Sometimes time vanishes without a trace—like those nights of dreamless sleep when the clock leaps forward and we only meet ourselves again at morning. But I’ve never passed a night without a dream—and I don’t think most people do—so I couldn’t quite imagine what that absence feels like until a recent colonoscopy. I was sedated for about forty-five minutes and woke to a clean page: no dreams, no drift, just the next moment. The interval might have been a thousand years—or none at all. I had no sense that any time had passed. It was as if I’d stepped out of one moment and directly into the next.
It made me wonder what we mean by time when the mind is absent, and what we fear in death if there is nothing there to feel the fear. Epicurus said we never meet death; anesthesia seemed to stage a small demonstration. Our consciousness stitches time together; without the stitching, the fabric falls silent.
Not everyone’s sedation is serene, and beliefs differ. Still, I find a strange comfort in this thought: life as music, death as the rest between notes—silence that carries no weight. Have you ever opened your eyes and realized the gap had already let you go?
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