1.03.02

In my instant panic, my first instinct was to hold my breath and scan around everywhere for somewhere – anywhere! – safe I could go. But after a minute or so of doing that I noticed that there was no increasing need to take the next breath, that I still did not feel weightless, and that I wasn’t freezing solid in the vacuum of space.

So I pushed my panic down and began to relax a fraction. Without thinking I took a breath as I relaxed, but nothing came of it. Seemingly my astral experiences were mostly driven by familiarity – I was used to breathing, so my astral self continued to mimic that behavior, even though I was in deep space with zero atmosphere. That’s also probably why I didn’t feel weightless – I was used to feeling weight as “normal”, so my astral self kept right on doing that. Which also finally explained how I could walk on floors and sit on benches despite not being able to touch them: my astral self had to have been only mimicking walking on floors and stairs, driven by my expectation of being able to.

But as comforting as it was to know that even in deep space I seemed to be astrally invulnerable, the larger truth was anxiety spiking: I was lost, more than any human had ever been before.

I had left my planet, solar system, and for all I knew even my home galaxy, and was now somewhere unknown in the universe with no way to find my way back.

The fact that I wasn’t in any danger was a very good thing, but I did not want to live as a disembodied spirit floating forever in the void. That idea quite frankly terrified me.

So I calmed myself again and examined the situation rationally. “Either I have a way back, or I don’t. I may as well assume for the moment that I do have a way to get back and try to figure out what that is.”

I paused try to think of something, anything. “Maybe if I try to reach out to my physical body, I can sense the way back to it – worth a shot, right?” I turned the idea over in my head, it seemed worth trying, and in that moment I couldn’t think of a better one.

So I tried to focus on my physical self. I tried to reach my senses out to it, tried scanning in all directions, astrally turning myself to look – but I accomplished nothing. I growled low, frustrated. This time I focused all my will and reached hard for my body.

Immediately I was dying, asphyxiating, freezing, decompressing, flailing, and soundlessly screaming. That was the second time I died and it was quite a bit more than unpleasant.

I had called my body to me.

As I regained my equilibrium I found myself back in my astral form, with my vacuum-killed body floating nearby. So much for that idea.

I moved a little bit away from my corpse – seeing myself like that was not good for my mood – and tried to come up with a Plan B. And continued to fail at exactly that.

I decided to take a break and see what it would be like to explore space. Everywhere I looked I saw countless stars and not much else, so I picked one at random and flew toward it, increasing speed as I went, though carefully. I almost went through and past it, but slammed on the brakes in time to see a rather bright bluish-white star fill most of my field of vision.

The view was amazing.

On another whim I dove in toward the star, and plunged inside it – no ill effect of course. Whatever sense I was using to astrally “see” was apparently superior to vision, because my sight adjusted and instead of seeing nothing but brilliant blinding light I saw textures and energy flows inside the heart of the star itself.

I surfaced out from the star and gazed outward, looking for any possible planets, but I knew before I started that seeing a planet at that distance was probably going to be impossible, and it was.

The problem with space it that it’s really big, vastly more than we humans can even conceive. Even if this star had planets and I knew which direction to look, I would almost certainly see nothing without a powerful telescope. I tried making my sight magnify briefly, but nothing happened – apparently that was not an option for astral sight.

So I picked out another star and flew to it. My skill at adjusting my speed seemed to increase. I spent some time visiting several stars in this way, touring a tiny slice of the cosmos. I was still not ready to face the big question of how – or if – I was going to get back home.

Although there was no way to know just how far I travelled in between these stars, I remembered that the distance from the Sun to the Earth took light about 8 minutes to travel. The distance between the stars was usually measured in light-years – one light-year being the distance light travels in a year – and as I recalled, the closest star to the Sun was at least three or four light-years away.

I was travelling between stars within minutes.

Astral travel apparently didn’t have to follow the rule about not going faster than the speed of light. Which also meant that my first burst of speed that took me away from the earth could have landed me absolutely anywhere in the universe.

I spent a while more zooming around the universe, gaining speed all the while – astral travel seemed to have no upper limit. It got so fast I was crossing the distances between stars in seconds.

I was pretty sure that any star I could see was probably within whatever galaxy I happened to be in, so for my next trip, I picked out a faint smudge of light. Smudges, as opposed to dots, wouldn’t be stars, they would be nebulae, clusters, or hopefully distant galaxies. I was no astronomer, but I thought that nebulae and star clusters would be larger smears, and the smudge I had picked I thought had that familiar galaxy silhouette.

Another fact I remembered is that while the stars within a galaxy could be 80,000 light years apart, galaxies themselves were vastly more distant then that. In other words, I wanted to push this astral speed even higher.

I focused on that smudge and projected myself at it.

And arrived above that galaxy in the next instant. Without crossing the intervening space.

With all my other traversals, I was always aware of crossing the intervening space, no matter how short the trip was, even as a mad blur. But this time I did not – I went from one place to another instantly. My astral self could teleport.

Score another one for astral travel!

Then I got excited – because in stories involving teleportation, a mental image of the desired destination was all that was usually required, the more familiar the better.

So I closed my astral eyes, and took some time to imagine every detail about my bedroom. And tried to project myself there.

When I opened my eyes I saw that I had succeeded.

I immediately reached down to pick up a back-scratcher I keep next to the bed, and pushed myself hard to actually make contact – and I was instantly back in my actual body – alive, thank you very much.

Checking the clock I saw I had spent the entire day roaming the cosmos, and I felt like it, so I tossed off my clothes and dropped into bed. I was asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

My last thought before I slumbered was: “I wonder what tomorrow will bring!”