The cryo dreams get really fucked up in the early days when your thoughts turn dark. The dreams become nightmares, because you have no way to escape. In cryo you don’t suddenly wake up when you’re falling, right before you hit the ground. The endings always repeat and change. It’s insanity, reliving the same second over and over, endlessly, until your mind is content with the outcome and moves on to the next idea.

I think I spent years falling. I think it was my brain trying and failing to wake itself up. Sometimes I would hit the ground, sometimes I would pass right through and keep falling and suffocating, buried alive because physics failed to take me out, so biology might instead.

Sometimes when I hit the ground, I would watch myself from third person, witness my body pulverised by gravity. I had a very astute imagination for someone who had never seen a body experience such an impact. Sometimes I would shatter like glass, I imagined the shards made music as they shredded the people on the street.

At some point the dreams became more real than the memories buried in the cliffs that kept the world at bay. I was healthy, happily married. Sometimes I had kids, sometimes I had exotic pets and a very eclectic fashion sense. I lived lifetimes of prosperity in mansions on the seaside with my yacht moored just offshore and I loved to watch the storms roll in and thrash against the world. I’d spend weeks building log cabins from scratch, and camping under the stars, trying to remember one single constellation from the real sky. But I’d always end up making an elaborate painting in their lights instead.

I taught myself to do a multitude of things with methods that would make Wikipedia look like valid source material, but I never found it in me to care. The cars I fixed always purred like kittens and the feasts I cooked were never less than exemplary. I performed live on stages to sold-out stadiums where people loved me so much they would beg me to tattoo my signature on their flesh, while others sobbed into my discarded laundry like it was a blessing from the gods. I also learned to fly. I started with aircraft before remembering that I owed nothing to physics and took to the sky with nothing between me and the wind.

I visited postcard places that were fuzzy on details and probably resembled B-grade movies more than reality, but I was a tourist all the same. I spent aeons perfecting the garden for my house that was ever changing. I had gothic eras, with towering spires and deciduous trees that only ever bloomed blood‑red flowers nestled in spider webs. I made this my Halloween house and without the confines of time, I’d celebrate anything on a whim. It would be a casual Tuesday, the weather wintery grey, when the carved pumpkins would suddenly pile up and gutter internally with ghoulish flames.

Out of all the places I created I had a favourite. After a while I settled into it and rarely brought about anything else, as this felt the most like home. It had marble floors and sweeping views of whatever scenery I’d conjure up that morning, though it was often a tumultuous ocean. There was a fire always burning in the hearth and a couch that caught the afternoon sun. It would have been a prime spot for napping if you could sleep within your own dreams. Sometimes I would spend autumn mornings on the porch, sipping coffee as I looked over a lake flooded with the colours of flame.

By the evening of the same day, I’d retreat to the depths of the ocean just to see how deep I could swim before the stars faded out to nothing. Sometimes I thought that was the closest to sleep I’d find here. Other times it made me wonder what death would be like. Would it be like this? Floating in an endless expanse with nothing but my own thoughts, and the weightless body that those thoughts were tethered to? Would there even be thoughts? Would I even still be?

I worked tirelessly to build myself a town, it was filled with people I had once known so it didn’t feel so empty. I wasn’t sure how real I got them, and I wasn’t sure when or why my neighbour Jim started collecting garden gnomes, but some part of me must have thought it up. My ex-wife lived on the far side of town, and I loved to drive by in my fancy cars and make her regret leaving me. Every other day I would have a crush on someone, like the waitress in the coffee shop who never forgot my order, or the stylish guy I met in the library who smelled like woodsmoke and only read the classics.

I fell in love – with everything.

Then they woke me up.