Although I had no sense of time, I knew it was still late night or early morning because it was dark outside save for the street lights. Besides, when I looked, the digital radio/alarm clock on the bedside cabinet told me it was 1.55 a.m. So who could be ringing me at that hour? Oliver, phoning to apologize for his behaviour earlier? I doubted it. My copywriter’s strops could last for days, sometimes weeks when he was really in a sulk. So who then?
Andrea. Her and Prim’s images leapt into my mind. Andrea would certainly ring if something was up at home. Or maybe she had expected me to ring her last night, as I always did when I was away. I invariably checked if things were okay with Prim and Andrea before dinner or around bedtime (my daughter’s bedtime), but tonight—last night, to be accurate—I’d been too engaged in hassles with Ollie to remember. There might not be a problem at home, I thought, calming myself to a degree, because my wife was aware that I’d probably still be working late into the night, so she wouldn’t be disturbing my sleep. I hoped that was the case as I studied the still-ringing phone.
It stopped abruptly, but I continued to stare. She’d given up, but would be worried that I hadn’t answered. What the hell could I do? I certainly couldn’t phone her back. One more try at the body. You never know, it could just work this time.
I rose and knelt on the bed, gazing down at my mashed face and the sight made me feel sick to my non-existent stomach. I didn’t avert my gaze though. Even if I could get back inside and take control, tap out my number on the phone despite blood-drenched and now misaligned real eyes, how could I speak to Andrea without a discernible mouth? I’d only spit gore and loose teeth into the mouthpiece.
Shit in a bubble bath, what the fuck was I supposed to do? I roared my anguish, a sound no living person could ever hear, and I sobbed into my hands. What had happened to me? Why had it happened to me?
Understand that the thing which makes you a person is not the flesh and blood, but the mind—not the brain—that lives within the shell. It forms the personality, the philosophy, the instinct and perception, the very nature of the man or woman or child themselves and I’ve learned over the years that this is what you take with you when you leave the body. It is you, and when you’re in spirit or OBE you perform just as though you’re in the physical. You close your eyes, you weep, you feel fear, you feel joy, you feel all emotions as usual; and you dress yourself as you would in life, your mind creates the phantom material; as mentioned before, you can experience desire, but because your mind is aware there can be no physical expression, it necessarily becomes unimportant. Your mind also reconciles other senses, so that you can hear, touch (but not actually feel—it’s all to do with perception), obviously see and you can speak, although no one else will hear you (in feet, all those senses are inexplicably heightened, because no longer are there physical defects or dulling limitations). I guess it’s all to do with the mind convincing itself—no, wait, it has to be stronger than that. Possibly it’s because the mind is the reality, all other material things non-existent or irrelevant, unless accepted by the mind itself. I’m no philosopher, never was, but it makes some kind of sense to me. Let’s just say I existed in the sixth sense, which does not preclude all of the other five. Taste is missing and so is smell. Just like in dreams, in fact.
But the main point I’m making is that even in my spirit form I acted exactly as if I were occupying my body as normal. I could sit, lie down, walk, run, jump. And on top of this, I knew I could fly, float, pass through walls, and think myself to other locations.
So now I kneeled on the bed and wailed. I was frightened and lost and had no idea where I was supposed to go from here. I was homeless; I had no body and no tangibility.
I cried for Primrose and Andrea, and I cried for myself. God, I even cried for Oliver and Sydney, my friends and business partners: what were they going to do without me, who would get the work done? I cried for my mother. We didn’t get along anymore, but what was she to do with me gone? She’d lost one man already, her husband, and now me, her son. Self-pity mingled with commiseration for my friends and family as I hugged my self there on the big, blood-ruined bed, rocking backwards and forwards on my knees, and all the while the demolished face of my old self watched me with crooked glazed eyes.
It took some time, but eventually I began to calm down. I wasn’t all-cried-out just yet—I knew more tears would be shed later—but I gradually became aware that staying here with the wrecked meat and bone that once was my human form was pointless. Besides, I felt an urgent need to see my wife and daughter once more, because maybe there would be no other chance; if I was dead (and let’s face it, all the signs indicated that I was) I might have only this last chance before I went on to the place where all souls go (I began truly hoping there was a heaven after all).
Before my life expired, merely the imagined picture of a location was enough to get me there almost immediately; I was always aware of my flight, but it usually went by so swiftly it hardly felt like a journey. This time, however, I consciously had to make the effort of leaving the hotel room by passing through the thick outside wall into the night. Once outside I had to follow a route to my home that I knew, transportation now a considered thing rather than just a wish-fulfillment. I was strangely chilled as I travelled, as if a breeze was flowing through me, even though I had no physical outline to capture its draught, and my journey was by short body-hopping movements, casting off with either hands or feet to float some distance before sinking to the ground again. It was like the recurring dreams I used to have where I never could quite fly above the earth completely, my own pragmatism allied with gravity drawing me back to solid ground each time. Those astronauts who had walked the moon must have shared the same experience.
The London streets were quiet, the occasional lonely lorry or all-night bus passing me by; only a few cars were about, their headlights dipped. There were people here and there, sometimes in small groups as if they had left late-night parties or clubs together (this was the weekend, I reminded myself) and I avoided them without knowing why. But on turning a corner and briefly grounded at the time, I ran straight through a person who had been about to make the turn from me other direction.
It was the weirdest feeling, because for an instant I was almost part of the stranger. Alien thoughts poured through me, not quite visions and certainty not manifestations, but thoughts, representations of people the person must have known. There was a fraction of a situation too, an altercation between two women, neither of whom was particularly attractive, over the person—a man, I assumed, the guy whose body I’d trespassed on—himself. There were other things too, as if this pedestrian was carrying the baggage of his whole life around with him, but these were confusing and easily relegated by the two-women scenario. Then it was gone and I was in open space again.
I felt suddenly drained, slightly nauseated, as if my invasion was punishable—or perhaps too much to handle—and I came to a halt. Turning my head to watch the man’s retreating back, I saw that he also had stopped and was looking behind him towards me, a bewildered expression on his lamp-lit face. I thought he might even see me and I unconsciously raised a hand in salutation, but of course he stared right through me (literally).
He shuddered, a jerky spasm, a feeling of someone walking over his grave, I guessed. And I felt the same way too, although I didn’t give a shudder. The man turned and went on his way, disappearing round the next corner, leaving me perplexed and no less afraid for myself. It was an unpleasantness I intended to avoid in the future. If there was some kind of future for me.
Resuming my journey, I discovered I could no longer float quite so easily. I realized much later that I was becoming used to my situation, my state-of-being, and the familiarity appeared to set its own limitations. You see, this was not entirely the OBE of before, when I had a proper life. No, I was now in some kind of limbo, unattached but still linked with the former life. Somehow, this condition imposed certain restrictions and I was yet to learn what they were. I guessed that the more I accepted and adapted, the less freedoms I would have, reasoned thought perhaps setting its own boundaries, if only to a certain extent.