It’s unlucky to be unlucky, so I am told, although that could just be a superstition. It’s unlucky to be superstitious too, as I have also heard – from very good authority, I might add. From the very best authority, in fact. Although that too might only be a baseless rumour started but yours truly for whatever murky suspicious motives I might have hidden in my subconscious. Some sort of basic unconscious self-sabotage routine, perhaps. God knows I have enough of them. It could ALL be unlucky, in my opinion. Everything could be. Life itself might be unlucky and there might be some truth in that too. Cynical as it may sound. Existence itself could be unlucky, like inadvertently drawing the ace of spades out of a pack. Existence itself might indeed be unlucky, although I’m willing to admit that this could be just another unfounded superstition. We’re all such dreadfully superstitious creatures you see – I rather doubt that we will be ever able to crawl our way out from under this doom. Furtive, jumpy, twitchy, superstitious creatures that we are – constantly in fear of bad omens.

It is unlucky to believe in luck, I have been reliably informed, and so as soon as I grasped this Supreme Mystical Principle I immediately became relieved of a whole heap of worry. A mountain of worry had been lifted from my shoulders, in fact. When I think about those long years that I have wasted staggering around under the onerous burden of all those groundless superstitious worries and all those ludicrous irrational beliefs that I used to have, I feel tempted to give way to bitterness and go down the path that leads on from there. That path which we all know so well. Personally speaking, I am deeply familiar with every little single bend in that particular path; I could walk down it blindfolded and – in fact – many is the time that I have done just that. Many is the time. I crow contentedly to myself, flapping languidly around the kitchen in my mental projection body which was that of a toad with wings, a very large super-warty toad the size of a football with spindly little bat wings sticking out on both sides. ‘All is well,’ I told myself, ‘all is well in my kitchen today’. I was on the look-out for bad omens you see, always on the look-out for bad omens.

It is a bad omen to be always looking out for bad omens of course and I recognise this more than most do. I am always trying to side-step my own shadow, to give it the slip if I can, but so far the shadow has anticipated my every move. I know that it is going to, I know perfectly well that it is going to – not being stupid or anything – but I keep on making the effort anyway. I keep on trying anyway because that’s the obsessive element that’s in me. Obsessively trying to do something that can’t ever be done and then cursing myself blackly when I fail. Cursing myself to hell and back when my futile efforts come to nothing, as they always must. As they always must, as they always must. I often try to outsmart my own mind by always doing the opposite of what it tells me to do, which is an old trick of mine. It’s the oldest trick I have – a personal favourite, in fact. I’ve never actually obtained any benefit from it, but that has never stopped me from trying. You never know do you? One day it may work, one day it may work and I’ll be free…

I had learned – with the passage of time – to skate around the inside of my bedclothes without using my physical body in any way. My physical body was still there of course but it was passive, inert, completely inactive. My dreaming body was free however, completely free. Free to skate frantically around under the duvet from one end of the bed to the other. It was only a very small dream body, like a speck of dust, but it could move extremely quickly, albeit only within the limited domain of the bed. For whatever reason – and I must admit that I am at a loss to account for this – my dreaming body is much, much smaller than I would have expected. It is microscopically small, in fact – it might be all of six to seven microns from one side to the other. The territory beneath the duvet was therefore like a vast uncharted tropical jungle to me, full of adventure and unknown dangers. As I skate around at high speed in this world I marvel at the richness and diversity of the environment. What a strange and magnificent territory this is, I say to myself. And yet even as I say this, even as I marvel at what I’m discovering in my travels – I can’t help wondering if I might not perhaps be imagining the whole thing. It could all turn out to be a bardo hallucination, the same as everything else.