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William Gerhardie - Resurrection

.... I was stepping lightly over an open patch of grass. A cluster of trees just in front on the edge of a precipice showed brightly in the moonlight. As I walked lightly towards them, the thought recurred to me : how do I know I am not dreaming this ? and the answer : look for the lighted cord behind you. I looked round. It was there, but it was very thin and in the moonlight it gave out a faint light around it. That satisfied me that I was not dreaming, but so pale was my consciousness that it never occurred to me to ask myself where I was or why I had come. And my consciousness went out again like a lamp.

When it returned it was so weak that I asked myself no questions, no more than you would in a dream. I had no curiosity and neither the strength nor the desire to look round. I was apparently hanging on to a thick brown beam on a white ceiling, effortlessly, like a bat, and in my enfeebled state of consciousness and the balloon-like lightness of my new body this seemed as unquestionable to the mind as it seemed natural to the body. Only I felt very ill. I felt so ill and faint that my continued presence there on that brown beam was becoming increasingly irksome and
uncomfortable about the heart, as if that organ were horribly incommoded by the pressure of air. Oh, I am so ill, so ill, so ill,I felt. How much longer must I remain in this warehouse ? For the ticking of a typewriter made me think it was an office, and the beam to which I clung somehow conveyed to me that it was a warehouse and that I was waiting there for some satisfactory reason unknown to me.

I saw nothing but the thick brown beam across the white ceiling and heard only the ticking of the typewriter. With a sickly feeling I let go, and then I felt myself a bent and paralysed being who was blind and thought he would never see again, standing beside my bed and unable to move.  It seemed to me I had already awaked in my physical body now hopelessly distorted by my experience.

Then it seemed to me as if a dozen coolies amidst much screeching and throbbing were lowering with the utmost precaution under expert direction from a noisy crane, which seemed to reverberate into my own brain, sorne precious burden, which was myself, into some vessel which presently became myself. Now I knew I had not got off my bed but was lying on it, stiff, cataleptic, unable to move a muscle.

Steady, steady, that same monitor who had directed my exploit, seemed to be saying, and then,
with a jerk which shook me as if the machinery dropped into my bowels weighed a ton, I opened my eyes.

I was in, my bedroom which, except for the glow from the electric fire, was in darkness. Alarmed, I stetched out my hand for the lamp on my bookshelf, found it, and surveyed the familiar world of my return. Not a detail of my experience had been lost to my mind, and there was quite another quality about it all, that of reality, which removed it from the mere memory of a dream. I was convinced I had been corrected on a point of fact, I, who had believed immortality the very antithesis of the physical and mechanical, only to be shown that we had a duplicate body all there and ready for
use, the almost undistinguishable double of our natural body, so cunningly disguised even to the duplication of clothes I happened to have been wearing as neatly to take in myself.

So I felt a blow had been dealt to my more poetic ideas of unimaginable life beyond the grave. It seemed that, for the first stage of survival at any rate, we already had a body, stored away, it is true, like a diver's suit, but nevertheless neatly folded in our own everyday bodies, always at hand in case of death or for special use.

Would I have to reshape my Resurrection in the light of the new experience ? Quite possibly.

The clock struck seven o'clock. I got up, and in some trepidation went through the rooms, checking the mental notes I had made about which windows were closed or open, which curtains drawn ; and the evidence in all cases proved correct.

By now it was time to have a bath and to dress for the dinner and ball.