His End and his Beginning by Jorge Luis Borges

After death, after the wrench and the stark loneliness, he dropped into a deep sleep. When he woke up, every- day habits and places came back to him. Telling himself he must keep his mind off what had happened the night before (and comforted by this decision), he slowly dressed. At the office he went about his work as well as he could, though with that uneasy feeling, usually brought on by fatigue, of repeating something he had done before. He had a suspicion that others were avoiding him, that maybe they knew he was dead. That night his terrible dreams began and, though he never remembered a trace of them, he feared their return. In time this fear prevailed, coming between him and the page he was writing or the book he was trying to read. Letters swarmed and throbbed, faces-familiar faces-began to blur, and men and objects kept drifting away from him. In a frenzy of tenacity, his mind clung to these shifting shapes.

Strangely enough, he never suspected the truth, but all at once it struck him. He realized that he was unable to recall the shapes or sounds or colors of his dreams-that there were no shapes or sounds or colors-and that they were not dreams. They were his reality, a reality beyond silence or sight and so, beyond memory. This troubled him far more than the fact that after his death he had been struggling against a current of meaningless images. The voices he had heard were no more than echoes; the faces he had seen, masks. Even the fingers of his own hand were shadows; but however dim and unreal, they were familiar, they were something to cling to.