GEEZE!

I’ve been pranked by my own mind!  The traitor!

See, yesterday morning when I was sleeping off the time before my shift began when I heard another car drive up and voices, door slamming and such, so I came partially up from the depths of sleep and opened my eyes to look around.  I didn’t raise my head or sit up though as I didn’t want whoever it was to see me there.  This meant I didn’t see whoever it was either. 

It was still pretty dark out and I knew I had more time to sleep, but didn’t drift immediately off.  Instead, I lay looking at the windows and then the upholstered ceiling above me.  And then I was floating up toward the ceiling, through the blanket, just lightly bumping my nose against it before floating right back down again.

This was/is something for me to get excited about as, for all my reading on the subject, I still don’t know how to do it on purpose.  It just happens now and then but very rarely.  I was stoked!  Yes, I know that dreaming is soul travel too, but you just suddenly bounce from place to place without a sensation of leaving here to get there when you travel that way and you’re not quite (sometimes not even close) to the you that went to sleep in your own bed.  When you embark from an awake/partially awake state, you get to see the whole journey and remain very firmly the person you are in your waking hours.  You know?

I floated back up a second time.  This time, I went through the ceiling and hovered a few feet above the car in the cool open morning air before falling back down again.  This time, though, I knew I was going to do it again.  I had it all figured out.  I might not understand the mechanics, but I knew the feeling because I still felt it and was determined to hold onto it.

I floated up and down several times; mostly to the ceiling and back, but sometimes through it a few feet above the car again.  Then I got all the way to the top of the tree in front of the car – really congratulating myself then – but that’s when I saw Jeb walking toward the car to wake me up so I fell right back down again.  He found me already looking at him through the window when he got there.

So this morning, while I lay in the car to sleep  before my shift, I decided to try and stay awake so I could do it all the way this time.

Bah.  I fell asleep so fast I didn’t even see it coming.  That light in the tunnel was an oncoming train.  Well, not really, but you know what I mean, right?

Yet there I was floating up again, stopping just sort of the ceiling… which turned out to be the bottom of a bunk bed.  The car does not have bunk beds.  This should have clued me in right there, but I was too excited to pay any attention to messy little details like that. 

I floated up through the upper bunk, then the stucco ceiling, a musty attic, the wood shingles, and finally out into a starry moon-lit sky – another few inconvenient clues I managed to ignore.  I had a brief thought of, ‘Hey wait a minute!  None of this is right!’ but quickly dismissed it.  I knew who I was and where I was supposed to be, but to look too closely would have been anticlimactic to put it mildly.

There was the roof of a rambler style house with a familiar looking garden down there.  The back garden was cut into three tiers down which a little waterfall tumbled.  Each tier had a lawn on it, sparkling with dewdrops, and the slopes between were thick with blooming flowers save where a curving steps made of railroad ties ran up to each level. 

Drawn, I landed on the bottom-most tier closest to the house and took in a deep breath of rose, jasmine, chrysanthemum, and pine – which came from the forest on one side of the garden and house.  Oh I liked this place and I knew it!  It was my home from the age of 5 to 14. 

Currently, there is no longer a forest beside the garden and I knew that, but it didn’t stop me from seeing it just the same.  It was all just as I remembered it at the age of 14 and I fully expected my parents to still be inside it.  I figured it would be nice to drop in on them but since I haven’t lived with them (or my mom at least) for many years now, I thought I’d just go around to the front door and knock properly.

I went through the gate to the woodsy side of the house and was just walking past the wood pile when one of the big frogs I used to feed as a kid showed up in the moonlight and jumped up right onto the front of my coat.  I was glad to see him so I told him “Hello there Leopold.  Nice to see you again,” and let him stay there.  He seemed to like the ride.

The front of the house look different enough to me that I hesitated when I got there to knock on the door.  I couldn’t say how it was different… just somehow.  I had a dawning thought of ‘Why would my folks be here anyway?  They moved – we ALL moved  from there when I was 14.  New people will be living here.’  inconvenient thought that.  I brushed it aside and knocked on the door anyway. 

‘My hand didn’t go through the wood like air.  It should have if this were a real OBE.  I also wouldn’t be physical, much less visible. Who cares?’ I irritably commented to myself just as my mother was opening the door and evincing surprise at finding me there.  She could see me.

She invited me in.  My step-dad Fred was also there.  Not my real father as he’d been when I was a kid.  Nope.  Just Mom and Fred and a little toy poodle named Jeana.  Okay, that worked.  I was tired of trying to be perfect in this experience.  I’d just accept things as they were.

The earth tones of the 70s were starkly absent from the decor.  The carpet was a different color (a lively pattern of turquoise, rose, and mint), the drapes were different, the layout of the rooms was different.  The kitchen was pretty much the same though.  Even so, and despite my determination to just accept things, the jig was abruptly up.  I knew I was dreaming. 

Damn it anyway.  I’d been fooled.

Please excuse me while I go away and sulk over this.