Fan Casting Two Lines - Part 4 in Strange Tales

The scene shows no transition: Stephen is ripped from his own body (the light shatters into multiple colors before focusing on a predominantly pale blue amidst a space that is sometimes dark, sometimes light), while his consciousness shoots out of him with a speed that doesn't even allow him a scream. His sensation was of a fall without ground, stretched beyond the limits of what his rational mind could accept. Strange still tried to cling to something—logic, science, control—but everything slipped through his thoughts, like his wounds reopened before his eyes. The ice cracking. The dry, almost timid sound. Black water under a frozen river, swallowing everything. He saw his own younger face, paralyzed between panic and hesitation. Time slowed down, almost mocking him. There would be no emotional anesthesia. He felt a tightness over his body—the weight of guilt, the desire to never be weak again, to never lose again. He saw faces he had left behind. Loves he had tried to control. People he had tried to correct. In that illogical plane, Stephen tried to move his hands – only to feel no weight on them. And then, the speed ceased as abruptly as it had begun, Stephen pulled back, compressed again within himself, the air returning to his lungs like a thermal shock. Staggering, eyes wide, heart racing. That man now watched him in silence, before being questioned. – ..What on earth was that? – It’s what we here call the Astral Plane. And it’s always quite revealing for those who access it.