The same ethereal rushing sound fills my ears and I find myself drinking cold air and standing far off the ground. The tree I’m in is old and it groans under our collective weight as branches shake and we climb closer to the heavens.

“What time is it?”

“Quarter to seven,” an unfamiliar voice says from my mouth, “the sun’ll be rising properly soon.”

“Beautiful.”

I leap across a gap and land shakily on another branch. There’s the small nagging feeling that I could die here, but that nag is quietened by a soft reassuring voice that dying here, right now, wouldn’t be so bad. My shoes slipped on the bark and I stared at the deepening blue sky and coughed on my cigarette. I leaned back on a branch and it snapped and I felt the freeing feeling of rushing to the earth.

My body hit a branch and I heard the crunch of bone and searing pain shot up my elbow, but before me the scenery changed and I was back in my little white room, eyes alight with wonder and a fresh need to escape this place and return to that tree, no matter how dead my host may have been.

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