It’s unlucky to be unlucky, so I’m told, though that’s probably just a groundless superstition. It’s unlucky to be unnecessarily superstitious too, as I have also heard – and on very good authority too, mind you. On the very best of authority. Although that too might only be a baseless rumour, started by yours truly (for whatever murky suspicious motives I might have hidden there in my subconscious mind). It could ALL be unlucky, in my opinion. Life itself might be unlucky and I suspect that there might be more truth in that than we like to imagine. Existence itself could be extremely unlucky, like inadvertently drawing the ace of spades out of the pack when you really didn’t want to. Existence itself might be super-unlucky, although I’m willing to admit that this could be just another unfounded superstition. We are such dreadfully superstitious creatures, you see. I rather doubt that we’ll ever be able to crawl our way out from under this particular rock. Fearful superstitious creatures we are, constantly in fear of coming across bad omens.
It’s unlucky to believe in bad luck, so I was informed, and as soon as I grasped this I immediately became relieved of a whole heap of needless worry. A veritable mountain of worry had been lifted from my sagging shoulders, in fact. When I think about the long years that I have staggered around under the onerous burden of all that needless anxiety (driven by innumerable baseless superstitious beliefs as I was) I feel tempted to give way to bitterness – I am tempted go down the path that leads on from that, the path which we all know so well. Personally, I’m deeply familiar with every single little bend in that path. I know it as well as I know the back of my hand. I could walk it blindfolded – and – in fact – many is the time that I’ve done just that!
I was making contented little crooning noises as I flapped languidly around the kitchen in my mental projection body, which was that of a toad with wings. A very large super-warty toad with spindly bat wings. ‘All is well’, I told myself grandly, ‘All is well in my kitchen today…’ I was on the lookout for bad omens you see – always on the lookout, always on the lookout for bad omens and evil portents.
It is an evil portent to be always on the look out for evil portents of course and I recognise this better than anybody. I’m always trying to dodge my own shadow and yet – as you might expect – it always manages to follow me. Naturally it does. I know that it’s going to, of course. I know perfectly well that it’s going to – not being stupid – but I keep trying to dodge it all the same. I’m always trying to escape my shadow because that’s the obsessive element that is in me. That’s the compulsion, you see – that’s what’s responsible for me obsessively trying to do something that can’t done (and cursing myself blackly when I fail). Cursing myself to hell and back when my frantic efforts come to nothing, as they always do. As they always, always do. What a life, huh? What a futile and frustrating life.
I was trying to outsmart my own mind by always doing the opposite of what it told me to do. It’s an old trick of mine. I have never actually obtained any benefit from this trick from it but that’s never stopped me! You never know, I tell myself – one day it may just work…
With the passage of time – and I am talking decades here not just years – I had learned to skate around in my bed without using my body in anyway. My body was still there – my physical body was still there, that is – but it was passive, completely inactive. It was dead to the world, out for the count. My Dream Body on the other hand was – however – free to skate around under the cover of the duvet from one end of the bed to the other in a completely frictionless way! My Dream Body was very small in those days and it could move exceedingly rapidly, but only within the limited domain of the bed. For whatever reason – and I have to admit that I’m at a loss to account for this – my Dream Body was extraordinarily small – microscopically small in fact. It might have been six or seven microns from tip to tail, and so the area beneath the duvet was like a vast, uncharted territory for me, full of both wild adventure and unknown dangers. As I skated around this world – at impossibly high velocities – I would marvel at the richness and sheer diversity of the environment I found myself in. ‘What a strange and truly magnificent territory this is,’ I would always say to myself at these times, overcome with wonder, ‘what a remarkably strange and utterly magnificent territory this is…’
