At age 14 I was clinically dead for 10 minutes. The details of how I found myself in this predicament are unimportant, and mostly dull. What matters is the experience I had while in this state. Let me explain.

After the shockwave knocked me out, the next thing I knew, I was travelling down this tunnel, at some speed, to a bright, almost blinding, light. For a moment, I thought I was still caught in the blast, but I soon realised that this was something else entirely. After a short while I was ejected in to the light itself and found myself in the most peculiar of places. Immediately in front of me were large gates which were encrusted with what looked like pearls. The effect was rather showy, even tacky, like a stone-clad house. The ground was all fluffy, almost like clouds but more solid, dryer and with lower levels of electro-static charge. It was all very ethereal and yet painfully middle-class in an indefineable way.

After a few moments I was greeted by a be-sandled man with a brown beard, a crown of thorns and a badge which read "HELLO: MY NAME IS jesus", with "jesus" scrawled, almost illegibly, in thick black marker.

"Wow," I said, "is this heaven?"

Jesus simply nodded and then pointed off in to the distance. I looked but had to squint hard before I could make out the sign, "Please do not feed The Jesus", it said. I looked confused for a moment.

"What's that got to do with anything?"

Jesus shrugged so as to make clear that, although it had nothing to do with the conversation at hand, He just wanted to make sure I was aware of it.

I gazed around with a sense of awe, wonder and possibly humility. It was literally exactly how I had imagined heaven, right down to the decor and layout. Finally Jesus cleared his throat - a divine and beautiful cough, the resonating flem within his oesophagus touched my soul and stroked it with gentle and holy hands.

"You see all this?" He said.

"Yes?"

"Well I'm afraid none of it actually exists. Sorry." It was at this point that He pulled an exaggerated frown and looked down sarcastically. For a moment I was stunned in to silence...

"What?" I said, eventually.

"It doesn't exist. None of it. It's all just a fairy story that your oxygen starved brain is holding on to in the final few moments of life. Think of it as a sort of dream, except you're not so much going to wake up from it as... well die. I suppose you can best imagine it as a kind of wild party in your brain - your neurons are going absolutely mental and by the time the party's over they will have completely wrecked the place. In real terms, I'd say you have about 3 minutes."

"Thanks, Jesus. Thanks a bunch." I finally said.

Jesus laughed and threw back his head/hair combination. "Don't blame me! It's pretty obvious this is all impossible."

"But everyone said this was all true and... Well people built churches and everything! It all seemed perfectly plausable at the time."

"Did you actually think about it or just accept what you were told like some kind of Daily Mail reader?" Jesus' face turned almost stern.

"Well... I guess I just didn't think about it."

"Then you've no one to blame but yourself."

"Fair enough..." All of a sudden things began to fade... "What's going on?" I asked.

"You're waking up now... You're going to live."

"A second chance! Thank you Jesus!"

"Make the most of it. You've got 80 or 90 years at best and then an eternity of nothingness. You will simply cease to exist and be soon forgotten by all."

"Jesus, Jesus, you really are a dick."

"Yeah, being fictional will do that to you..."

And with that. He was gone.

It's been almost 20 years since that fatal night but, in some ways, it almost feels as though it were yesterday. Jesus still turns up in my dreams from time to time but all he says now is "90 years max!", taps his watch and laughs. If anything I think he's become even more of a dick.

The only comfort in all of this is that when I die I'm taking Jesus with me. Let's see how he likes that, the dick.