Been a decade now.

I doubt I was always aware, but from my memory, I usually was. It was like being trapped in a puppet body, unable to change a single thing. I tried to wrest control over and over. I went crazy fighting to gain any manner of control. Eventually I just tried to get my heart to stop so I could die a true death and escape that way.

My assumption is that what I was feeling was surgeries as anesthesia started to wear off and before they could safely dose me down into dreamless black again. From my perspective, this meant shifting from one nightmare to the next. Sometimes I would get ripped apart over and over. Other times I would drown for hours or die of thirst and hunger on a loop.

I had a few pleasant dreams. The one I remember most was where I was lying on a slab and Robin Williams was singing songs from his movies to comfort me. I had this sense I was about to actually die, and by that time I was very comfortable with that. It was peaceful and I was ready. Turns out my body wasn't. I got about as close to death as you can get without my heart stopping. Many of my organs shut down, but never my heart.

Lots of imagery from games and movies cobbled together to shape the horrors that assaulted me. The ape things that ripped me apart in some nightmares were more or less a combo between the grey apes from congo and goro from mortal combat with a shovel shaped head. Laughable sounding in the waking world. Terrifying beyond words when I knew what they could do to me.

The main epiphany I came away with is that true death is not as scary as you might think. Fates worse than death are a thing and I have a living will to prevent going through one ever again. My relationship with death is much more cordial these days. I do not rush to embrace it, but when my time comes, I will go at ease because I never forgot the peace I felt during the Robin Williams dream. At the very end, the only thing waiting is rest eternal.