"Heston came to in an odorless room, the stillness of the dark enveloping every available inch of the spaces his periphery allowed him to observe. His mind was empty, still echoing some nocturnal reverberation from the expanses of the deep sleep he’d managed to rustle himself out from. His cognizance emerged slowly, deliberately, not from his own will, but through the magic revelations of a brain he couldn’t possibly care enough about to try to understand. As the flipclock snapped the two half-oval zeros to a straight lined one, and this new echo of tangible, analog noise disrupted the dawning of the dream state, the sticky cobwebs of Heston’s waking consciousness began to be stripped away, the way a fog evaporates from a cold lake when the sun finally rises to scare it off. His face glistened like a still pond."
