Some time later, Dean awakens atop a filthy cot in a midnight crackhouse on the outskirts of Cicero (I'm guessing) to find Sam grinning at him from across the room. Dean immediately bolts upright to glare before calming down a bit to assume he'd been murdered, and is now reuniting with his younger brother in Hell. Darling Sammy quickly disabuses him of that notion, noting that Dean was poisoned, and that every Satanic claw mark and bloodstain and Ceiling Demon Dean thought he saw up to this point in this evening's presentation was actually a hallucination. Dean quite rightly wonders if Sam himself is a hallucination as well, so Sam makes a great show of carving into his own heretofore remarkably healthy forearm with a silver knife and chugging down a quart or so of salt-laced holy water to prove that he's real, even though such exercises in self-mutilation and religiously themed hydration prove nothing of the sort, and it's all too stupid for words, and then they hug. Finally -- finally -- Dean thinks to wonder how Sam freed himself from The Pit Of The Audience's Everlasting Despair, and not only does Sam not know how he escaped, he also does not particularly seem to care. One minute he was down below getting into repeated slapfights with their bastard brother Adam, and the next, he was flat on his back in the rain in Stull Cemetery. Sam's tried contacting Castiel, but everyone's favoritest little angel hasn't been answering his prayers, so after a couple of weeks' worth of wandering around looking for an explanation, Darling Sammy decided to roll with it, and here we are. Dean's all, "Weeks?" so Sam's forced to admit he's been topside for nearly a year. Needless to say, this admission immediately twists Dean's mighty man panties into a righteous wad, and he gets very, very loud until Sam shuts him down by insisting that his deliberate absence in Dean's life over the past twelve months was for the best -- after everything Dean had been through over the last five seasons, what he needed most was to rest, and to build a life with the extremely bendy woman he claimed to love, and who is Sam to take that away from him? Predictably, Dean's all, "You're my brother!" or something, but they pummeled that pony into the dirt a very long time ago, so I sort of stopped listening to him halfway through this conversation, especially because there are several other ridiculous plot points to cover in this sequence, and after wasting approximately three thousand words on Dean's pointless hallucinations, I'm over it.