text: My room is a pale cube, carpeted, with a metre-wide intrusion on one wall from the box around the chimney flue. There's a stretched out radiator that runs under the only window, for about five feet, it's a squat and dusty thing that goes too hot. When the air turns colder and thicker in the late evening, the radiator expands and my beechwood desk tightens up, and they both clack at each other, right as I'm getting hypnagogic. &#x200B; Last night, having plainly over-drunk from a bottle of red wine (that was on the turn anyway, if that's an excuse), I schlepped up the staircase and fell on to the bed. I passed out over the covers, still dressed. I had spilled red wine on my shirt, and my trousers were unbuttoned at the waist where the top button had started to come loose. The clacking of the radiator at the desk must have woken me, and the desk's creaking replies kept me awake long enough to sit up in hot frustration. Still being on top of the sheets, I went to stand up to take off my trousers and button-down shirt. As I shifted off the bed and planted my feet on the carpet, something about the give in the mattress gave me pause. I had the impression there was a weight on the bed behind me, and pause turned to cold panic: Something person-sized is on my bed. The mattress was clearly bearing the heft of another body. &#x200B; I sat with my spine like a rod, too terrified to turn and look. A long minute passed, as I considered why I hadn't just spun around and looked straight away. The weight hadn't startled me so much as willed me to freeze. Eventually, I found courage enough to stand up, slowly. I had the childish thought that if I went about normally, then nothing could possibly be wrong. Having got up to take off my clothes, that's what I did. I removed my trousers and shirt and left them in a heap on the floor. Now underdressed for a paranormal experience, but not necessarily for anything unwelcome-but-human, I turned around at slow speed. &#x200B; I cannot fully describe the character of an out-of-body experience. If I had to try, I would draw a line between seeing myself in the mirror, seeing a picture of myself from the side, and seeing myself on an old home video, from one sensation to the other, in a straight upward path from left to right. On this graph of experiencing myself outside my own skin, what I saw on my bed was way out to the right, way above a home video. I am lying on the bed. I am standing next to the bed. I am so convinced that I am standing next to the bed that I start to doubt it's me lying on the bed, asleep, unmoving. Now my out-of-body experience is an out-of-self one. I am something else. &#x200B; In the division of my standing self from my sleeping counterpart, the sleeping person becomes alien to me, even hateful. I walk around the bed to its foot, with my back to the chimney wall. I stare at my unjoined twin, and as I stare I start to drain, and my eyelids snap together. Right as I feel like I'm going to pass out, with my back pushed up against the cold wall, I open my eyes again. The body, the copy, is sat up, staring back at me. We stay locked on each other for some time, neither moving, neither saying a word. I'm getting drained again, and my eyes shut all at once. &#x200B; I woke up to morning light and a wide headache, fully clothed, over the covers. I was myself again, completely. The picture of what had happened in the night came back softly, dream-like at first, and then as the complete nightmare. But the horror came back in double parts. In one part, I had felt a shadow move about my bed, and settle at the foot of it. The dreadful, unknowable thing stared me down, even as I sat up to stare back at it. It had been something outside of a dream, it was more of a hallucination, if not something real and awful. The other part was more of a cloud than the solid memory of the first. It was definitely more nightmare than truth. I had been outside of myself, and become something else. I had undressed, turned to the bed, and seen my body sundered from my knowing mind. I had reared up against the chimney wall and stared my old body in the eye until I fell unconscious. &#x200B; Struggling to put the memory and the nightmare together, but also unable to fully tell them apart, I start to haul myself up and off the bed. I plant my feet on the carpet. On the floor are a pair of trousers with a broken button, and a wine-stained button-down shirt, identical to the ones I am still wearing, left in a heap.