It started with a fascination with lucid dreaming after my first experience during my teenage years. It was an otherwise unremarkable dream and occurred entirely by accident. I flew in that dream, not like a bird or superhero, just casually floating through a nameless city below, watching people move like ants, cars like cockroaches, busses and trains like centipedes. It was liberating, fresh and exciting. I was obsessed.
I spent most of my teenage years trying to hone my ability. I researched techniques on how to increase the likelihood of a lucid dream, scribbling in dream journals and flipping light switches during my waking hours and other “reality checks” that I would eventually engrain into habits, even compulsions. I usually experienced a lucid dream once a month, each time a random location. The majority of these dreams were neutral, if not pleasant. Sun drenched beaches in what seemed like southern California, snow covered mountain peaks so high that I was looking down at the tops of clouds, fireside in a remote cabin in Maine. I was immune to temperature, I couldn’t feel rain, I didn’t require oxygen even a mile above Mt. Fuji. I even found myself at the precipice of the Mariana Trench, staring down into an unfathomable void. I did not jump in. I had the distinct sensation that something was down there. Something horrifyingly consequential, despite being in a dream state. I woke up to the sound of my heart pumping, my body covered in sweat. I stopped trying to lucid dream for a while afterward, too terrified to accidentally find myself back there, or worse, down in the trench.
Eventually I learned that I did have some control over my destination. I re-visited my favorite places and desperately tried to avoid going anywhere that I hadn’t already been. I could feel my ability getting stronger. I gained confidence. They were just dreams, anyway. I felt invincible.
The moon, at least Earth’s moon, was boring. Every visit was the same, nothing happened. The “dark side” was more of the same nothingness, vast expanses of craters and debris from expired lunar vehicles the only things poking up from the monotonous landscape. I went farther. I’d seen nearly the deepest depths of our own planet, hovered miles above Mount Olympus on Mars, I made a zen garden in the dust of Mare Anguis on the moon. I felt like a god.
Until Jupiter.
I found myself above the atmosphere, trying to get out of the clouds of ammonia for a better view. The planet was massive and swirling, a neverending chaos of gasses and metals like smoke inside a balloon that took up my entire view. I backed up farther until I was at the distance of satellites.
Something. A massive shadow below the violent churning of noxious clouds, a shadow likely larger than entire continents on our own planet. It moved counter-clockwise, against the flow of the revolving red and tan clouds. I felt sound that I could not hear, vibrations so deep that I could only sense them. I felt gravity for the first time in a dream. It pulled me in toward the planet like a whisper at first, barely audible, barely feeling the compelling force. I tried to leave. The gravity was no longer a whisper, it was a scream. The shadow had stopped moving. The gas giant stopped spinning. I was hurtling toward the atmosphere, past Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, frantically trying to wake up.
Suddenly the planet rotated with a shudder and a deafening groan like a cosmic head snapping around to face me. The gigantic red storm was all I could see as I careened toward it like a falling satellite. The massive shadow lurched beneath the tide of the red swirl as the clouds began to part. The eye of the storm blinked. I tumbled through the atmosphere, screaming through the ammonia toward the massive shape just beneath the clouds. I could feel it bellowing. A singular thought stuck in my head, consequence.
I woke in a hospital bed. My entire body ached, my lips were dry and cracked, my tongue was swollen. My neighbor was there. She told me she found me in my backyard after noticing me there for two straight days, lying on my back unconscious, just facing up at the sky, a terrified, grotesque expression frozen on my face.
“You picked a heck of a time to pass out for two days, honey” she whispered as she turned on the television with the hospital remote.
“What do you mean? What happened?” I asked.
She rose from the chair by my bedside and motioned me over to the window.
“It’s been there for two days now” she said, pointing upward to the sky. I slowly walked over to the window, taking notice of the lack of sunshine despite the morning news broadcasting on the television.
It was there, hovering suspended just beyond our moon, not rotating, like a bowling ball hiding behind a marble. The red gas giant, the enormous crimson eye facing earth, facing me, searching. Somehow, deep inside, as deep as those resonating vibrations I’d felt before, I knew what it wanted, because I’d already found it years before. I knew what I had to do. I had to face the consequences of being an astral projector. I had to go back and this time, I had to jump in.