The old man has trouble dying. The peace he hoped for was disturbed by dreams. Some of the dreams took on the sharp edges of a nightmare, and kept sleep away.

These dreams distorted his thinking so that he muttered to himself, "You have to be mindless to be mindfull..." As he looked outside the open window, he said, "You have to be landless to be landfull..."

It was late evening, the lights are fading. His ears were filled with clamouring voices, and his mind with vivid pictures from the past. His mind gradually emptied itself of all that he himself had gathered through the years and left him naked, skinned.

He chuckled, lying on his wooden bed and said to himself, "This is the falling out of from the skin I knew long ago..."

He had experienced this just after his mother died, when he was about eight. It was not the sense of loss that his mother's death brought, but a loss of the self. The person he had known to suddenly die.

Just then his wife came hobbling in, a cracked bowl of porridge in her hands as she said, "Must eat for your body's strenght," She was thin, almost only bones and silvery hair sitting on top. His new consciousness.

"Is this death at last?" he asked her, "Is this why the body goes cold and stiff only afterwards?"

But death won't come easy. It came like stillness of the night. Like story creation, heard or read...the land that resided within sleep memory. Wasn't it God, who created the universe for Man to sport in? The land that came to him now before the remigration of people from their original countries. The great war and the harsh, sun-reflecting buildings.

On the mindscape that he now lie between life and and murky, there rose a fresh and green land. Seeds popped, transparent thin stems reached out from the ground. The ground surface cracked and thick tree trunks heaved themselves up through the resinous ground. Grass matted the slopes, creepers wove themselves into green canopies. His land screamed with life, and shook with dangers.

The old man became delirious, his wife had to wipe him with a damp cloth. He rambled on all the time. His speech was beyond his control and his body is not his keeping.

"Where's my body? I can't feel it...maybe it jumped out of my skin."

"There you are, just a shape! Too dark now to see, too dark..."

"...what being yourself? A face with many destinies written on it?"

"I don't want to know...I'm too frightened! Afraid I would fall into a dark, deep hole!"

"...I can only take the thing that could be touched, the body!"

"I can't die...how can I die? The mind isn't full to be emptied. The body isn't there for the blood to grow cold!"

"This is dying. Having not lived, but this is dying, this is dying. This is..."