of light just like Earth, but one that shone even brighter.
With great anticipation I watch as my stream joins the river heading down to the planet below. As my soul grows closer to the world below I feel a force press against my soul. The force was strange in that I felt that it was coming from the planet below. The force reached out and drove my soul body into my heart of light before leaving some mark upon my heart of light that glowed green on my blue soul.
Unable to resist the force or even move now that my soul shape had been consumed by my heart of light, my soul could only float along the current where it hurtled towards the world below. Watching the final moments of my soul's journey I see my soul heading towards a night shaded northern continent. Without the electric lights of my old world I can only make out some clouds and snowy mountain tops peeking above them instead of the web of lights I am used to. The last thing I see with my soul is the insides of a cloud bank as my soul flies through it to be reborn.