I didn’t get out of bed right away when I awoke the next morning. Visions of space still danced in my head. It was all happening so fast, I decided right then to re-embrace the normality of my life before the meteorites fell. I figured it might be a good idea to just put a pause on all this astral power stuff and go back to regular life for a week. After a week of normalcy, then I’d come back to mess with the astral stuff some more.
Even in the moment a part of me had doubts about the possibility of making it a week, but I was determined to give it a shot. So I returned to “normal” life with gusto. I cleaned up the apartment a little, followed up with some clients and their IT needs, got on Facebook to chat with family and friends about ordinary stuff, played some games on my computer, and watched some of the TV shows I had waiting. Had a light lunch of a hot dog, a bowl of cereal for dinner, a few small chosen snacks in between (single oreos, only 70 calories each) and logged it all on my food diary app so I could stay on track to continue to lose weight. Spent the night watching YouTube videos – some of videos of other meteorite impacts – and got in bed around 11pm.
One day down, six to go.
Getting up on Wednesday, there was one thing I tried very hard to not think about, but which kept creeping back into my mind. I don’t know if you’ve picked up on it yet, dear reader, but I’d been avoiding looking too closely at one particular truth of my recent extraordinary experiences.
Around noon I could ignore it no longer, so I decided to face it the best way I knew how – by running an experiment. I took a quick trip to the local CVS store to get what I would need, and brought it home.
I sat on my bed, once again. Put the monitor over my index finger, and the beep-beep-beep started. The screen showed my pulse as 88 beats/minute. I took a breath and again left my body, retaking my astral form.
Well, I had made one day of normalcy.
Standing there outside my body, I watched the monitor fail to count any more heartbeats, warnings flashing.
That settled it. I wasn’t just taking my astral form while leaving my body to snooze in the meanwhile, like in the the stories. No, my truth was grimmer: apparently the way I took astral form was to will my own death first.
Every time I left my body, I left it a corpse.
That was what I kind of had guessed given my experiences so far, but not wanted to face. It was a somber realization.
Instead of trying to pick something up to re-incorporate this time, I tried simply pushing myself back into physicality, kind of like I did accidentally in deep space. It worked, the corpse on the bed vanishing the same moment I became physical again. I put the heart monitor back on my finger and it resumed it’s beeping as it monitored my newly living heart.
I repeated the test twice more, with the same results.
I can’t tell you why, and maybe I don’t have to, but the idea of having astral powers seemed a lot more whimsical before I knew that every astral journey began with me willing myself to death first.
Back in my body again, I took a deep breath, telling myself one of the mantras I had picked up from a delightful Harry Potter fanfic called “Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality” – which explored the idea of what if Harry had been sorted into Ravenclaw.
The mantra was: “What’s true is already so, owning up to it doesn’t make it worse.”
So I did.
After that, I got back on the normalcy wagon, put my new powers back down, and tried not to think about them for a bit. My abilities had lost a little bit of their fun factor, so I went back to taking a little break.
And this time I would have made a week without using them, I really think, if I hadn’t been murdered first.