Tethered to Earth

By Sam Sorenson

This is the dream I was telling you about, he told her. She flinched in a subtle, graceful way. She was not breathing. It did not matter.

He watched her grope for something solid, but of course there was nothing. There was no such thing.

Impossible, she told him. He heard and nodded.

I understand. Now you, too, can understand.

No.

Soon, then.

I cannot believe this.

This is not a place of belief. You know. Know.

No.

She began to shimmer. It would soon be finished. He thought: Please remember, please, please remember. And she was gone. Back to the slow place where dreams were trivialized.

What was it now? November? Already November?

Thomas checked his calendar, and the time. He rose and showered and dressed and ate breakfast like a good human. He looked into the mirror before leaving his apartment. “Thomas,” he said, nodding. Then he was out the door and in the car and on the way to his appointment.

The strange things had started happening in the Spring. They had quickly become impossible to dismiss. He had tried at first, of course he had. But the things—the Strangeness—had actually responded with more intensity, like a visitor knocking at the door, and becoming more insistent when he knows he’s being ignored.

I know you’re in there. And, more to the point: You know I’m out here.

He’d understood fairly quickly—within the first two weeks—that they weren’t dreams. The knocking was too insistent. It had been tempting to try to force an explanation at first, but it was useless. Especially after the incidents with Allison. Once he accepted it was real, the Strangeness became stranger. Until he wasn’t spending much time on Earth anymore. Which sounded disconcerting to anyone trying to understand.

He’d only briefly considered drinking again—three years sober (thank you for sharing Thomas, round of muted applause)—but had decided against it not just because of the streak (which he truly was proud of), but more because he knew the knocking would be ready and ever more intense each time he sobered. Plus the hangovers had never been worth it. And the inevitable weight gain. And the depression. And—the other myriad obvious reasons never to drink in the first place. Obvious now.

“Why are you so self-destructive?” Allison had asked him once. A rhetorical question, a desperate hurl to yank him out of his spiral. He’d given her some pithy answer anyway, as was the way of one in a spiral, and sometime shortly after that dismal discourse she’d left him for good. If he’d known then what he’d since learned, his answer would have been very different, and miles from pithy. Sincere. Something on the order of It’s the way we made ourselves or I don’t know who I am yet. Would that have given her pause? Would that have made her think she’d actually succeeded in yanking him free? He thought of their last text exchange.

Allison: Please stop texting me. Don’t make me change my number.

Thomas: Sorry. No need. I wish you well.

Even now he could reflect on the empty space between the notification (she responded!) to the content of her message. Casual, matter-of-fact reproach. His heart had plummeted.

What was it about the human form which invited such drama? Demanded it?

That was when he’d gone on his last bender. Heartache, headache, stomachache. Then he’d started his sober streak. Then three years of building himself into a human again. Then the Strangeness. Is it purification? he’d wondered at first. Is that what it’s about? No. Too hollow. But it was a beginning.

Back then he’d been excited. After understanding it wasn’t a dream, and concluding he wasn’t crazy, it had been a bit of a thrill. Now it was different. Nebulous. And increasingly difficult to stay grounded.

“Your name?” came the question.

“There is no name,” he said before he could get fully back in place. Not in any real sense, he could have added for context, but that wouldn’t have been helpful. He looked to the person behind the reception desk doing the asking. A portly young woman. Her name tag said Emily. Beneath it read: she/they.

Hmm. The poor dears. This pronoun thing was going the wrong way. If Emily could glimpse what he’d been mired in, the only thing beneath the name would be ALL. Micro-specifications were misleading. Missing the point. To understand what you were, you had to expand.

“Thomas,” he said. “Thomas Carl Young.” Despite the setting, he didn’t explain that his parents had provided the label as a clever nod to Jung, whose ideas they enjoyed enough to give their son a name pun. He further didn’t feel tempted to explain to Emily (to Them, most assuredly) that Red Book was honestly one of the most profound tomes humanity had produced to date, and while its secrets would seem to be unattainable to her at first glance -- at this Emily who was an avatar of a thing much greater and grander -- and that even all the while she/they would be lost, the much greater/grander (Them) already knew everything in it, and everything else besides. So it was just a terrific mobius strip. As you read it you realized you already knew it. Now you see, now you don’t, yet you always knew. And yet still you forgot so you could tell you.

“The doctor will be right with you.” He thanked her and took a seat. He had to concentrate on walking to the chair so he wouldn’t float. The others in the waiting room glanced at him and each other furtively from their magazines. He wondered if he could visit each one of them at will. Probably not quite.

He’d gone to the priest about it a few months in. At first the conversation had been comforting, settling into the ruts of childhood’s understanding of the ineffable. But the Strangeness didn’t fit very well in the current interpretation of the scripture, and Father Burke had stumbled into a tangent about how the best vaccine against Covid was the love of Christ and had wondered aloud what the world was coming to? Thomas had thought about suggesting that every generation asked that same question when its members came of age and the question had never been a reflection of the state of the world but a way to reflect on your own stage of life in relation to the others around you. And he further considered suggesting Covid might be a Tower-of-Babel-moment for this collection of generations, the universe’s challenge to force difficult conversations. Yank from the human spiral. But Father Burke wasn’t in a receptive mood so he changed the subject.

“I think I saw heaven,” he said.

“No you didn’t,” the priest said immediately. It was a retort. Reflexive.

“What you would think of as heaven,” Thomas elaborated.

“Nonsense, my son. Shall we to the confessional?”

“I remembered it, Ricky. I remembered being there before I ever came here. Wait till you see it. It’s just wild.”

Father Burke flinched at the insult of being addressed so casually, but of course deconstructing the hierarchy was the whole point. Deconstructing all the way back to source.

“What are you doing?” the priest demanded suddenly.

“I mean no disrespect,” Thomas said earnestly. After that they had a brief discussion about fear of the Lord and the oft-repeated Biblical command Be not afraid. Thomas left when no more headway could be made. Ricky Burke would ruminate and the patterns would sink in on a subconscious level. Thomas expected it wouldn’t do much here, but when the man expired in a few decades the debt would be paid.

“Thomas?” the doctor called. She was a blond, striking even in middle age. “I’m Doctor Lundgren.” He greeted her warmly and she led him to her office. There he described the Strangeness in terms he believed she could understand, though such things were becoming more and more difficult to judge. He came to the heart of the matter quickly.

“Is there a medication you can give me to help me stay?”

She frowned and explained that she wanted to understand more about his experiences first. Then she smiled, and it lit up the room, and he was taken aback at the sight of it and the very revelation of his own reaction. A lesson. Oh, they were everywhere in the physical. He wondered if she’d come into her profession this way, her mysterious way of getting people to open up to her an absolutely nonmystical effect of her natural beauty. Of course that was a part of her path. And that he could be still affected by such physical things: perhaps this alone was the reason he’d come. Not for medicine to keep him in place after all.

He tried to read her quickly, seeking elevated value beyond pleasant exteriors. “Dr. Lundgren, do you find love to be a perception of the physical brain as manifested in the mind, or might love predate each incarnation?”

Her smile changed into appreciation, brainstorm.

“Well of course you’d expect me to say that however you perceive it is real to you, but I have come across enough experience in this chair to believe there just may be a higher truth that touches on your question. Are you suggesting love as a general emotion or assigning your love to someone in particular?”

“Love is a fundamental force in the multidimensional universe,” he said hastily, then regretted his insistence. She didn’t understand the larger riddle, how could she? But she could offer insight into the ones here. The human web-work was a support system for evolving.

“They’re not dreams,” he said, already unsure if he’d explained this. Was he being repetitive? This is the dream I was telling you about. He started to lose track of his surroundings and took a few deep breaths to steady himself. “But they’re not what you’d expect. Going out is far more complex.”

“And by ‘going out’ you are referring to Astral Projection?”

Behind her and to the right, the thin skin of the world shimmered, then shone through. A green ethereal palace. And he knew what it meant. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain! Everyone had a Holy of holies. Axiomatic.

“Maybe,” he told her carefully. Labels were distractions. Limiting. “Or OBEs or journeying. Exploring. Kundalini Awakening.” He proceeded quickly now, told her of the first time he found himself outside his body. He’d lain down for the night and was awoken to find himself floating against the ceiling, actually able to look down to his form in the bed. Impossible. Real. He’d snapped back in a rush. But later it had happened again. And again. Until it was commonplace, and he could stabilize his form, and could even wander around his apartment. And into others.

Dr. Lundgren asked the obvious: How do you know it’s not just a dream? He explained the doubt, the tests, the exploration, the increasing intensity. The nature of reality had undergone a massive shift. The things in the universe that were knowable had multiplied infinitely. And then came the next level: he’d ventured to other dimensional spaces. Not just a guy touring the planet with his spirit form, but a spirit unfolding the truths of its multidimensional nature. Past lives. Other energy systems. All new and yet intimately familiar.

“Now please pay special attention,” he said.

And he told her of the Allison incident. He’d found her in a strange place, a distant granite peak, where the water flowed upward along a sheer rock face, and a crystal city sparkled in the valley below. This being was of course not Allison in the particular, but her greater self, the element of the whole which had delivered a part of itself to don the mortal suit that would become named Allison Jane Foster and who was to become the love of Thomas Carl Young’s life. He spoke to the being, this Higher Allison, and her depth and wisdom was astonishing. Soon he was shown to a diner, the diner where they’d met many times for late coffees, and there he’d encountered the Allison he knew. This started recurring. They would meet there, they would speak, she would be reticent, she’d depart, he’d ask her to remember. Then she’d be gone in a shimmer.

This pattern repeated multiple times every week. He’d find her somewhere, not in dreams but in the ether. He would try to connect. She was inconsistently fully present. When she was entirely with him, their conversations were so rich they eclipsed the best of their connections in the physical from their dating years.

These were true connections, he was certain of it, and the only way they could have continued was for Allison to be a willing participant. But to her they would still seem to be dreams, so he had to figure out a way to wake her within the dream.

“You can see the bind I’m in,” he said.

“Can you tell her?” Dr. Lundgren asked.

“Not so easy. The content is telepathic and—”

“I mean can you tell her in person?”

He tried to stay his impatience. “No.” And he explained Allison’s forbidding final text. And of course the good doctor asked how in the world the powerful content of his “visions” didn’t supersede the spirit of that long-ago text. He had to remind himself it wasn’t her fault.

“Not visions,” he said.

“Dreams?”

“Only in their appearance to her.” This was the point where words failed.

Dr. Lundgren came back to herself now, realizing she’d stepped slightly out of her lane, had shifted her attention to her own intrigue instead of keeping him focused on him. The fading green palace shimmered on its way out. They were locked into physical matter reality again. She settled back into her role.

“What do you think it means?” she asked. She smiled, that go-to gesture she subconsciously fell back on to disarm. The door had been cracked open, closed now, but it would ripple its breath in her dreams, even if the full force wasn’t realized until future lives. He thought of ancient trees passing wisdom from soil to air. Progress was intentionally slow.

He answered: “I’m beginning to know. There’s no rush, as we’re really only discussing eternity, but the lesson here may be to rebalance.” She greeted this with inquisitiveness. “Meaning: I spend so much time away from myself, I’m wondering if I’m called to stay on Earth more. If that’s the message my soul is communicating.” She looked confused. He shrugged. “Because I can always explore when the body quits.”

“Then why would your soul be taking you out in the first place?” she asked, then flinched at herself. Nearly straying out of her lane again. Professionalism overrun by curiosity and the relentless machinations of simple logic.

“Of course,” he said, “it has everything to do with Allison.” He wondered if he’d come here to get guidance from her, or offer it to her.

Both, came the answer. Always both. Always infinite. He chuckled. The cosmic cop-out.

The appointment ended.

It was two nights later when he had his next Allison encounter. This is the dream I keep telling you about, he told her in the etheric diner. She still was not ready to believe. He sent her an image of a piece of driftwood washing up on an ocean shore, how it progressed down the beach, taken out and redeposited over and over, making the slightest progress down the beach. Incremental. This was the wash of lifetimes. Then she shimmered and was gone.

Within the next few weeks he saw her and sent her the same image. The driftwood had moved imperceptibly. She came to know it was not just parable. It was real somewhere. But symbolic just the same. Then something clicked in her. Can I believe this? she asked.

He waited. Their energies enfolded in heartbreaking brilliance. At length she sent to him: the driftwood is smoothed and shaped in this process as it progresses down the beach.

They both viewed a canvas of their relationship, a cloak perched in the air in brilliance and searing with its dark edges.

He felt through her. Can you forgive me?

She shimmered, and retreated again to the land where dreams were trivialized.

It was the next time when she understood finally that the things known as dreams were not dreams at all.

When we go, we do go somewhere. He smiled. And she finally told him: I can believe this.

Know, he told her. And she was not breathing, and finally understood that when you went to places where the rules of the road were so utterly and fantastically different, you needed ways to stay tethered to the consensus reality.

She shimmered.

Please remember, he sent as she went. It emanated with the force of misspent love for years of human folly.

The next day his phone rang. Allison. Here on Earth now. His heart lifted in a way he wouldn’t have believed possible anymore. So it was that the secrets of the universe were always right before you.

When they met at the diner, they embraced fiercely, wordlessly, for a very long time. Then to the booth. They watched each other through welling eyes. She smiled with gratitude.

“This is the dream you were telling me about,” she said, and he was thrilled to recognize her old sardonic grin, the great unspoken familiarity within it. “Now tell me more.”

The end