You know that feeling, right when you realize you're dreaming? I always feel cold all of a sudden, like I'm not welcome anymore. The world around me loses vibrancy, my movements feel restricted, and anything short of surrendering back to unconsciousness will bring me straight to wakefulness. This moment was a bit like that.

Just... without the waking up.

The weakness suddenly intensifies and I find myself experiencing this strange place from a new angle: face down in the grass. Grass... that undeniably feels, and tastes, like grass.

All in a moment, any amount of calm or collection I had breaks and I do what any rational person would, faced with the situation of actually waking up on a dream island at the edge of the world.

I panic.

I’m oddly detached as my mad scrambling sends me rolling across the manicured lawn, spinning rapidly and hoping deep down that enough idiotic motion will wake me from what must be a very convincing bout of sleep paralysis. Suddenly, I find myself in free fall. My eyes snap into focus, alerting me that I have inadvertently pushed myself over the edge of the small peninsula overhanging the waterfall.

You know how falling in a dream is supposed to wake you up? Well, I can say it awoke something: that pure, unbridled fear best described as the 'did I just kill myself' feeling.

Imagine you're downhill mountain biking, and your wheel slips at just the wrong time. The turn is over too soon, you're going too fast, and with a final shudder of the suspension, your bike -and you- are airborne. Below you is nothing but an unforgiving drop onto uncaring rocks, whose only purpose in that moment is to give you a comfortable place to land. I've always thought that what you do in that moment defines you. Do you freeze up, refuse to accept reality, and die? Or, do you 'screw the security deposit' and kick that bike further out into the abyss, praying it’s enough to keep you among the living? Fortunately, I've been more than stupid enough to become accustomed to answering that question.

Several things click in my head at once: this is real, the consequences are real, and regardless of how little I consciously believe what's going on, my leftover monkey brain is more than happy to take over and save my sorry ass.

What I hadn't noticed before was how the bottom of the cliff happened to be an ideal place for vine growth, and a few of them hung down to bask in the spray. Not the best bet, but surely the only one.

I throw my hand out and catch one of the vines, but its slimy texture and relative thinness make it unable to stop my rapid descent. Panicking further, I grab with my other hand, missing any other vines completely and instead, spinning myself around as I continue to slide.

I'm rapidly approaching the end, both of the vine and my life, and my grip isn't enough to stop me.

I feel my body lock up, with every option I come up with becoming impossible the moment I move to execute it. Fear. My hand slips off the end. Dread.

I feel something in my back pop, pain lancing through me. My head spins from the jarring motion. Must have hit a rock or something so I can be in pain the whole time I'm falling to my death. Damnit. I always knew it was going to end this way. But… it's less windy than I thought it would be. Might as well take in the view while I'm falling. I tentatively open my eyes and I’m immediately rewarded with a profound sense of vertigo. I expected to see things moving quickly past me as I fell, but instead I find myself upside down and decidedly not falling. My eyes pan to the gaping void of water and air below me.

I won't lie, there was some screaming. I'm happy to say, I instinctively went into my best diving form. I'm less happy to say that diving into the bottom of a never-ending waterfall would be the most surefire way to die, not even mentioning the fact that you can't DIVE if you're not FALLING. Oh well, we can't all be winners.

However, after giving my lungs a bit of exercise (read: voice has failed from yelling too much), I realized one very important thing: I was not falling. Or rather, the ground isn't getting closer quite yet... if there even is ground down there...

Maybe don't speculate about that. Yeah. Good.

I crane my neck to look up and, after some elegant wiggling, I get a view of my predicament. My ankle is thoroughly entrapped in vines, so I won’t be moving anytime soon. Less fortunately: the extended screaming and being upside down had kinda messed with my blood flow, and I'm not feeling super. Even the effort of looking up was such that, after only a second of analysis, I let myself go slack to ponder further. Thinking while all your blood is in your head is a poor decision in any situation, but exceptionally bad when you are in a life or death Spider Man swing under a waterfall. As such, the first thing I thought to do was free my foot. How? Well... if I swing back and forth enough, I'll get the momentum to more easily do the hanging sit-up required to reach the tangle. Obviously. Beginning the execution of my ingenious plan, I work up a bit of momentum, which would almost be fun if not for the gentle reminder from gravity that centripetal force was a thing. Everything is working against my blood flowing anywhere but to my head. Good thing blood flow makes you smart.

This combined with the fact that I had been so focused on my trajectory away from the rock that I neglected to think what would happen on the back swing, which led to me whipping around the bottom of the outcropping. An outcropping I met, full force, with my face.

Today is looking like a bad day for faces.

The term “knock some sense into them” seems to work exclusively in cartoons, because whatever semi-competent mental state I was in before now takes a back seat to my blood overdosed and newly concussed train of thought.

My face has become a mask of pain and blood, indicating that I really messed something up this time. Blood from my mouth flows logically into my nasal passages, causing me to reflexively cough and splutter to clear it. I succeed only in blowing more blood into my face. Which gets into my unsuspecting eyes. I'd like to take a moment to remind anyone who enjoys happiness that blood in the eyes is never the way to achieve that. I'm just saying, hemorrhagic fever and smashing face first into a rock have one clear thing in common, bloody eyes. I wouldn't do something so brash as to compare my suffering, -upside down, confused, bleeding, blind, and sad- to someone with Ebola, but I can say I empathize with them a bit more now.

Putting 'analytical thinking' and self deprecation aside, I opt for the tried and true method of brute forcing my way through things. I use my adrenaline fueled muscles to get into a highly uncomfortable sitting position, and grab the slimy vines. With a foothold, I might have a chance. I try to raise my grip, one hand over the other, slow and steady- my hand slips. With a hearty “FUUUUCK”, the limited progress I have disappears before my eyes, and it's all I can do to keep my hands on the vine at all. The thought of falling back into the upside down hang fills me with dread. Can you imagine running out of energy and just being stuck there, eventually dying, upside down, in an alien place? I’d be a fucking macabre pinata. I can die a little better than that, right? Again, one hand over the other... but I'm just squeezing my body into a tight ball... the strain will always eventually be too much. I'll slip before I can get vertical the way I want to be. An idea strikes me... sometimes you have to trap yourself more to get untrapped. I reach out to one of the nearby vines and wrap it a few times around my wrist. I grab the area directly above my wrap, using my own wrist as a hand hold. Can't slide past that, slimy bastard. I roll my arm slowly more and more into the vine, getting a handhold that climbs with me, until I can feel my feet start to shift in the tangle. I know that if I cock this part up as badly as the rest, it's free fall time, so my nerves are fully on edge as I pass all of my weight onto my arms and kick free of the tangle. There's a moment of pure terror as the ball of safe vines careens away, and it takes every ounce of effort I can muster to keep from losing my grip.

Agonizing seconds creep by as the ball leisurely floats away, bounces lightly off the cliff face, and shakily swings back towards me. I wait until it's just about as close as it will swing, before striking from above with my foot. It's like trying to balance on a particularly angry goat, who is itself on top of a flimsy ice float, but eventually I manage to get both feet squarely on the tangle.

An unbidden sigh of relief escapes my mouth. That acrobatic bullshit was probably the worst thing I've ever had to do, and you're damn right I was going to bitch and moan about it to anyone who would listen.

Which was… Exactly nobody. I don’t know where I am and there aren’t any other people around... what is this place? Where is everyone? WHO PUT A HOUSE BY A CLIFF- calm. Calm.

Questions for later.

I take a moment to use my new perspective and actually survey my surroundings. The craggy rock face I'm looking at seems to be around 8 feet thick at the base, and it steadily gets smaller in width and depth the further towards the tip of the peninsula you get. I shiver momentarily as I remember how long I spent on that outcropping... I really wish this had been a dream. There are worse ways to die than an impromptu waterfall surf atop a falling rock, but... there's also not dying which is a much higher priority.

As I'm about to start climbing, something gleams in the shadowy depths, as though calling to me. It's higher than me, and looks to be embedded in the cliff side in some mud... but it must be really shiny to reflect the limited light down here.

…

I

…

I want the shiny.

Greed is such a powerful thing, and it always always makes things worse...

Quietly cursing the fact that I've clearly not evolved far beyond the common crow, I add 'collecting the shiny' to the route I need to take to get back up to the top of the cliff. But... where would I put it? The pants I have... these are not my pants. Looking down, I realize that nothing I'm wearing looks familiar in the slightest. REGARDLESS. The strange pants I'm wearing have no pockets. Men's pants that don't have pockets. Yeah, this is definitely an alien planet.

There has to be a way to do this...

The pants are fairly tight around my waist... I could tuck in my shirt now, and then use it as a giant pocket. It's dumb, but... I'm not exactly in a 'high functioning' mood after all the head injuries and near-death experiences. This will probably secure the shiny thing, and that's what matters.

I free my hand from its wrap, and start twisting the tangle. Just like in grade school when I would twist the swing, as long as I didn’t let it untwist I would slowly gain height. Once I was high enough, I could probably use the twisted part above my current platform as an extremely temporary foothold. Then... I'd have to wrap my arms in vines and hope for the best...after grabbing the shiny thing. I begin to execute my plan, slowly rising, inch by inch, until there are only a few feet from the top of my hands to the top of the cliff. I mentally rehearse what I'm going to do: pull myself onto the twist I've been making, grab the shiny and secure it, and...jump...up the rest of the way. I can do it... I just... ya know... am terrified.

If I don't go now, I'll be stuck contemplating it till I die, which will be soon. One more deep breath....

Go.