Above the Bed

Lyrics

[Intro]
(room tone, and a sense of the ceiling being closer than it was)
You are looking at the top of your own head.

[Verse 1]
Not dramatically. Not in a tunnel of light. Nothing like that.
Just: the point of view has moved about four feet upward
and turned around, and is looking down, quite calmly,
at a person in a bed who is you, and who is fine,
and the duvet is the colour the duvet actually is,
and the room is the correct room, and you are in two places.

[Chorus]
Above the bed. It is more common than anyone says.
One in ten will report it, and most only ever once,
and almost nobody mentions it, because of how it sounds
to say out loud, in daylight, to a person eating breakfast.
Above the bed. Looking down at yourself.
And feeling, more than anything, mildly curious.

[Verse 2]
The details are usually wrong. That's the part that interests me.
People check afterwards — the position of a chair,
what was on top of the wardrobe, whether the door was shut —
and it's the room as they remember it, not the room as it is.
So it isn't a window. It's a model. A very good model.
Built by someone who has been in this room ten thousand times.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And the feeling is not terror. Everybody expects terror.
The overwhelming report is calm — a kind of administrative calm,
the way you'd look at a photograph of a room you used to live in.
No fear of dying. No sense of leaving. No light, no tunnel.
Just a person, from slightly too high up, breathing steadily,
and a mild interest in the arrangement of the furniture.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the ceiling, receding)
Down.
Back down. There. That's better.