Last night I had a near-death experience of a quite different stripe. Yes, this bizarre apparatus with its spaceman-like mask has been very effective, but in the middle of the night I suddenly had a dream of being in the coffin, being talked about by my friends, and being carried about in a funeral procession. So I wake up and I'm suffocating and clawing the air and I'm in complete darkness in a stifling room. Half conscious, I start to rip off the mask. It turns out there's been a power outage. The technology has stopped working. I sort of stagger out towards the fusebox and, working completely blind, I managed to flip the electricity back on. In a second, the airconditioning works again and a few dim lights come on and I can breathe.
Now this is genuinely frightening, because I had intended to take a sleeping pill. Had I done so, I might not have been able to wake up to reset the electricity. I might not have been able to rip off the mask, which, without the current of air, is a death mask. I might, indeed, actually be dead.
If I have to spend my nights attached to machinery, I think I had better look into some kind of electrical stabilizing device/battery backup sort of thing.
It's been quite a sobering morning.
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