The Boy Who Died and Came Back: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse
by Robert Moss
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$15.95
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Author: Robert Moss
Publisher: New World Library
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1608682358
ISBN 13: 978-1608682355
Publisher: New World Library
Paperback:
ISBN 10: 1608682358
ISBN 13: 978-1608682355
Travels in Many Worlds with a Master Storyteller
Join Robert Moss for an unforgettable journey that will expand your sense of reality and confirm that there is life beyond death and in other dimensions of the multiverse. Moss describes how he lived a whole life in another world when he died at age nine in a Melbourne hospital and how he died and came back again, in another sense, in a crisis of spiritual emergence during midlife. As he shares his adventures in walking between the worlds, we begin to understand that all times — past, future, and parallel — may be accessible now. Moss presents nine keys for living consciously at the center of the multidimensional universe, embracing synchronicity, entertaining our creative spirits, and communicating with a higher Self.
Join Robert Moss for an unforgettable journey that will expand your sense of reality and confirm that there is life beyond death and in other dimensions of the multiverse. Moss describes how he lived a whole life in another world when he died at age nine in a Melbourne hospital and how he died and came back again, in another sense, in a crisis of spiritual emergence during midlife. As he shares his adventures in walking between the worlds, we begin to understand that all times — past, future, and parallel — may be accessible now. Moss presents nine keys for living consciously at the center of the multidimensional universe, embracing synchronicity, entertaining our creative spirits, and communicating with a higher Self.
Review
“Moss (Dreaming the Soul Back Home) is an extraordinary guide to dreams and dreaming who also knows the power of storytelling. While not an autobiography, his book includes many personal stories and memories that offer rich fodder for the imagination....His ability to normalize the idea of communication and movement between this world and the next through story, and to show how reality is layered and time is fluid, is sublime....Reading this book is like embarking on a guided mystery tour through the past, present, and other worlds — and discovering the potential to transform one’s own life, as well as a path to transform the world.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Robert Moss’ extraordinary life story, told with beauty and passion, confirms that there is life after life and will inspire all who read it to transcend the fear of death and live richer and deeper lives.”
— Raymond Moody, MD, author of Life After Life
“Sumptuous language, lush imagery, and fantastic narratives...Moss is a captivating storyteller with an eye for detail, possessed of impeccable timing....Those seeking their own answers may find a sense of direction, deep healing, or a glimmer of insight to help guide them on their own personal metaphysical quests....It’s a rare talent that can infuse the magical with the mundane in a manner that lends real weight and volume to their narratives. Moss not only possesses it, he wields it with masterly precision....Believer and skeptic alike will discover that time spent with Moss will be enjoyable and perhaps life-changing.”
— ForeWord
“The Boy Who Died and Came Back is a masterpiece. Captivated from the very first page, I could not put the book down. Robert Moss is the consummate guide to this grand multiverse in which we live.”
— Bonnie Horrigan, author of Red Moon Passage
“This wonderfully written book by Robert Moss shares the amazing story of his life and adventures in nonordinary realms. He teaches us about dreams, the multiverse, and death and shares powerful teachings to wake us up to a new awareness of just how many paths we walk through the seen and unseen worlds.”
— Sandra Ingerman, MA, author of Soul Retrieval and Medicine for the Earth
“Robert Moss is a weaver of worlds. In this book, he entwines the shamanic with the classical, the mythological with the historical with gold-threaded prose. He shows us how conscious dreaming can lead us into the non-space-time regions of the inner universe, where all things are connected — from whatever time, place, or reality. Moss’ book is a superb illustration of the restless, exuberant creativity of consciousness.”
— Julia Assante, author of The Last Frontier
“This is a thrilling personal account of the farthest reaches of human consciousness. Robert Moss shows us that our mind is more than physical, that it is not limited to the here and now. Being infinite in space and time, it is immortal, eternal, and soul-like. Moss continues to be one of our greatest explorers of consciousness. He is that rarest of authors who brings hope and meaning to every reader.”
— Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind
“The Boy Who Died and Came Back is a fascinating travelogue of visionary journeys into nonordinary realities. The rich spectrum of these remarkable adventures in consciousness ranges from near-death experiences, memories of previous incarnations, lucid precognitive dreams, encounters with spirits and archetypal beings, and stunning synchronicities, to shamanic experiences of psychospiritual death and rebirth. Robert Moss’ unique ability to navigate these experiences; use them as sources of inspiration, healing, and spiritual insight; and integrate them into his everyday life makes this book an invaluable guide for people interested in self-discovery, spiritual quest, and learning about the nature of reality.”
— Stanislav Grof, MD, author of Beyond the Brain, Psychology of the Future, and When the Impossible Happens
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Robert Moss’ extraordinary life story, told with beauty and passion, confirms that there is life after life and will inspire all who read it to transcend the fear of death and live richer and deeper lives.”
— Raymond Moody, MD, author of Life After Life
“Sumptuous language, lush imagery, and fantastic narratives...Moss is a captivating storyteller with an eye for detail, possessed of impeccable timing....Those seeking their own answers may find a sense of direction, deep healing, or a glimmer of insight to help guide them on their own personal metaphysical quests....It’s a rare talent that can infuse the magical with the mundane in a manner that lends real weight and volume to their narratives. Moss not only possesses it, he wields it with masterly precision....Believer and skeptic alike will discover that time spent with Moss will be enjoyable and perhaps life-changing.”
— ForeWord
“The Boy Who Died and Came Back is a masterpiece. Captivated from the very first page, I could not put the book down. Robert Moss is the consummate guide to this grand multiverse in which we live.”
— Bonnie Horrigan, author of Red Moon Passage
“This wonderfully written book by Robert Moss shares the amazing story of his life and adventures in nonordinary realms. He teaches us about dreams, the multiverse, and death and shares powerful teachings to wake us up to a new awareness of just how many paths we walk through the seen and unseen worlds.”
— Sandra Ingerman, MA, author of Soul Retrieval and Medicine for the Earth
“Robert Moss is a weaver of worlds. In this book, he entwines the shamanic with the classical, the mythological with the historical with gold-threaded prose. He shows us how conscious dreaming can lead us into the non-space-time regions of the inner universe, where all things are connected — from whatever time, place, or reality. Moss’ book is a superb illustration of the restless, exuberant creativity of consciousness.”
— Julia Assante, author of The Last Frontier
“This is a thrilling personal account of the farthest reaches of human consciousness. Robert Moss shows us that our mind is more than physical, that it is not limited to the here and now. Being infinite in space and time, it is immortal, eternal, and soul-like. Moss continues to be one of our greatest explorers of consciousness. He is that rarest of authors who brings hope and meaning to every reader.”
— Larry Dossey, MD, author of One Mind
“The Boy Who Died and Came Back is a fascinating travelogue of visionary journeys into nonordinary realities. The rich spectrum of these remarkable adventures in consciousness ranges from near-death experiences, memories of previous incarnations, lucid precognitive dreams, encounters with spirits and archetypal beings, and stunning synchronicities, to shamanic experiences of psychospiritual death and rebirth. Robert Moss’ unique ability to navigate these experiences; use them as sources of inspiration, healing, and spiritual insight; and integrate them into his everyday life makes this book an invaluable guide for people interested in self-discovery, spiritual quest, and learning about the nature of reality.”
— Stanislav Grof, MD, author of Beyond the Brain, Psychology of the Future, and When the Impossible Happens
From the Author
NINE KEYS TO LIVING CONSCIOUSLY IN THE MULTIVERSE
1
The only time is Now. All other times - past, present and parallel - can be accessed in this moment of Now, and may be changed for the better.
2
We dream to wake up. Dreaming is not fundamentally about what happens during sleep. It is about waking up to a deeper order of reality. Dreaming is a discipline; to get really good at it requires practice, practice, practice.
3
Treasures are waiting for us in the Place Between Sleep and Awake. The easiest way to become a lucid or conscious dreamer is to spend more time in the twilight zone between waking and sleep, or between sleep and waking. Tinker Bell told Peter Pan to look for her in the Place between Sleep and Awake. This liminal state is a place of encounter with inner guides and transpersonal visitors. It is also a place of heightened psychic perception and creative breakthroughs, where it is easy to make connections that escape the daily mind.
4
We live in the Speaking Land, as the First Peoples of my native Australia say. Everything in the world around us is alive and conscious and will speak to us if we are paying attention. Navigating by synchronicity becomes very simple, even irresistible, when we stream into this mode of understanding.
5
To live well, we must practice death. We bring courage and clarity to life choices when we are aware that death is always with us, and that we should be ready to meet it any day.
6
We must feed and honor our animal spirits. A working connection with them gives us immense resources for self-healing.
7
We have a guide for our lives who is no stranger. He is always with us and does not judge us. This is the Self on a higher level. When we rise to the perspective of the Greater Self, we are able to make peace between different personality aspects, including our counterparts in other times and parallel realities.
8
We are at the center of all times. The dramas of lives being lived in other times and in parallel realities may be intensely relevant to understanding and navigating our current relationships and life issues. We can learn to reach into those other lives to share gifts and lessons. We can dialog with our own older and younger selves within our present lifetimes.
9
We must entertain the spirits, starting with our very own - the child self, the inner artist, the passionate teen, the animal spirits, the creative daimon.
[a summary of Part IV of "The Boy Who Died and Came Back"
About the Author
Robert Moss is the creator of Active Dreaming, an original synthesis of dreamwork and shamanism. He leads transformative adventures all over the world and has taught many thousands of people in all walks of life to heal their lives, discover their personal mission, and awaken to the reality of the multidimensional universe. The author of nine books on Active Dreaming, he is also a novelist, poet, and independent scholar. He spends half his year on the road and half at home in upstate New York.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I died for the first time in this life when I was three years old. My great aunt, the opera singer, saw my death in the bottom of a tea cup. She turned white and left the room and wouldn’t talk about what she saw until after I died and did something she had not foreseen. I came back.
In the bitter winter that followed, in Tasmania, I was rushed to hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. I lost vital signs. When I returned to the little body in the emergency room, a startled doctor told my parents, “Your boy died and came back.”
We didn’t have the term “near-death experience” back then. Raymond Moody invented that phrase long after, and – like other survivors – I am grateful to have some language that sounds at least vaguely scientific and respectable. But the term is not exact. What I, and legions of others, have experienced in crises of this kind is not “near” death; it is death. It is also one of our most important ways of confirming that soul or consciousness is not dependent on the physical body, and of gaining first-hand evidence of what happens after death (and perhaps before birth).
I don’t remember much about what happened after I died at the age of three. What I do remember, vividly, is how hard it was for me to come back and stay in the ordinary world. It was as hard for me to operate my body as it would have been for me to drive my father’s blocky Holden automobile. I seemed to be allergic to almost everything in the world around me, and all the drugs the doctors pumped into me did not change that. I was constantly ill, and would lie in the middle of the night coughing into my pillow, trying not to scare my mother. I got pneumonia again, and again, twelve times in all over eight years. Half my time was spent in the twilight of sick rooms. In sunlight, I felt alien, as if I had fallen to Earth from a distant star. On warm nights when I wasn’t too sick, I would lie on my back in the grass trying to make out maps in the night sky. The names of the constellations that adults gave me did not seem right.
At nine, I died again. This time I came back not only remembering the whole journey, but a whole other life, lived among people other than human in a world that seemed like home.
In a suburb of Melbourne, in front of our modest bungalow, I am in shorts and thongs under the hot sun. I am doing what normal boys do, poking an anthill with a stick. The anthill is the size of tumulus, and its tenants are not meek little leaf-carrying ants, but large and heavily armored bull ants, whose bite is agonizing. So at nine, stirring the bull ants to a war frenzy feels less like bullying than like an act of bravado, especially with the crazy boy from across the street egging me on.
I jab harder, and the ants of the garrison rush out furiously over my feet, nipping and punishing. I jump back, using the stick to brush them off. Next I am doubled over in pain. Could bull ants pack that much poison? Strangely, the pain that crumples me is not coming from my feet, but from my lower right abdomen.
I hobble across the burned lawn to the house. My father comes out the front door and looks at me, dog at his heels.
Before he can ask, I say, “Dad, I feel a bit crook.”
Griff, our corgi, whimpers and licks my feet. Dad asks no questions. He runs back in the house and phones for an ambulance. He knows I don’t mention pain unless I am close to breaking. I was in hospital the week with pneumonia in both lungs, but never complained
At St Andrew’s Hospital, the doctors in the emergency room find that my appendix was about to explode.
“How did it get to this stage?” they want to know. “Robert must have told you he was in pain.”
Dad says, “He doesn’t talk about pain.”.
Next, the operating theater. They want to take my appendix out right away. They will put me under first, if they can. “Can’t put the little bugger down,” I hear someone say as they double the dose of anesthetics.
I’m still in my body when the knives come out and the blood flows. I have a mild interest as I watch layers of skin and flesh peeled back from somewhere outside this boy’s body. I’m struck by how pale this body is, in a sub-burned country. Some of the people in scrubs are gossiping and giggling. Don’t they know I can hear?
I don’t want to see any more. I drift out into the corridor. I see my mother in a waiting room, drawn and deathly white. I don’t want to be present to her grief, knowing that I am the cause. My father sits strong and straight beside her, always the soldier on duty.
I slip by them. Now I am up on a window ledge, looking out through the grass. I see a great bird gliding on straight wings above the rooftops, and envy its freedom.
My face is pressed to the window. The glass yields under my pressure. I push a little, and its texture changes. It becomes a soft bubble, containing my head and shoulders. I butt, and the bubble of soft glass pops open, and lets me pass.
I am happy to be flying, like the eagle. I practice swooping and gliding. I can see white sand and blue water at the city’s edge and the moon along the beach. The moon is the gate of Luna Park, a big round face with an open mouth that invites you to step through if you dare. Luna Park, Just for Fun, they say in the advertising jingles.I want to go through the moon gate now and ride the roller coaster and the ghost train and look at girls in summer dresses.
Quick as thought, I am at the moon gate. Nobody asks for a ticket. The park seems strangely empty, but that is fine with me. Maybe I’ll go on the ghost train first; I smile, remembering how it spooked my cousin. I jump in to a car, and the train rattles off at high speed. We are going down at a steeper angle than I remember. Soon it’s almost a vertical descent. This is scarier than ghosts in sheets and skeletons. I am gripping the edges of the car with both hands, willing myself not to be thrown out. But I can’t keep my hold. I am plummeting down and down, headfirst, through a lightless tunnel.
Dark within dark. It fills my mind. I don’t know how my fall is broken, or how I re-discover myself laid out on a bed of soft ferns and grasses, but soon none of that matters, because I am surrounded by warmth and love. The people who tend me are very tall and very slender. They bend like flowers. Their skin is silvery and they glow with an inner light that radiates from the center of the chest. I don’t think they are wearing clothes, but this is in no way shocking to me. They hold a bowl to my mouth and encourage me to drink. The juice is delicious; it reminds me of mangoes and passion fruit and wild berries all at once.
They are working on my body. Their fingers are very long and play me like a stringed instrument. I have the sense that they are adjusting my form. I can see my toes growing longer, like theirs, which are as long as their fingers. They are singing over me, and the music brings tears of joy. I know this song, or its sister. I know I am home.
There is no measurement of time in this world, apart from the changing colors of the great Tree of Life at the center of all. There is no division of day and night. We live in a perpetual twilight. I swim and climb and move like a flying fox through the trees with the other young ones. I sit with the elders and grandmothers. They transfer their wisdom by bringing me inside their energy fields, as within a tent, and filling me with their songs and images.
When I grow beyond boyhood, the young women take turns to teach me other things, until She Who Chooses me receives me into the sacred bed. I become a father and a grandfather among these gentle people. Life in a sun-burned country as a sickly boy is a fading dream that disturbs me less and less.
I enjoy the body I now inhabit – its quicksilver ability to morph and stretch, to give and receive pleasure. Yet with long use it slows and falters, and I understand that it is time to let it drop, as a well-used garment, and travel on, through a pattern of stars the elders showed me, for which I am now a memory keeper. I choose dissolution by fire. I rise on the sweet aroma of fruitwood burning in the pyre, ready to enter the dance of the stars.
But a force intercedes. I am pulled up through the layers of earth and rock, up into a world of glass and brick and asphalt, and thrown back into the body of a nine-year-old boy with stitches on his abdomen.
His mouth – my mouth – is terribly dry. The people around me look like ghosts. I’m not sure whether I’m among the dead or the living. I feel terribly sad, as if I have lost my home.
“Welcome back.” One of the ghost people is peering into my eyes, which are wounded by the hard sterile lights of this place. “You went away, didn’t you?”
Luna Park. Just for Fun.
I thought I would not have much of a story to share from my long overnight journey to Montpellier. no flight delays, no missed connections or lost bags, empty seats beside me on the first two flights, so no stories from people dressed like Indiana Jones or peddling bull semen enhancer or living parallel lives with two different husbands (see "On Another Plane", the introduction to my book The Three "Only" Things, for those traveler's tales.)
Then, on my last short flight from Paris-CDG to Montpellier, I took out my inflight reading, a book in French titled Les portes du rêve. A flight attendant immediately asked me if she could see the book. Leafing through it with mounting excitement, she saw that one of the driving themes is using dreams of the departed and conscious dream journeys to the Other Side to gain first hand knowledge of what happens after death.
"This is my favorite theme," she told me. "I am passionate about it. I am going to get this book!"
I now confessed that I was the author. I explained that I was reading myself in hopes of brushing up my French prior to opening a depth workshop near Montpellier titled "Faire de la mort une alliée" (Making Death Your Ally). Les portes du rêve is the French version of my book Dreamgates.
Cabin service at my end of the cabin was now suspended while the flight attendant proceeded to fire a volley of questions. "To write about these things you must have had a near-death experience, yes?"
Yes, indeed.
People around us did not seem to mind that the coffee and juice was not being poured. An older couple next to me wanted in on the conversation. Viollette, the wife, said, "We are all so hungry for first-hand information about what happens after death. I want to know what I can expect in the afterlife, and I don't want to hear it from priests or psychologists. I want to hear it from people who have been there! And I want to know how I can find out these things for myself."
I quoted Montaigne. Puisque nous ne savons pas où la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. I had forgotten that I don't speak good French as I quoted this wonderful counsel in the original version. "Since we do not know where Death will meet us, let us be ready to meet it everywhere."
There was a stir of agreement from folks around us. I realized I now had an audience of at least a dozen people.
"I can't think of any subject as important as what you are discussing," a man across the aisle contributed, writing down my name and the title of my book. A male flight attendant joined us, wanting the same information.
I observed that we have two main ways of gaining direct knowledge of l'au-dela, the Other Side. We can communicate with people who are at home there, and we can make the crossing before death, to see for ourselves.
This led to an urgent series of fresh questions, again centering on my personal experiences.
I noted that I have never been content with the term "near death experience" for what happened to me a s boy, when I died and came back. On one occasion, when I checked out of my body during emergency appendectomy, aged nine, I seemed to live a whole life in another world. "I don't think I had a near death experience. I think I died and came back."
More questions, more and more urgent.
"Do you have no fear of death?
"Do you talk to many people who have died?"
"Are there many different places where people go when they die?"
The short answer to those three, of course, is Yes, Yes, Yes. I gave highest marks to this question: "Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?"
That was a tough one. I confessed that I was so in love with the people of the other world who raised me as their own when I went away from this world at age nine that I had a hard time living in the body of a nine-year-old boy when I came back. "I suppose I was in love with Death. I have learned to make Death an ally rather than a lover. I want to be ready to meet him anywhere, everyday. I also want to use him as a conselor who can help me to make my life choices with the courage and clarity only Death can bring."
The flight attendant had returned to her regular tasks, but kept coming back to rejoin the conversation. When we landed, she was waiting outside the baggage claim with some of her colleagues. They were all very interested and wanted my website and book information.
"You see, we are making you some good publicity, so you will have to keep teaching us about l'au-dela here in France."
There was a synchronicity at play in all of this that make it a marvelous confirmation, one of those secret kisses, a bisou from the universe. An hour before I left for the airport on Friday, I had sent my favorite editor a few pages from a book-in-progress, from a chapter titled "The Boy Who Died and Came Back."
In the bitter winter that followed, in Tasmania, I was rushed to hospital with a severe case of pneumonia. I lost vital signs. When I returned to the little body in the emergency room, a startled doctor told my parents, “Your boy died and came back.”
We didn’t have the term “near-death experience” back then. Raymond Moody invented that phrase long after, and – like other survivors – I am grateful to have some language that sounds at least vaguely scientific and respectable. But the term is not exact. What I, and legions of others, have experienced in crises of this kind is not “near” death; it is death. It is also one of our most important ways of confirming that soul or consciousness is not dependent on the physical body, and of gaining first-hand evidence of what happens after death (and perhaps before birth).
I don’t remember much about what happened after I died at the age of three. What I do remember, vividly, is how hard it was for me to come back and stay in the ordinary world. It was as hard for me to operate my body as it would have been for me to drive my father’s blocky Holden automobile. I seemed to be allergic to almost everything in the world around me, and all the drugs the doctors pumped into me did not change that. I was constantly ill, and would lie in the middle of the night coughing into my pillow, trying not to scare my mother. I got pneumonia again, and again, twelve times in all over eight years. Half my time was spent in the twilight of sick rooms. In sunlight, I felt alien, as if I had fallen to Earth from a distant star. On warm nights when I wasn’t too sick, I would lie on my back in the grass trying to make out maps in the night sky. The names of the constellations that adults gave me did not seem right.
At nine, I died again. This time I came back not only remembering the whole journey, but a whole other life, lived among people other than human in a world that seemed like home.
In a suburb of Melbourne, in front of our modest bungalow, I am in shorts and thongs under the hot sun. I am doing what normal boys do, poking an anthill with a stick. The anthill is the size of tumulus, and its tenants are not meek little leaf-carrying ants, but large and heavily armored bull ants, whose bite is agonizing. So at nine, stirring the bull ants to a war frenzy feels less like bullying than like an act of bravado, especially with the crazy boy from across the street egging me on.
I jab harder, and the ants of the garrison rush out furiously over my feet, nipping and punishing. I jump back, using the stick to brush them off. Next I am doubled over in pain. Could bull ants pack that much poison? Strangely, the pain that crumples me is not coming from my feet, but from my lower right abdomen.
I hobble across the burned lawn to the house. My father comes out the front door and looks at me, dog at his heels.
Before he can ask, I say, “Dad, I feel a bit crook.”
Griff, our corgi, whimpers and licks my feet. Dad asks no questions. He runs back in the house and phones for an ambulance. He knows I don’t mention pain unless I am close to breaking. I was in hospital the week with pneumonia in both lungs, but never complained
At St Andrew’s Hospital, the doctors in the emergency room find that my appendix was about to explode.
“How did it get to this stage?” they want to know. “Robert must have told you he was in pain.”
Dad says, “He doesn’t talk about pain.”.
Next, the operating theater. They want to take my appendix out right away. They will put me under first, if they can. “Can’t put the little bugger down,” I hear someone say as they double the dose of anesthetics.
I’m still in my body when the knives come out and the blood flows. I have a mild interest as I watch layers of skin and flesh peeled back from somewhere outside this boy’s body. I’m struck by how pale this body is, in a sub-burned country. Some of the people in scrubs are gossiping and giggling. Don’t they know I can hear?
I don’t want to see any more. I drift out into the corridor. I see my mother in a waiting room, drawn and deathly white. I don’t want to be present to her grief, knowing that I am the cause. My father sits strong and straight beside her, always the soldier on duty.
I slip by them. Now I am up on a window ledge, looking out through the grass. I see a great bird gliding on straight wings above the rooftops, and envy its freedom.
My face is pressed to the window. The glass yields under my pressure. I push a little, and its texture changes. It becomes a soft bubble, containing my head and shoulders. I butt, and the bubble of soft glass pops open, and lets me pass.
I am happy to be flying, like the eagle. I practice swooping and gliding. I can see white sand and blue water at the city’s edge and the moon along the beach. The moon is the gate of Luna Park, a big round face with an open mouth that invites you to step through if you dare. Luna Park, Just for Fun, they say in the advertising jingles.I want to go through the moon gate now and ride the roller coaster and the ghost train and look at girls in summer dresses.
Quick as thought, I am at the moon gate. Nobody asks for a ticket. The park seems strangely empty, but that is fine with me. Maybe I’ll go on the ghost train first; I smile, remembering how it spooked my cousin. I jump in to a car, and the train rattles off at high speed. We are going down at a steeper angle than I remember. Soon it’s almost a vertical descent. This is scarier than ghosts in sheets and skeletons. I am gripping the edges of the car with both hands, willing myself not to be thrown out. But I can’t keep my hold. I am plummeting down and down, headfirst, through a lightless tunnel.
Dark within dark. It fills my mind. I don’t know how my fall is broken, or how I re-discover myself laid out on a bed of soft ferns and grasses, but soon none of that matters, because I am surrounded by warmth and love. The people who tend me are very tall and very slender. They bend like flowers. Their skin is silvery and they glow with an inner light that radiates from the center of the chest. I don’t think they are wearing clothes, but this is in no way shocking to me. They hold a bowl to my mouth and encourage me to drink. The juice is delicious; it reminds me of mangoes and passion fruit and wild berries all at once.
They are working on my body. Their fingers are very long and play me like a stringed instrument. I have the sense that they are adjusting my form. I can see my toes growing longer, like theirs, which are as long as their fingers. They are singing over me, and the music brings tears of joy. I know this song, or its sister. I know I am home.
There is no measurement of time in this world, apart from the changing colors of the great Tree of Life at the center of all. There is no division of day and night. We live in a perpetual twilight. I swim and climb and move like a flying fox through the trees with the other young ones. I sit with the elders and grandmothers. They transfer their wisdom by bringing me inside their energy fields, as within a tent, and filling me with their songs and images.
When I grow beyond boyhood, the young women take turns to teach me other things, until She Who Chooses me receives me into the sacred bed. I become a father and a grandfather among these gentle people. Life in a sun-burned country as a sickly boy is a fading dream that disturbs me less and less.
I enjoy the body I now inhabit – its quicksilver ability to morph and stretch, to give and receive pleasure. Yet with long use it slows and falters, and I understand that it is time to let it drop, as a well-used garment, and travel on, through a pattern of stars the elders showed me, for which I am now a memory keeper. I choose dissolution by fire. I rise on the sweet aroma of fruitwood burning in the pyre, ready to enter the dance of the stars.
But a force intercedes. I am pulled up through the layers of earth and rock, up into a world of glass and brick and asphalt, and thrown back into the body of a nine-year-old boy with stitches on his abdomen.
His mouth – my mouth – is terribly dry. The people around me look like ghosts. I’m not sure whether I’m among the dead or the living. I feel terribly sad, as if I have lost my home.
“Welcome back.” One of the ghost people is peering into my eyes, which are wounded by the hard sterile lights of this place. “You went away, didn’t you?”
Luna Park. Just for Fun.
I thought I would not have much of a story to share from my long overnight journey to Montpellier. no flight delays, no missed connections or lost bags, empty seats beside me on the first two flights, so no stories from people dressed like Indiana Jones or peddling bull semen enhancer or living parallel lives with two different husbands (see "On Another Plane", the introduction to my book The Three "Only" Things, for those traveler's tales.)
Then, on my last short flight from Paris-CDG to Montpellier, I took out my inflight reading, a book in French titled Les portes du rêve. A flight attendant immediately asked me if she could see the book. Leafing through it with mounting excitement, she saw that one of the driving themes is using dreams of the departed and conscious dream journeys to the Other Side to gain first hand knowledge of what happens after death.
"This is my favorite theme," she told me. "I am passionate about it. I am going to get this book!"
I now confessed that I was the author. I explained that I was reading myself in hopes of brushing up my French prior to opening a depth workshop near Montpellier titled "Faire de la mort une alliée" (Making Death Your Ally). Les portes du rêve is the French version of my book Dreamgates.
Cabin service at my end of the cabin was now suspended while the flight attendant proceeded to fire a volley of questions. "To write about these things you must have had a near-death experience, yes?"
Yes, indeed.
People around us did not seem to mind that the coffee and juice was not being poured. An older couple next to me wanted in on the conversation. Viollette, the wife, said, "We are all so hungry for first-hand information about what happens after death. I want to know what I can expect in the afterlife, and I don't want to hear it from priests or psychologists. I want to hear it from people who have been there! And I want to know how I can find out these things for myself."
I quoted Montaigne. Puisque nous ne savons pas où la mort nous attend, attendons-la partout. I had forgotten that I don't speak good French as I quoted this wonderful counsel in the original version. "Since we do not know where Death will meet us, let us be ready to meet it everywhere."
There was a stir of agreement from folks around us. I realized I now had an audience of at least a dozen people.
"I can't think of any subject as important as what you are discussing," a man across the aisle contributed, writing down my name and the title of my book. A male flight attendant joined us, wanting the same information.
I observed that we have two main ways of gaining direct knowledge of l'au-dela, the Other Side. We can communicate with people who are at home there, and we can make the crossing before death, to see for ourselves.
This led to an urgent series of fresh questions, again centering on my personal experiences.
I noted that I have never been content with the term "near death experience" for what happened to me a s boy, when I died and came back. On one occasion, when I checked out of my body during emergency appendectomy, aged nine, I seemed to live a whole life in another world. "I don't think I had a near death experience. I think I died and came back."
More questions, more and more urgent.
"Do you have no fear of death?
"Do you talk to many people who have died?"
"Are there many different places where people go when they die?"
The short answer to those three, of course, is Yes, Yes, Yes. I gave highest marks to this question: "Were you happier in the life when you died, or the life you are living now?"
That was a tough one. I confessed that I was so in love with the people of the other world who raised me as their own when I went away from this world at age nine that I had a hard time living in the body of a nine-year-old boy when I came back. "I suppose I was in love with Death. I have learned to make Death an ally rather than a lover. I want to be ready to meet him anywhere, everyday. I also want to use him as a conselor who can help me to make my life choices with the courage and clarity only Death can bring."
The flight attendant had returned to her regular tasks, but kept coming back to rejoin the conversation. When we landed, she was waiting outside the baggage claim with some of her colleagues. They were all very interested and wanted my website and book information.
"You see, we are making you some good publicity, so you will have to keep teaching us about l'au-dela here in France."
There was a synchronicity at play in all of this that make it a marvelous confirmation, one of those secret kisses, a bisou from the universe. An hour before I left for the airport on Friday, I had sent my favorite editor a few pages from a book-in-progress, from a chapter titled "The Boy Who Died and Came Back."