Waking up to that fact that it’s not only a dream; it’s another world.

“Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore. We must be over the rainbow.”
– Dorothy, in the movie version of The Wizard of Oz

I am thinking about the moments, in the midst of a dream adventure, when we wake up to the fact that we are not in ordinary reality.

You look in a bathroom mirror and you see a very different face.

You are with people and suddenly remember that in the regular world they are dead.

Fish start flying through the air.

A horse jumps out of a painting on the wall and thunders across the room.

Such moments are prompts to dream lucidity. You say to yourself, I’m dreaming. Sometimes this startles you into leaving the scene and dropping back into your body in the bed. With practice, you may learn to use these awakenings, inside the dream state, to carry on with the adventure, now fully aware that you have the power to navigate, making conscious choices – and powers you don’t have when you are in physical reality.

The prompt may not only help you to become a lucid dreamer; it may awaken you to the fact that you are in a different world. In one of the great Celtic voyage tales (immrama), known as the Voyage of Máel Dúin, the travelers in their skin boat set off from what is now Galway city. They awaken to the fact that they are no longer on the Irish Sea when they reach an island where the ants are as big as calves.

They came to a strange island ahead. Giant ants were swarming to meet them. Looking upon the great snapping mandibles, Máel Dúin thought better of landing and said “Away, away!” So they sailed on. It was becoming clear to them now that they no longer sailed on the mortal waters of the world.

A radical change in the apparent scale of things is a well-recognized indicator that we have gone beyond the bounds of the familiar everyday world.

I found the following dream event thrilling and instructive:

“You are in the afterlife”

I am bouncing along in a yellow cab in a part of New York City I don’t know well. It’s run down. The road is potholed. Some of the stores are shuttered, some of the buildings look abandoned. The street seems very wide because there is little traffic.

The driver is tearing along, much too fast, veering all over the road. I ask him to slow down. He either does not hear me, or has decided to ignore me. I lean forward to speak to him through the gap in the security screen. I notice for the first time that the taxi driver is a dead man. He is yoked to the steering column by a rope tied round his neck like a noose.

I realize that I am not in any regular city. I must be dreaming. So now I am lucid, yes?
Yes and no. As this thought rises, the driver slams on the brakes and the taxi stops so violently that I am bounced off the broken springs in the back seat towards the ceiling. I grab the door handle. As I move to get out, the kind of voice you hear in recordings in New York City cabs says, very distinctly.

“This is not a dream. You are in the afterlife.”

I enter a building that seem to be a funeral parlor with vodou or hoodoo trappings. Members of a large black family are gathered in somber clothes. This opens into an adventure in which I visit several different afterlife locales, none of them especially elevated, and learn a lot about lifestyle choices and dramas on the Other Side.

At a certain point, I become concerned that I have gone so far and deep that it might be hard to get back. Since I am lucid, and aware of my body in bed at home, I could simply will myself back. Yet I am troubled by the thought that if I try a quick exit – Back to the body! – I might leave some vital part of myself behind in the Underworld I have discovered.

I could use a little help, I signal.

This inner call produces an immediate response. An elegant figure, dressed in black and red as if for a costume ball, appears, with a yellow car that this time is not a yellow cab. It looks like a Mini Cooper. With a dashing gesture, the driver invites me to hop in. He drives me up many levels of the Lower World at incredible speed.

Yes, I recognized my helper. He belongs to one of many spiritual families I have encountered when dreams lift the veil or when what lies beyond the veil comes into the world as synchronicity. Many years on, I look at what unfolded when a hanged man drive me to a realm of the dead as part of my training and anamnesis – “remembering” things I knew before I came into my present life experience.

Àború Àboyè Àbosíse

I give thanks for the adventure, and the roadside assistance.

Journal drawing “Fish Woman on the Paris Bridge” by Robert Moss. Already lucid in the dream, I was delighted to find myself wandering as a flâneur in what seemed to be Balzac’s Paris. I enjoy oneiric time travel and it gives me such good leads for subsequent research of the kind I call dream archaeology. When this lady appeared on the Pont Neuf I realized that even more was going on.

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