So. Now you are awake, or at least conscious, some degree of consciousness at least. You are aware, as you replay it, of a point in that prior situation, call it a threshold, at which or through which the continuity of things appears to have severed off but now been rejoined. Say that a branching of thoughts occurred to you, if they could be called thoughts. Say rather that a set of sensations and images and concepts unrecalled have been experienced by you since then, without your active input, yet now you are once again able to set those thoughts upon a course by yourself. You suspect that you were dreaming, call it a dream, of box-stacking or passageway wandering, something intricate and precise and requiring your full attention and focus, or whatever its dream-proxy may have been.
You slowly become aware of the continued presence of the man on the table, of your continued presence in the events you have reviewed, and are astonished that you are not dead; you startle around frantically, clicking yourself fully back into the world. You are still unable to see, at least in any manner providing data, though you go through the motions of looking. You hear a movement, forward and above, startlingly real and close, and you understand that yes, the man is still up there and moving a little, you can clearly discern the small sounds that he makes.
There is nothing that you can immediately translate, no set of sounds which obviously correspond to an understandable set of actions, but they are sounds nonetheless, sounds of a body in motion; muffled and distorted, table-oriented, they are nevertheless the noises made by a thing alive, or at least by some mechanism or simulacrum or a byproduct of encroaching weather. Assume it is the man, although you are ignorant of how much time has passed. It could be hours or days later and the man long since departed, some rodent snuck in or some bird, now pecking at the top of the table, or if not pecking then roaming, roaming and seeking things to peck, while you lie here with your eyeballs uncovered and think nonchalantly of men, of men!, who have long departed.
You make a noise yourself in response. A bark; words are impossible given your current state, and you do not know if the man has any which you might hold in common. It seems unlikely, given the size of the world, or of what you believe to be the size of the world or at least what you have been told about it. For in that case what would be the likelihood that any man encountered randomly in a random place—is that what has happened here?—that such a man would be similar enough to yourself to understand your own modes of speech and communication? You bark, once, sharply, and listen hard and goggle and baulk with your eyes for any motion of the woods of the table, assuming they are woods, they may be great wood-coloured slabs of metal or other materials, you are not an engineer.
You listen and goggle and baulk until: a possible shuffle, a possible flutter of wings. You see no motion. You bark again more loudly and sharply, three times, thinking to scare off this bird, if it is a bird, before it can ever see you, before it can make any assumptions as to the ease or otherwise of your softer parts for food.