For a moment, Josiah understood everything.

And the voice said, “wake up.”

Floating in an ethereal mist where time and place did not exist; he had pure clarity, pure bliss. No series of words could ever explain this enlightenment, it was a feeling, not a definition. It was real and true. How could he bring it back with him?

And the voice said, “wake up.”

Acetylcholine burst out of his gamma-aminobutyric neurotransmitter while the oxycontin levels of his brain depleted. Fantasy merged into reality, and he found himself in the precipice between these two worlds; he had a lifeline from the plane of ignorance to the realm of insight.

He stayed calm and present in that perfect place; grappling with his new understanding; trying to bring a 4d object into a 3d world. So he turned the truth into a jagged rock, but when he grabbed for it, his hands slipped through the solid surface as if it were jelly. With each new try, it became less dense, less real. The more effort, the more impossible the task became. It turned to strings which unraveled before his eyes, he remembered being a kid, messing up his grandmother’s yarn and never being able to form it back into that perfect spool it once was.

And the voice said, “wake up.”

Norepinephrine coalesced into serotonin and dopamine as his body tried to soothe the transition of being pulled out of the most beautiful place in the universe, and thrown into that painful existence that is reality.

How could something that made so much sense, just vanish?  It was too late. He was now lucid and present.

For a brief moment of time, Josiah understood everything, but that perfect clarity was now replaced by some asshole saying, “you need to wake up.”

“God Damnit!” Josiah barked back, “I’m trying to sleep, what is it??
“The EU has just launched their entire nuclear arsenal against our city, we have about thirty minutes until we are all dead.”

He had to admit, that was a pretty good reason to wake someone up.