"Goodnight, little wook," I said, turning out my reading lamp. "I'll meet you on the corner of Cloud Street and Sleepy-Bye Lane. . . ."
"I won't be long, sweetie," she said. "Goodnight."
I squashed my pillow and curled into a sleeping-ball. For some time I had been practicing induced dreams, with minimal success. Tonight I was too tired for practice. I fell off the edge into sleep.
It was a light airy glass house that we saw, high on a greenforest island. Flowers splashed everywhere, a flood
of color through the rooms, over the decks and beyond, spilling downslope to a level meadow. A Lake amphibian in shades of sunrise, parked on the grass. Away over deep water other islands scattered, evergreen to mistblue.
There were trees inside the house as well as out, trees and hanging plants under a great square of roof moved away to let in sunlight and air. Chairs and a couch soft-covered in lemon-vanilla cloth. Shelves of books at easy reach, Bartok's glorious Concerto for Orchestra in the air. The place felt like home to us for the music and the plants, for the airplane outside and the far view, like flying. It was exactly what we wanted for ourselves, some day.
"Welcome the both of you! You made it!"
The two who met us were familiar. They laughed and hugged us joyfully.
We forget in the daytimes, but asleep we can remember dreams from years gone. The man was the same one who first flew me in the Pterodactyl; he was myself in ten years or twenty, but grown younger. The woman was Leslie-by-the-airplane, more beautiful with knowing.
"Sit down, please," she said. "We don't have much time."
The man set hot cider for us, on a driftwood table.
"So this is our future," said Leslie. "You've done a good job!"
"This is one of your futures," said the other Leslie, "and it's you who did the good job."
"You showed the way," said the man. "Gave us chances we wouldn't have had, without you."
"It was nothing, was it, wook?" I smiled at my wife.
"It wasn't nothing," she answered, "it was a lot!"
"The only way we could thank you was to invite you to the house," said Richard-to-be. "Your design, Leslie. Works perfectly."
"Almost perfectly," his wife corrected. "The photovoltaics, they're better than you thought. But I've got some suggestions about the thermal mass. ..."
The two Leslies were about to fall into a deep technical talk of hybrid solar engineering and superinsulation when I realized . . .
"Excuse me," I said, "We're dreaming! Every one of us, isn't that right? Isn't this a dream?"
"Correct," said the future Richard. "This is the first time we've reached you both. We've been practicing this, on and off, for years-we're getting better!"
I blinked. "You've been practicing for years, and this is the first time you've reached us?"
"You'll understand when you do it. For a long time, you'll only meet people'that you haven't seen--future you's, alternate you's, friends who've died. For a long time you'll be learning, before you get into teaching. It will take you twenty years. Twenty years' practice, you can pretty well give direction to your dream-state, when you want. Then you get around to saying thanks to ancestors."
"Ancestors?" Leslie said. "Are we ancient?"
"I'm sorry," he said. "Poor choice of words. Your future is our past. But our future is your past, too. Soon as you get yourself free of this time-belief and on with your dream-practice, you'll understand. As long as we believe in sequential time, we see becoming, instead of being. Beyond time, we're all one."
367
"Glad it's not complicated," said Leslie.
I had to interrupt. "Excuse me. The new book. You know me and book-titles. Did I ever find a title? Did the book ever get written and printed and I can't for the life ofme. . . did I ever find a title?"
The future Richard had not a lot of patience for my doubts. "This dream is not to tell you that. Yes, you found a title; yes, the book got printed."
"That's all I wanted to know," I said. And then, meekly: "What's the title?"
"This dream is to tell you something else," he said. "We got a . . . let's call it a letter . . . from us way out ahead in our future. Your ideas about getting through to young Dick and Leslie, they started something. Now quite a few of us have turned into sort of psychic pen-pals.
"Everything you thought to your younger selves, it got through. Tiny changes, subconscious, but they are alternate people, they may not have to go through the hard times we did. Some hard times, of course, but there's a remote chance that learning how to love won't be one of them."
"The letter we got," said Leslie-to-be, "it said, everything you know, is true!" She was fading; the scene flickered. "There's more, but listen: Never doubt what you know. That wasn't just a pretty book-title, we are bridges. ..."
Then the dream shattered, broke to suitcases stuffed with muffins, a car-chase, a steamboat on wheels. I didn't wake Leslie, but I wrote pages on the pad by my
pillow, remembering in the dark what had happened before the muffins.
When she woke next morning, I said, "Let me tell you about your dream."
"What dream?" she said.
"The one meeting us hi the house you designed."
"Richard!" she said, "I remember! Let me tell you about it! It was a glorious place, deer in the meadow, the pond was a mirror for a field of flowers like we had in Oregon. The design, the solar house will work! There was music inside, and books and trees ... so open and light! It was a beautiful bright-color day and there were Dolly and Angel looking at us, purring back to sleep, fat old cats. I saw the new book, our book, on the shelf!"
"Yes? Yes? What was the title? Say!"
She struggled to remember. "Wookie, I'm so sorry! It's gone. . . ."
"Oh, well. Don't feel bad," I said. "Silly curiosity. Quite a dream, don't you think?"
"It was something about forever."
forty-seven
I FINISHED reading Recollections of Death
one evening shortly after she started Life After Life, and the more I thought, the more I needed to talk with her.
"When you have a minute," I said. "Long minute."
She read on to the end of her paragraph and folded the dust-jacket over her page to mark it.
"OK," she said.
"Does it strike you wrong," I said, "does it strike you wrong that dying is most often a messy sort of inconvenient bother, for most people, something that jumps on us maybe just when we've found the one person in the world we love, we want never to be separated from her even for a day, and death says I don't care I'm going to rip you apart?"
"That has struck me from time to time," she said.
"Why does dying have to be that way? Why should we give our consent to such an out-of-control death?"
"Maybe because the only other choice is suicide," she said.
"Aha!" I said. "Is suicide the only choice? Isn't there a better way of leaving than this random last-minute dying-by-force custom they have on this planet?"
"Let me guess," she said. "You have a plan that you are about to propose? First you ought to know that as long as you're here, I'm not all that unhappy with dying at the last minute."
"Wait till you hear this. Because this is going to appeal to your sense of order: Why, instead of surprise-dying, don't people reach a time when they decide, 'Done! We've finished everything we came to do, there are no mountains that we haven't pretty well climbed, nothing unlearned we wanted to learn, we've lived a nice life,' and then in perfect health why don't they just sit down, two of them under a tree or a star, and lift themselves out of their bodies and never come back?"
"Like in the books we're reading," she said. "What a nice idea! But we don't ... we don't do it because we don't know how to do it."
"Leslie!" I said, full of my plan, "/ know how!"
"Not just yet, please," she said. "We've got to build our house, and there are the cats and the raccoons to think of, and the milk in the refrigerator will g
et sour and the mail has to be answered; we're just getting started again."
"OK. Not yet. But it struck me, reading near-death experiences, they're the same as the out-of-body experiences in the astral-travel books! Dying is nothing more than an out-of-body, from which we don't return! And out-of-bodies, they can be learned!"
"Hold on a minute," she said. "You're suggesting we
choose a pretty sunset and leave our bodies and not bother to come back?"
"Someday, yes."
She looked at me sideways. "How much of you is serious?"
"Hundred percent. Really! Doesn't it beat getting run over by a trolley? Doesn't it beat getting separated, losing a day or two, a century or two together?"
"The together part I like," she said. "Because I'm serious, too: if you die, I do not want to live here anymore."
"I know," I said. "So all we have to do is learn out-of-body travel, like spiritual adepts and wolves."
"Wolves?"
"I read it in a wolf-book. Some zoo-people trapped a pair of wolves, mates, in a soft trap, a humane thing that didn't hurt them a bit. Put them in a big cage in the back of a pickup-truck, drove them to the zoo. When they got there, lifted out the cage, both wolves . . . dead. No sickness, no injury, no nothing. The wolves didn't want to be separated, they didn't want to live in a cage. They let go of their will to live and they died together. No medical explanation. Gone."
"Is that true?"
"It's in the wolf-book, nonfiction. I'd sure do it, if I were them, wouldn't you? Wouldn't you say that's a civilized, an intelligent way off the planet? If the whole earth, all space-time is a dream, why not wake gentle and happy somewhere else, instead of screaming that we don't want to leave here?"
"Do you really think we could do it?" she said. It did appeal to her sense of order.
Hardly had the question faded and I was back on the bed with a dozen books from our shelves. The Study and Practice of Astral Projection, Journeys out of the Body, The Supreme Adventure, The Practical Guide to Astral Projection, Mind Beyond the Body, The weight of them sagged a shallow crater in the mattress.
"These people say it can be learned. It's not easy and it takes a whole lot of practice, but it can be done. The question: Is it worth doing?"
She frowned. "Right now I'd say no. But if you were to die tomorrow, I'd be awfully sorry I hadn't learned."
"Let's compromise. Let's learn the out-of-body part and save the not-coming-back part till a long time later. We've been out-of-body before, both of us, so we know we can do it. Now it's a matter of doing it when we want to, and doing it together. Shouldn't be all that hard."
I was wrong. It was all that hard. The problem was to go to sleep without going to sleep, without losing consciousness of ourselves separate from our bodies. Easy to imagine doing that when one is wide awake. Staying conscious with a blanket of sleep heavier than lead dragging one down-that's no simple task.
Night after night, we'd read our astral-travel books, promise to meet in the air over our sleeping bodies, just a glimpse of each other and remember when we woke. No luck. Weeks went by. Months. It became a habit that lasted long after the books were read.
"Remember to remember. . . ." we'd say, turning out the light.
We'd fall asleep programmed to meet overhead; she'd go to Pennsylvania and I'd be perched on a rooftop in Peking. Or I'd show up in a kaleidoscope future and she'd be in the nineteenth century, giving concerts.
Five months into our practice, I woke up, it must have been three in the morning.
I was trying to move my head on the pillow, change position, when I realized that I couldn't do that because the pillow was down on the bed and I was floating on my back, three feet in the air.
Wide awake. Floating. The room was wall-to-wall in dark silver-grey light. Moonlight, I would have said, but there was no moon. There the walls, the stereo cabinet; there the bed, books neatly on her side, a tumbled stack on mine. And there our bodies, asleep!
A jolt of pure astonishment, like blue fire through me in the night, and then an explosion of joy. That was my body, down there; that curious thing on the bed was me, eyes closed, sound asleep! Not quite me, of course . . . me was the one who was looking down.
Everything I thought, that first night, was underlines and exclamation points.
It works! It's so easy! This is . . . freedom! HURRAY!
The books had been right. Think about moving, and I moved, sliding on the air like a sled on ice. I didn't exactly have a body, but neither was I without one. I had a sense of body-hazy, foggy, a ghost's body. After all our determined practice, how could this be so easy? Extreme consciousness. Compared to this humming knowing razor-life, daily consciousness is sleepwalking!
I turned in the air and looked back. The faintest thread of glowing light led from me to my sleeping form. That's the cord we read about, the silver cord, that links a living ghost to its body. Sever that cord, they say, and off you go.
At that moment a rippling aura blurred from behind me, slowed to hover around Leslie in bed and faded into her body. A second later she moved, turned under the
covers; her hand touched my shoulder. It felt like being tackled from behind; I was catapulted headlong awake by the touch.
My eyes flew open in a room darker than midnight . . . so dark it didn't matter whether eyes were open or closed. I reached for the bed-lamp switch, heart pounding.
"Wookie!" I said. "Sweetie, are you awake?" . "M. I am now. What's wrong?"
"Nothing wrong!" I shouted quietly. "It worked! We did it!"
"We did?"
"We were out of our bodies!"
"Oh, Richie, were we? I don't remember . . ."
"You don't? What's the last thing you can think of before now?"
She brushed golden hair from her eyes, and smiled dreamily. "I was flying. Pretty dream. Flying over fields . . ."
"Then it's true! We remember out-of-body nights as flying dreams!"
"How do you know I was out of body?"
"Because I saw you!"
That woke her up. I told her everything that had happened, everything I had seen.
"But 'seen' is not the word for out-of-body sight, wook. It isn't seeing as much as it is knowing, knowing in detail that's clearer than sight." I switched off the light. "The room's this black, and I could see everything. The stereo, the shelves, the bed, you and me. . . ." In the dark it was impressive, to talk about seeing.
She touched her light, sat up in bed, frowned. "I don't remember!"
"You came by rne like a rose-and-daisy UFO; stopped in the air and sort of melted into your body. Then you moved and touched me and bang! I was wide awake. If you hadn't touched me that moment, I wouldn't have remembered."
It was another month before it happened again, and then it happened nearly in reverse. She waited till morning to tell me.
"Same as yours, wook! I felt like a cloud in the sky, light as air. And happy! I turned around, looked back at the bed, and there we were asleep and Amber, there was dear little Amber curled up on my shoulder, the way she used to sleep! I said, 'AMBER!' and she opened her eyes and looked at me as though she had never left. Then she stood and started to walk toward me and that's the end of it, I woke up in bed."
"Did you feel like you had to stay in the room?"
"No, no! I could go anywhere hi the universe, anywhere I wanted to, see anyone. It's like I had a magic body. . . ."
Powerhouse quiet crackled in the room.
"We did it!" she said, excited as I had been. "We're doing it!"
"Another month," I said, "maybe we can do it again!"
It happened the next night.
This time I was sitting in the air when I woke over the bed, and what caught my attention was a radiant form afloat, flawless sparkling silver and gold barely two feet away, exquisite living love.
Oh, my! I thought. The Leslie I've been seeing with my eyes isn't the tiniest part of who she is! She's body
within body, life within
life; unfolding, unfolding, unfolding . . . will I ever know all of her?
No words required, I knew whatever she wanted me to know.
-You were sleeping, and I was here and I coaxed you out, Richie please come out . . . and you did-
--Hi, sweetie, hi, hi!
I reached to her, and when the light from the two of us touched, there was the feeling we get when we hold hands, yet many times closer, gentle rejoicement.
-Up-I thought to her.-Slowly. Let's try going up.-
Like two warm balloons, we lifted together through the ceiling as if it were cool air.
The roof of the house sank beneath us, rough wooden shingles covered in fallen pine needles, brick chimney, television antenna pointed toward civilization. Down on the decks, flowers asleep in planters.
Then we were above the trees, drifting carefully out over the water, on a night of stray wispy clouds in a sky of stars; thin scattered cirrus, visibility unlimited, wind from the south at two knots. There was no temperature.
If this is life, I thought, it is infinitely beautifuller than anything I have ever . . .
-Yes-I heard Leslie thinking.-Yes.-
-Lock this in that awesome memory of yours, I told her.-You are not going to forget this when we wake!-
-You, either . . .-
Like student pilots on our first solo, we moved slowly together, no quick motions. We had not the smallest fear of height, no more fear than two clouds of falling, two fish of drowning. Whatever bodies these were, they had
no weight, no mass. We could glide through iron, through the center of the sun, if we felt like it.
-Do you see? The cord?-
When she said it, I remembered and looked. Two gleaming cobwebs stretched away from us toward the house.
-We're spirit-kites, on strings,-I thought.-Ready to go back?-
-Nice and slow.-
-We don't have to go back . . .-
-But we want to, Richie!-
Nice and slow, we floated back over the water to the house, through the west wall of the bedroom. We stopped by the bookshelf.
-There!-she thought.-See? It's Amber!- A fluffy light-form floated toward Leslie.
-Hi, Amber! Hi, little Amber!-
There was a hi-feeling, love-feeling from the light. I left them slowly, moved across the room. What if we wanted to talk with someone? If Leslie wanted to see her brother who had died when she was nineteen, if I wanted to talk with my mother, with my father just died, what would happen?