Chapter 8: Flexible Flyer

Seven a.m., Pacific time. I was driving down the Silverado Trail from Livermore to my resorts at Clear Lake, where I had relocated with my family after the flood and the bankruptcy. Although I had driven this road many times before, the honeymoon between us wasn't over and I was still in love with the natural beauty of the area. I relaxed and enjoyed the view as the road wound its way through California wine country. I did a lot of my best thinking on the road, or in airplanes. I was a workaholic in those days, always finding new tasks to add to an already very demanding work schedule. With all of the things that I had going on in my life, driving had become a kind of meditation for me.
Something, an inner voice, asked me to pull over. I ignored it for a few moments while my conscious mind rolled through the usual rolodex of objections, not the least of which was the ten o'clock appointment I had to keep with one of my business partners. Running businesses under the protection of a Chapter 11 filing required keeping a lot of appointments, and running the businesses on a shoestring meant that I had to attend to most things myself, from payroll to carpentry. The voice immediately came back, stronger this time, demanding my attention, literally screaming at me to pull over.

I swung the wheel over and pulled onto a paved roadside cutout. I remember thinking that something wasn't right. My hand felt like it was made out of lead as I reached for the ignition key. I saw the steering wheel rushing up to meet my face. Then I saw nothing at all.

The first thing I noticed was that I didn't feel heavy anymore. I felt myself becoming lighter and lighter, until I could feel myself traveling through space at incredible speed, so fast that I couldn't even tell whether I had a body or not. I had a sense that I was bridging space in some way, leaving a trail like a comet as I rocketed from one point to another. Having no frame of reference to compare my experience to, not knowing whether I was awake, dead of a heart attack, or asleep, I didn't have time to question my experience, only to be it.

The sensations of depth, sound, and smell returned. I could now see thick clouds of greasy black smoke boiling up from the ground below me. Through the smoke I could see a hotel. I could see a grassy area across from the hotel, a swimming pool behind it, and an airport in the distance. There were no fire trucks or ambulances. Then the entire scene faded to black.

I was in a hotel corridor, full of roiling black smoke. The wallpaper was bubbling and peeling off of the walls from the heat. I could perceive something through the thick smoke, on the floor about fifty feet in front of me. I moved closer. It was a man, curled up in a tiny ball on the floor trying desperately to breathe. There was a silhouette beside him pulling frantically on his arm. I could sense that the silhouette, like the man, was very afraid. Although it was human in form, it was vaguely incorporeal, like something that you could put your hand through, and because of this it was ineffectual; the man wasn't budging. My inner voice told me instantly that this was no time to ask questions, that we had to get that man out of there. I knew it was not his time to die.

I felt my vibration changing and as I became more solid I could perceive just how desperate a situation we were in. The man, about 220 pounds, shirtless and gasping for air like a fish out of water, looked about as easy to move as a bank safe. I could see that the being tugging on the other shoulder wasn't going to be much help. In fact, I could see right through it.

Both the being and I gathered all of our energy and intent. We lowered our heads and hit that man like two football players at our first day of training camp, putting everything that we had into it. It wasn't just his life that was at stake. I knew that if we didn't succeed that I would die trying.

I looked about in shock. We had done more than just move. We were fifty feet further down the long hotel corridor, fifty feet closer to the fire exit. Looking back now, I know that I couldn't have been physically present or dense enough to move him through any kind of muscular effort. I could only have moved him psychically.

Encouraged, I looked over at the being that I had come to help. She was a young woman, slender, around 19 years old with blonde hair. Together, we lowered our heads, focused every ounce of our energy, and rammed the man again. I don't know how we did it, but the next thing I knew we were in the fire escape rolling, pushing and dragging the man downstairs.

Outside, the fire trucks and emergency vehicles had arrived. Two firemen ran toward the man we had helped, now coughing and retching outside the fire exit. The hotel was now a raging inferno. I stood in a grassy area in the midst of a ring of angelic beings. With me, within the semicircle, were all of the people that had died in the catastrophe, and I was talking to them. We had corralled the fire victims so that they wouldn't get lost. Most of them were confused, bewildered, and scared. Not all of them even understood that they were dead. All that they knew was that they had just been taking a shower, or sitting in bed reaching for the phone to call room service when suddenly everything changed.
I told the people that had died, that they were going to be all right, that their guides and angels were there and that we were going to take care of them. I had to make them understand that they were safe, that nothing bad was going to happen to them. They needed to know this so that they didn't run screaming out into the streets, which is probably what I would have done. If they ran away they would become lost, which was at least as bad as dying in a fire.

I started to talk to the angelic beings who were holding the circle around us. They were part of a hand-picked disaster response team. The hotel fire still raged behind me and more and more fire trucks and ambulances kept arriving. One of the firemen pulling a hose ran right through us. We didn't pay any attention to him. I continued my debriefing, carefully explaining to the angelic beings how they could be of better service to other victims by preparing for their missions more carefully, so that they themselves wouldn't fall victim to the confusion and chaos. They listened to me very carefully and when my talk was over, thanked me many times for helping them.

Somehow the fact that I was still present in the physical made it possible for me to exist in a state between their world and mine, a state or a vibration from which I could do work that they couldn't do. I also knew that these beings would stay at the hotel as long as they needed to, until their work was done.

A produce truck whooshed past on the highway, rocking my car slightly in its wake. I pulled my head off the car's steering wheel, blinking owlishly at the faintly glowing digital clock on the dashboard. I had been parked for forty five minutes. I studied the green meadow outside skeptically. Something didn't smell right. My car in particular. It smelled like it had been on fire. I tugged my lapel under my nose and sniffed at it. My nose wrinkled and I recoiled slightly. My clothes smelled as if I had been sitting in a bar all night. They were saturated with smoke.

That night as I collapsed into my easy chair back at home in Livermore, the last thing I had on my mind was the forty-five minutes that I had somehow lost that morning. What I had on my mind was an hour of delightfully purposeless television. I let my mind float away as I channel-surfed. The sound of the blow-dried saccharin television news anchors was as restful to me as the babbling of a brook.

Then I snapped upright in the chair, as awake as if someone had dumped a bucket of ice water on my head. The lead item on the news was the crash of an air force jet on a training mission. I felt the goosebumps rising all over my body as I watched the footage shot from a circling helicopter of the burning hotel. The back of my neck felt like it had 1,000 volts running through it. There was absolutely no doubt in my mind. I had been there. I hadn't dreamed it. It was real.

From that moment forward, I never looked at dreams the same way again. The different worlds that I traveled between were starting to overlap. While my physical reality was breaking down, my invisible realities were becoming real. The smoke that I smelled on my clothes was as tangible as my money and my resorts. Previously I had experienced different realities only as fragments. Now I understood that each part contained the whole. As my reality was becoming holographic, so was I.