On a Different Plane

The other day I was sitting in a cafe reading a newspaper when a woman whom I vaguely recognized made eye contact from a distant table. Middle aged with fair, curly hair, full-bodied and friendly. The next minute, she was stood over me and asked if she could join me.

'By all means', I said, abandoning my paper.

She settled into her chair and looked sweetly into my eyes. 'I dreamt about you the other night', she began.

'Ookay...'

'We were travelling on a space ship together. I could tell it was your first time. You were very nervous and trying to escape out of the window...'

'That sounds like me.'

'We weren't travelling over Earth, it was a distant planet. The landscape completely different. I've done so many of these journeys before, but I could see you were worried. I wanted to calm you down. When I saw you just now I wanted to come over and tell you that it's OK.'

'Thanks, that's very kind of you.'

'You'd entered another frequency of existence. Most people just don't realize how many frequencies there are, that what we see around us is just one tiny wavelength. Of course we didn't really come from this planet in the first place, we were brought here from a different world. Once you connect to the different frequencies of your existence, you can begin to understand who you really are and where you came from...'

'Yes, there's so much about life we don't understand...'

'So just to say, it's alright: Don't worry.'

'I won't, and thanks again for looking after me up there...'

Regular readers of this blog will know that although I have little time for mainstream religions, I am constantly fascinated by individualistic belief systems (see my blog: 'Penetrating the Occult'). If you are going to have 'faith' in something, you might as well go the whole hog and believe in something of Ridley Scott-esque, thrilling, technicolour proportions. Setting off in a spaceship every night to revisit distant planets? Why not indeed. In the early 1960s, the great Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima was supposed to have spent some nights on his balcony keeping an eye out for UFOs and in a nearer pop universe Robbie Williams apparently threatens to abandon his showbiz career in favour of full-time UFO-logy.

In my abandoned newspaper I had just read a review of a new biography of Sir Thomas Browne, the great 17th century essayist, by the reliably good David Aaronovitch in The Times. Browne was a man of quite extraordinary breadth of interests and inexhaustible curiosity. The books he produced are some of the most uniquely fascinating in the English language. Aaronovitch slightly criticizes him for not quite being able to deny the existence of witches: Browne apparently didn't actually believe in witches, he was just reluctant to categorically state they didn't exist. But in fact Browne's indefatigable curiosity resides in this very open-mindedness, in this ability to find fascination in the mental borderlands of fact and fantasy.

The spaceship-lady rather drifted out of my mind and then a few weeks later while seated in another cafe (when the stars align, I can wangle a decent amount of time sitting in cafes), she joined me again, this time while I was sitting with someone else. Truth to tell, I had completely forgotten about our dark secret, that we had spent a night together on a spaceship with me trying to escape out the window. The lady began relating how she had attended a meeting that morning in a hotel conference room of a 'mystic master' from India, whose very presence had changed the energy of the room and connected everyone to their hidden 'frequencies of existence'.

My companion unfortunately gave it all short shrift, bursting into snorting laughter and uttering sardonic, mocking remarks. I reprimanded him for his rudeness and then suddenly recalled the 'spaceship dream'. The moment became strangely Freudian, as if tapping into a hidden world of dreams.

So I wonder: will I be heading off tonight again in spaceship travels while I sleep? Will I feel confident enough this time to sit down, opening myself to the experience and not try to scramble out the emergency exit?

And in those dreams, what will I encounter? All my fears and longings? And of the recognizable humans I meet up there, will I be brave enough to go up and tell them when I spot them the next day on the other side of my cafe?

I began to think I really rather admired the self-confidence of the spaceship-lady, though recalled hearing she had also made attempts to pay for local services in 'moon therapy' rather than cash. One local merchant took her up on it and found himself seated in a chair for an hour staring up at the moon, wondering why he had not asked for payment by bank transfer instead.