The distance is overpowering.  It stretches into an endless horizon where light bends and crawls and condenses into cities collapsing infinitely against one another. 

Up on the rooftop I can see forever. A figure sits beside me, staring at the same skyline.  He introduces himself, says his name is Aiden. I know he is another traveller: I can feel it in his skin when I shake the hand he offers; it runs like a hot current between us.  His humanity is loud and adamant. 

We stay a while, discussing the profound solidity of the astral projection experience and the undeniable reality of the place in which we are standing.  When I suggest that we could agree to attempt to meet up on an internet forum in order to verify our experience, he seems hesitant and uncomfortable at the suggestion.  While I find this disappointing – real world proof of an astral encounter would be extraordinary – it makes sense that any potential encounters should be treated with the same kind of caution you might lend to a stranger in the waking world. 

This didn’t occur to me until later on in the daytime – assuming while projecting I did meet another astral traveller, and he was not in fact a mental projection, neither of us had the first idea who either of us really were.  There’s a tendency for me to get excited when I think I might have collided with another person wandering the astral planes, and forget that there are those who astral project with the intention of causing harm, such as searching for vulnerable unconscious individuals in sleep states who aren’t aware they are accessing the astral plane through their dreams. 

Aidan is gone and I return to my room briefly, then leap into a great epicentre – a city state populated by huge crowds of non-human entities.  I get the impression I’ve entered some kind of astral highway – a cultural hub constructed from information and concepts that form a complex of streets and emporiums and meeting places.  A blue figure catches my eye; she is at once slender and angular, four arms tangled into geometric shapes.  I don’t know who or what she is, but we notice one another through the crowds.  I smile and wave and these gestures seem pathetic and simple.  She doesn’t react, but I can feel her across the city.

Streets give way to pits and burrows lit by strings of lanterns, neon bulbs highlighting stairwells carved into the dirt.  A little underworld of cave bars and chthonic demigods, peering out suspicious from glass bottle windows.

A solar wind takes me and pitches me violently into the sky and I’m hurtling so fast I can’t process the enormity of this wilderness.  One mountain range is as big as an entire planet.  I can’t breathe or think and my heart is pounding – it races so fast I’m shaken awake by it.