The Book of Death

The 20th of September 2014, was just like any other day.

At the time I was living on my own in a small old house in Żurrieq. I had spent the evening at St Julian’s Bay with three of my friends whom I used to meet daily at the time and by midnight I was making my way home. I went straight to bed and fell asleep. But then, as I awoke briefly to turn from one side of my bed to another, from the corner of my eye, I spotted myself, another Ricky, looking down on me from above.

t first, I thought nothing of it and assumed it was a dream, so I drifted back out of consciousness to continue my sleep. However, I quickly found myself awake once again as I was feeling observed by this other Ricky, suspended above. I turned to lie on my back, facing upwards, now fully awake and completely conscious, to realise that this other Ricky was still there. It did not feel like it was a dream, but rather, a strange manifestation of another reality, as real to me as my being in bed trying to sleep. And so, this new reality unfolded.

In a split second, I felt that I—the one on the bed, that is—had become connected with myself—the suspended version I was observing and who returned my gaze. We now had the same mind; I was conscious as both the figure looking up and the figure looking down, aware of both versions of myself. And as soon as this connection occurred, I once again found myself suspended at a point beyond the world, as in my previous experience, this time in a position from which I could observe the world beneath me while also still being able to see my own figure lying in bed.

Unsurprisingly, from this curious vantage point, I no longer felt human. Instead, my out-of-body self, suspended in space, had been transmuted so that I felt I was the world itself, the world I was still looking down upon. From that point onwards, I was no longer Ricky; I was no longer that figure I recognised in the mirror to be me. What was I, now that I was not identified by my human body? I was a pure disembodied mind, an untethered consciousness. I simply did not feel like I was my bodily self, the singular self I had always been.

Rather, I was everything......