Under a Starless Sky novel Chapter 26

Shen decided the ‘dream’ friends were right; he needed to make contact. He didn’t care if it was Other, alien, tree spirit, earth spirits, water spirits, or Jinn. Calling ‘Typsy,’ his personal Jinn, didn’t have any noticeable results; she was so magically and physically flamboyant, there would have been no doubt about response. Histrionics would be understating her presence. She was to him as Q was to Picard. She was as wondrously bizarre as a Katy Perry video. Still, he wanted contact with someone, something, and he wanted it now. He wanted contact with a being that was at his level of understanding or greater, who was also genuinely and affectionately disposed with kindness towards all beings. Especially him. This latter was a reasonable caveat when tossing miscellaneous, psychic invitations to the wind.

Lotus pose, right hand palm up resting on leg, left hand resting in right hand also palm up, and the orb resting in his left hand, gently cupped by fingers. It glowed. He closed his eyes and his sight rose to the top of the Sleeping Forest. He felt drawn there, without volition. He did not fight it. He had experienced astral redirection in the past and had never been harmed, so he trusted his inner guide to influence his experience. At least, he was hopeful he was being guided, as opposed to just being a random tourist. He almost laughed, as if tickled; “I am the planchette and the world is the Ouija board.”

Above the canopy of sleeping trees, it was a different world. If he didn’t know it was forest top, he would have thought it a grassy plain. It was a sea of leaves. There were even wheat fields in the sky. There were more animal and insect life up here than he had yet seen below the canopy. To his knowledge, very few of these creatures touched the ground- from cradle to grave, they were tree top bound. He found it too amazing to believe that the human world was so comparatively barren, when there was so much here. Birds. Reptiles. Insects. Alien creatures. Day or night, life flourished. At night, it was like Christmas. During the day, it was akin to Cameron’s Avatar. Flying reptiles, dragonish, reminded him of Anne McCaffrey’s Pern. They were the size of cats. Floating things, like balloon, tethered to trees. When they broke free they rose and popped and glittery, golden dust fell like a glitter bomb. Bat like creatures swarmed the glitter trying to eat it all. The dragons ate these guys. If any of the humans had seen the flying reptiles, then yeah, the stories of dragons would be real enough.

The thought of dragons carried him further from the forests. He found himself at sea. It was fast travel, a blur and a turning, not too unlike the movie adaptation of Doctor Strange. Columns of rocks rose from the sea. The tops of these columns were nests to full size dragons. They were lazy creatures, their wings stretched absorbing sunlight. They reminded him of walrus seals, trying to own their perches, sometimes sharing, sometimes fighting, and snuggling like a group of bats. The occasionally leapt from their perch, dove into the water, and when they emerged, they took flight carrying bottle nose dolphin sized fish, perhaps tuna. What wasn’t eaten or shared was shoved off- landing on nooks where lesser birds and reptiles had their fill, or if it the water, other fish ate. This place was full of life.

From there he saw varied landscapes. Deserts. Oceans. More variety of sea life surfacing and visible just below the sea than he could take in. A life time of categorizing wouldn’t catch a tenth of what the astral eye was perceiving. He came across a place that reminded him of Japan’s Izu peninsula. Waterfalls, natural arches, exotic plant, alien landscapes, pink lakes, and it was coming so fast he was having trouble keeping up with it. He was no longer flying, but jumping from place to place.

He surfed his visions like a kid with ADHD, going from place to place at the whisk of a thought, seeing wonders, and frightening things, and was so filled with delight, wonder, and fear that he wondered if it were all a dream. A giant, sentient plant that ate meat! It wasn’t a Venus fly trap, but tentacles would catch animals that wandered too close and drop it into a lotus where it would be digested. The open lotus was a pool of acid. There were bits and pieces still dissolving. He suspected the animal inside was a squirrel. He saw a ‘Tulpa’ squirrel- it was the spirit of the plant manifested in a way to attract more squirrels- the last thing it had eaten. It was not only an ambush predator, but it created it’s on bait based on the last thing it had eaten!

“Am I dreaming?” he asked himself. He frequently asked this and would perform reality checks.

“No,” came the voice. This was Oa. He was absolutely sure about that.

Shen was so startled, he popped out of his Astral meditation. He cursed himself for being so easily frightened. He got up and walked. He was now too ‘awake’ to return to another session. There was no apparent evidence for life above the Sleeper Trees from down here, except for the occasional fallen fire-snake. He rationalized, ‘I am on the edge of the forest.’ If they pooped or pissed, it wasn’t ‘apparently’ reaching the ground. He could not discern the top of the trees from the ground in the dark. Even if he calmed his mind and brightened the gift orb, he could not see the top. The further into the forest he went, the thicker the trees became the darker the path became. They became so huge he had to forcibly remind himself this was a tree, not a wall. There were places where it was impossible to go further, either because the tree trunk had joined with others, or the tree was that big. He had gotten lost several times, and if he hadn’t been able to minimally remote view the lake side home or the cave, he might have stayed lost.

He dreamt of Loxy. It was a normal dream, not lucid, not informative- probably just a tease.

“Can you open a portal and come to us?”

“I am not in that world,” he reminded her.

“Magic is magic. Tech is tech. And I am telling you, there is no difference between the two,” Loxy said.

On his ship, he could manifest things through replicator technology. In the more magical universes, tech was not absent, but if he wanted something, he could manifest it. “If only I had my world war two mail bag.”

“The cloth one? With MASH on it?”

“Yeah,” Shen said.

“Is the bag magic, or are you magic?”

Shen didn’t answer. He was tired of hearing that. The ‘Secret’ was not only a lie, it was a damn lie. He relented some. Not a lie. Just not accurate. It was complicated. It was not just about the ‘I’ I think I am, but there was another deeper self who also had a vote in what happened. If one accepted neural science, the conscious experience was complete confabulation and choice was an illusion, everything experienced was hallucination. He didn’t buy that, but he did accept he didn’t have full control of everything. Even in his lucid dreams, he didn’t control every detail. If he went into a dream New York and looked up at all the windows on a building, some would be lit and some wouldn’t. Could he pick a window and say, ‘lights on’ and lights come on? Yeah, but he wasn’t in charge of every detail. Something bigger than him had him. He was the goldfish, the water was the subconscious and the bowl was the super-conscious that held it all together.