I wasn’t scared. I guess I was too curious for that. I just felt cool about the whole situation. And because of that lack of anxiety I was able to examine my situation calmly.
I decided to see if I could move about and instantly I could. Just by willing myself I floated to the other side of the artroom, observing the heads and hunched shoulders of the students at work as I did so. I half-expected some of them to look up as I passed over, perhaps disturbed by the breeze I must be creating, skimming along like that. I thought my tutor might bark, “You there, True, come down from zat ceiling and get back to your pless!” in that prissy accent of his, but he continued to study his book, one finger of his hand dipped deeply into his breast pocket as he settled the silk hanky. I could see myself—I’d stretched both hands out in front of me like some ethereal Superman and they were plainly visible—so why couldn’t the teacher and students see me? (At that time, of course, I hadn’t yet come to understand that it was my mind filling in what it expected to see.)
Hovering over a bright window, I turned back to the class. The notion of passing through the window glass had occurred to me, but while remaining perfectly level-headed, I was a little anxious about wandering too far from my natural body. I really did not want to lose sight of it, and I think that was quite reasonable. What if I got lost outside? What if there was a point where the spirit (or whatever I was up there, hovering inches away from the ceiling) became too separated from the physical body and something, some invisible connection, snapped, making re-entry impossible?
Anyway, during that time in the artroom I was, as mentioned, pretty cool about the situation, even if I was reluctant to let my material self out of sight. I looked around, took notice of things, considered how I felt about my condition, then, and only after several minutes, I became eager to get back into my body. (It was like resisting one last chocolate from the box because you’ve already had too many.) And the moment I felt that way I was back.
I don’t recall any journey across the room, nor dipping myself into my natural form; I was just there, looking at the world through my physical eyes once more. Only then did I begin to feel some panic, but it was mild. I think I was too stunned to experience overwhelming anxiety. Soon I was plain curious as well as elated. I’d gone through something rare—at least I thought it was rare, because I’d never heard of this sort of thing happening to anyone on a regular basis, although I’d read of one-off dream-flying and of survivors who claimed they had left their bodies while close to death.
I sat there bemused, worrying that my cracked skull had its aftermath, that the impact had messed with my brain and was creating hallucinations, fantasy trips. But I’d been too passive during the experience and observed too much too clearly for this to have been and illusion. Besides, everything else in the room had been quite ordinary and the other students’ behaviour perfectly normal.
Laying my paintbrush down, I sank back into my chair. What the hell was going on? I remembered the hot potato incident, then the immediate consequences of the motorcycle accident. I’d told the doctors of my out-of-body experience and they’d just smiled benevolently and explained that when the head—the brain, more specifically—took such a hard knock, it often went into some kind of seizure, perhaps losing control for a short time, so that visions in the unconscious state might seem like reality. Nothing to worry about, but a few tests would be in order.
Scans showed nothing amiss as far as my head was concerned; fortunately, the fracture had been minimal, the bone barely penetrated, and the brain itself revealed no evidence of swelling or injury. Rest up, give yourself time for the leg to heal and the skull’s light fracture to knit together. Any trauma to the head could be dangerous and cause concern, no matter how light the blow, but in this case, there appeared to be no such problem. A little surgery on the leg was all that was required.
It was some months after the artroom OBE that I began to think back and re-examine some of the “dreams” I’d had from the age of even onwards, dreams that had not gradually faded from memory as they were supposed to, those that had lingered in my thoughts because of their extreme clarity and almost rational content. In them, I’d visited places I’d only heard or read about, art galleries (paintings and sculptures had fascinated me from an early age), playgrounds, and homes of schoolfriends. I’d spied on my mother as she sewed the lapels of handmade suits while pausing every so often to watch her precious soaps and game shows on the small television we owned and which lit up an otherwise dreary corner of the room. There was no sense of adventure with these dream excursions, nothing exciting about them at all really, and this was what eventually made me realize they were something other than natural dreams.
That’s when I started reading up on the phenomenon and discovered it was more common that I had first thought. I learned that certain curious and dedicated people had achieved by research and perseverance what came naturally to me. Even so, nothing I read compared exactly to my own experiences. Others, apparently, had not attained such clearness of vision or logical continuity; their OBEs were more dreamlike and lacked control, and generally were broken up by blank periods of unconsciousness so that their flow was interrupted, to be remembered later only in vague episodes. However, I did pick up some useful techniques for putting myself into a receptive state, not quite a trance-like mode, but a kind of open responsiveness that encouraged the phenomenon to occur. Things like alert relaxation, where the body is in repose, but the mind is acutely aware if itself rather than the physical body; or the method of loosening the body completely, resting it limb by limb, piece by piece from head to toe; or the perception of outside from within, as if my eyes were merely portals through which I could observe the outer world; or shrinking inside myself, so that my skin and flesh were like an ill-fitting suit, loose enough to escape from. Then there was the mirror image method, whereby a person thinks of themselves floating about their own body, just a foot or two away; the image is clear, and exact replica of himself or herself wearing the same clothes, sporting the same five-o’clock shadow or make-up; the person then imagines he or she is now looking down at their own body from above, that now it’s the physical self that is being viewed. It’s supposed to make the transition easier, but it never worked for me.
In fact, all I had to do was make myself as relaxed as possible, relieve my mind of extraneous thoughts, and will myself to leave my body, sometimes looking at some particular spot on the ceiling or far corner of the room so that my “spirit” had a destination. Then I’d wait for it to happen.
Which it didn’t, more often than not. But sometimes I was successful and the more I was, the more I started to control my “flight”. Initially, I never left the room I occupied, but gradually I began to venture further to other rooms in the flat, cautiously graduating to outside locations, so that ultimately I was able to fly above rooftops, explore places I’d never physically visited—Buckingham Palace was dull, while the homes of some complete strangers could be interesting, even scary. It seemed I was limited only by my own boldness (I have to admit that in those early days I was somewhat timid; the fear of being unable to find my way back to my body was too strong. I was also afraid that the further afield I travelled, the easier it would be to break the psychic link to my physical self).