Waiting for Autumn (9 page)

“‘Conscious cooking’? I didn’t know it had a name. Is that a new thing?”

“It’s been around since the beginning of time. It’s just that most restaurants don’t care about intention. That’s why a home-cooked meal always tastes better.” She caught her breath for a moment and then added, “If I had a restaurant, I’d force the employees to go home if they came to work in a bad mood. You can’t have a restaurant and let chefs put their bad energy in the food that’s served to customers. I guess now I have to start my own restaurant! Do I have to do
everything
myself?” She laughed and her blue eyes sparkled.

I had never met someone who effortlessly balanced strength with compassion as much as she did. In her world, it appeared that both were part of a single continuum; and I was genuinely impressed with the grace with which she wove them together.

“That’s a handsome bracelet.” She changed the subject without missing a beat while nodding to the bracelet Robert had given me.

“Thanks. A friend of mine made it for me.”

“Tell me about it.”

“It’s made of carnelian and has moonstone and silver because of my connection to the moon. It comforts me.”

“Oh, that makes sense,” she smiled. “I thought I felt some lunar energy coming from you. I have a spiritual jewelry company. This is a piece of mine.” She gestured toward the necklace she was wearing. It had three silver ovals with Chinese characters and a clear crystal hanging from it.

“It’s very beautiful.”

“Yes, I love it. I just licensed it from a friend of Martika’s. I’ve actually been looking for some new designs that can be worn by men. Maybe your friend would be interested in working with me.”

“That would be great—I’ll let him know.” I thought that getting Robert some additional income would allow him to spend less time at the Co-op begging for money, and have more quality guru time.

“Give me your number and I’ll call you when we’re ready to take on some more designs. In the meantime, find out if your friend might be interested.”

“I will.” I gave her my number, hoping that she wouldn’t wait too long to call. As I handed her the paper, a friend of hers appeared and whispered in her ear.

“That’s my ride,” Madisyn said while getting up. “I have to go now. It was really nice talking to you.”

“You, too.”

“Bye, Lunar Boy.” She winked as she walked toward the door.

“Goodbye.” I nearly blushed.

After Madisyn left, I realized that I still hadn’t fully recovered from Yreka and was starting to get tired. I decided it was probably a good time to leave and found Martika outside on her porch saying goodbye to the other guests. I too said my goodbyes and walked down her painted white steps into the night and toward my apartment.

There were no streetlamps on the road until I got to the main arterial, but the moon was full, which provided plenty of light. Walking alone by the light of the moon was a perfect way to end such a wonderful evening. When I arrived at my apartment, I immediately crawled into bed, filled with gratitude to finally be part of a community that welcomed me so completely. I closed my eyes and fell asleep, the happiest I’d been in years.

After nearly two full weeks of violently disturbed sleep, I began to get really worried and started to obsessively research what dreams meant and how they could be controlled. The lack of rest was definitely affecting my waking hours, and I was increasingly becoming unsure of the line that separated the two. I resorted to browsing nearly every bookshelf in the library and was finally relieved to discover a book about lucid dreaming, which outlined in very practical terms the tools needed to control dreams. I hoped that if I could remain in control, I would be able to put mine in their place and finally get an uninterrupted night’s rest.

I started by explicitly following the instructions in the book, and before I went to sleep, I would set the intention to meet my dream guides as soon as I was unconscious. I chose to hold on to the idea of my ancestors from the constellation because they were the only people I knew who were dead besides Cheryl. I was hoping that they would accept my invitation, since I’d only briefly met them at the constellation and had never spent much time with them while they were still alive.

I wasn’t very successful at first, and every time I tried to influence my dreams, I would either wake up or get sucked into another flashback of Yreka. What finally worked was to imagine standing in one place and spinning around really fast as soon as I began dreaming. Once I stopped spinning, I would still be dreaming and would remain in control. After a few nights of practice, I was able to direct my dreams without spinning.

When I finally arrived in my first lucid dream state, I nearly tripped over an older man seated in a weathered wooden rocking chair. We were on the porch of a familiar gray house with a white picket fence bordering a huge cornfield that I thought I recognized but couldn’t place. It was nearly dusk, and the air was warm and humid, with the buzzing sound of crickets filling the silence. After a few moments of taking in the scene, I recognized the porch as a house in Iowa my grandmother had taken me to when I’d visited her as a child. The house had been about to be torn down, and she had wanted to show me where she’d grown up.

“Hello, Scott,” the older gentleman on the porch said as he kept the rocking chair in motion with his large bare feet.

I stared at him blankly.

“I’m your great-grandfather.”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t recognize you.”

“That’s okay—you never saw me when we were on the same plane before.”

He had died in a hunting accident before I was born, which probably explained why my grandmother had been so upset when she’d found out that my father wanted to give me a gun for my thirteenth birthday. Nobody had really talked about my great-grandfather when I was growing up, and the only time I’d ever met him was at the constellation when he was represented by a woman.

“You’ve been spending a lot of time here,” my great-grandfather continued. “Don’t you like living on Earth?”

“It’s okay, I guess.” I had never thought about it before. “I suppose I was just drawn here to discover something.”

“What are you looking for?”

“I don’t know. But it seems important.”

“Yes, it is. You are starting to pay attention to your intuition, which is good. You will come to find it is the only sense you can rely on. Your eyes and ears are easily deceived, but your intuition is your compass.”

At that moment, the white picket fence that surrounded the house morphed into a brightly colored cement wall that was painted in alternating rectangles of primary colors. The lawn turned to sand before my very eyes, and a silver metal slide and seesaw grew out of it within seconds. I instantly recognized the playground as the one from the preschool I had attended during my early childhood years. When I looked back to my great-grandfather, I saw that his house had been replaced by a lowslung gray stucco schoolhouse.

“Where are we?” I yelled over the echoes of childhood screams that began to fill the playground.

“We are in your dreamland.”

“My dreamland? What’s here?”

“Whatever you want to be. You can use it to work on earthly problems and find the best solutions before returning. It’s also a good way to stay in touch with the spirit plane while you’re on Earth.”

Although none of this seemed to make sense logically, I could feel in my heart that what he was saying was true. “So this is the spirit plane?”

“No, this is a safe zone between consciousness and the spirit plane. Many of the same rules apply, but nobody can get in unless you invite them here.”

“Can I get to the spirit plane from here?”

“Yes, you can, but you aren’t ready yet. I suggest you spend some time here and get familiar with your dreamland first. If you’re still interested, we can talk about that later.”

Spending time in my dreamland was a lot of fun. I could conjure almost any time and place I wanted and meet friends and relatives from the past at whatever age I wanted them to be. I started with my favorite memories, reliving them one at a time: The first time I learned to ride a bicycle. My first puppy. The vacation to Yosemite. One after another, I revisited these moments until I couldn’t remember any more.

But there was one thing I couldn’t figure out.

“Why can’t I relive memories with Cheryl?” I asked my great-grandfather.

“As I mentioned before, you are able to invite people and places into your dreamland at will. But those people and places have to accept your invitation before coming in. The souls of people you conjure actually participate in your dreams.”

“But why wouldn’t she want to come in? Even people I haven’t seen since preschool come.”

“You trapped Cheryl in your dreamland for many years, and she was unable to progress to where she needed to be. At the moment, she’s a bit wary of returning here.”

“How could I trap her here when she needed to accept my invitation to come?”

“Well, of course she accepted it at first—you had a very special bond. But once she arrived, you kept her here by sinking your energetic hooks in her.”

“Really? Why would I do that?”

“There are many reasons to attach to other people’s energy. In your case, it was out of fear that you were going to lose a part of yourself when she died.”

His words struck a chord in me that I knew was true. The more I understood, the more I felt awful about what I had done to Cheryl after she died.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” my greatgrandfather said. “It’s actually a pretty common situation for many people who love each other.”

“Is she mad at me?”

“I doubt it. You just need to give her some space until she gets her own afterlife established, and I’m sure she’ll visit you in the future once she’s more settled.”

I realized that one of the main things keeping my interest in the dreamland alive was the search for Cheryl. Once I discovered that she wasn’t to be found, I began to get bored. I asked my great-grandfather about showing me the spirit plane again, and although he told me I still wasn’t ready, he could tell I was getting close. Eventually he agreed to help me prepare.

“The first thing you have to do is learn to protect yourself energetically from other souls,” he began. “Here you don’t have the barrier of a body to shield yourself from energy outside your soul, so you need to learn to contain yourself.”

“Contain myself? What does that mean?”

“You need to surround yourself with protective white light so that it only lets good energy in. You’ll still be able to feel everything, but there won’t be any serious damage, like what happened in Yreka.”

“You know about that?”

“Of course. I was with you that day. I’ve been walking with you since you were born. You just didn’t pay attention.”

I wondered why it had taken me so long to let my ancestors help me. I’d always felt that it was more noble to be on my own, but I began to understand that drawing from the strength of family felt quite natural.

“Not necessarily. The truth lies somewhere in between. Yes, it’s true we are all one, but it’s also about relative power. Relative strength.”

“What do you mean?”

“For example, if a negative force is drawing from all the negative energy of humanity and you are drawing only from your own positive energy, it’s likely you would be overpowered.”

“Like I was in Yreka?”

“So what should I do?”

“For now, you should simply protect yourself. As you grow in your own personal power, you will naturally attract others with like interests, but after what happened to you in Yreka, you should probably be extra careful as you have already attracted some attention you don’t want.”

“Will you show me how to protect myself?” I definitely didn’t want to go through another Yreka experience.

“It’s quite simple. Just imagine yourself surrounded by a bubble of white light and relax. The more you do so, the more the white light will fill your soul and protect you.”

“But where does the white light come from?”

It all seemed very abstract and complicated, and I became frustrated as I tried to remember mixing paint in summer-school art class. “I don’t think I’m doing it right.”

As I quieted my breathing and imagined feeling safe and protected, I began to sense a warm glow emanating deep from within. It filled me slowly at first, and when I opened my eyes, it looked like I was standing under a very bright lightbulb. But I could see that the light was literally coming from within me. Its energy illuminated nearly two feet in all directions, and it felt very comforting. The more I relaxed, the brighter the light got, but when I started to think about what was happening, it would dim. And although it was unusual to see myself lit up like a lightbulb, it also felt very natural.

“Good,” my great-grandfather said. “Practice that regularly, and once you get used to your light, I’ll take you to the other side. Protection is very important on the spirit plane—we don’t want anything bad to happen.”

I spent the next few days practicing surrounding myself with protective light, and as I did so, I became less afraid of going to sleep at night. It finally felt that I had the tools to keep myself safe and protected if something horrible happened again like it had in Yreka.

I also changed my diet significantly. I had to stop eating at restaurants completely because I could no longer trust that the employees would be in a good mood when they prepared my food. And since I would ingest their energy when I ate, their mood became mine. I had never learned to cook for myself, but I had no choice now because of how sensitive I’d become.

In addition to my emotional sensitivity, my body also seemed to be changing—I could no longer digest rich foods very easily. I radically simplified my diet to the point of eating only steamed brown rice and drinking red rooibos tea. It was very cleansing, and although I didn’t have a lot of energy when I started, after a while I felt better than I ever had. I knew it wasn’t very healthy in the long run, but those were the only things I could keep in my stomach with all the shifts that were happening. I also felt that the more weight I began to lose, the easier it was to stay in my dreamland. The extra pounds seemed to weigh me down, and the leaner I became, the more freedom I had to slip in and out of consciousness.

When the day to begin exploring the spirit world finally arrived, my great-grandfather took me to a part of my dreamland that I’d never seen before. We walked past the playground of my preschool, across the freeway overpass of my adolescence, and over the mountain pass of my teenage years. On the other side of the mountain range, we approached the edge of a massive cliff that was so high above the valley floor that I couldn’t see the bottom. All that was visible was a field of clouds that went on for miles, with birds flying in and out of the billowy mist like dolphins playing in the surf. I thought I had explored my dreamland thoroughly before, but I didn’t remember this particular precipice. It was as if it had appeared out of nowhere when I was ready to see it, and it seemed to beckon me with clouds that were breaking like waves against the cliff. As I stood mesmerized by the awesome beauty in front of me, a small flock of large ravens circled above my head and cast an ominous shadow at my feet.