Passage to the Second Dimension

by Andy Miller

Clicking my reading light off that night, I fell asleep and into a dream, a nightmare. Something pursued me. Something terrible, cold and infinitely powerful. Wet sand slowed my feet and I discovered I was on a beach. Waves crashed in the darkness, consuming my body and pulling me into the wetness. Tumbling through the sea water, my lungs filled with liquid. A terrible force surrounded my skin and soaked through my pores. Electric currents pulsed deep into my bone marrow, disrupting the ionic balance in my nerves. All the muscles in my body went rigid. Sheer pain seeped through my body.

Instantly, I was no longer in water, but covered in burning, blinding light. A hideous, relentless pressure began to build on top of my chest, then on my feet, and, finally on my head. I felt like in was in a demonic hydraulic press or compactor of some sort. The weight intensified. The force was not equal in all directions. Rather, it was as if two planes of brilliant molten silver, one on top, the other below, were converging. The bones in my feet shattered first, exploding immense pain through my legs. Then my ribs compacted, deflating the air from my lungs. My skull gave slightly before shattering violently. The remaining air in my lungs sputtered out through bloody nostrils of deformed cartilage. The rupturing of my liver, kidneys and stomach proceeded heavy internal bleeding. As my skin burst, I realized that I had not lost and would not lose consciousness through this hell.

The force continued, spreading the grotesque fluids and tissues of my body farther upon the planar fields. I was now an elliptical shaped, nearly flat mass of fragmented bones, blood and connective tissue. Neurons sundered, the pain now diminished. My only sensation was pressure, which somehow lingered. The weight ceased to feel like it was crushing me. I could no longer differentiate between the forces above me and the reactive force my bodily tissue exerted in opposition. It was almost as if a gravitational force pulled me simultaneously up and down. The sensation not unlike standing between two infinitely massive planets, whose very gravity pulled every atom in my body downward and upward with infinite force as the planets collided to crush me. The planes might have been pure masses of opposing subatomic particles, one of protons, the other of electrons, whose nuclear properties overpowered any machine know to humanity.

This process might have taken millenniums or nanoseconds. This dimension of time was imperceptible to me, if not nonexistent in this field of pure force. My sense of distance disappeared. My human frame, measured in feet, now could be measured in miles. As the molecules in my body were crushed to their atomic counterparts, their mass was spread out in a near plane, a thickness of no more than several atoms. I have no idea of what the surface area I occupied, but with my atoms scattered and drifting, I might have occupied square light-years of near two dimensional space.

Something peculiar began to occur at this point. The force persisted in squeezing the atoms of my body. These degraded eventually into subatomic particles, and these, into their respective components. This chain continued, consuming massive amounts of heat, flowing from the energy planes above and below. The most fundamental bonds, formed in the first moments of the universe’s creation, broke. I suddenly anticipated the untimely end of my body’s matter. I was being pressed into two dimensional space. No matter could exist in this realm, I realized. What would befall of me? A grinding sensation began in the most elementary matter in my body. Sparks danced from these particles, bouncing outwards into the planar space. The sparks increased, until only a bright light showed my existence. I could see the outer shells of the particles of my body dissolve from matter to a new state, light. The final grain of matter, the inner core of the last subatomic particle of my body, disintegrated, like a grain of salt in water. The two planes collided with a tremendous boom, forming a true plane, infinitely smaller than the thinnest sheet of paper. Matter could not exist in this realm. I now moved in one direction, with an immutable frequency and wavelength, at the speed of light.

My eyes opened. I was awake again. It had been a horrible dream. I tried to sit up and orient myself, but my corpulent white cat lay curled on my chest, purring, as if in a lovely dream.