Katiannah Esmae

Astral Traveler

The insistent shriek of the alarm hadn't disturbed the silence yet, and Katia seized this precious window to project her consciousness out of her body once more. It was the hypnagogic state, the hazy realm between wakefulness and sleep, a time when the mind lingered in a liminal space, that served as an easy gateway into the astral realm.

Countless versions of herself existed concurrently across multiple dimensions. Some near-mirrors of her life, with only the faintest variations - a missing logo on a familiar underwear brand, a children's book title with a different twist. But others offered wildly divergent paths.

In one version she lived in a legendary hippie van parked in the heart of Sedona. There, she strummed her guitar at cozy coffee shops and mystical vortexes, living on the kindness of strangers' tips. Another, far more extraordinary path, had her as a fearless astronaut, nurturing life on a distant Martian colony. As she voyaged through the cosmos, she desperately tried to capture its beauty with the same camera sitting on the shelf in her apartment.

Then came the most jarring dimension: a desolate cityscape overrun with radioactive monsters stalking her through the hungry crumbling streets. In this bizarre twist, she wielded a blunt katana and a temperamental shotgun, her only defense against the horrors of this nightmarish world.

These infinite realities weren't just possibilities, they were a nightly storybook, her great escape. They offered excitement just as much as they served as a reminder that even the deepest heartaches wouldn't last forever. Like a gripping TV show or a book transcending reality itself, she could lose herself in these alternate lives.

Yet, her role was akin to a captivated, yet occasionally horrified, observer – swept along by an invisible current, like playing a scripted virtual reality game. She could experience these alternate universes, but never alter their narratives. The words leaving her lips felt foreign, a dissonance with her desires. Actions too, seemed out of sync, akin to a marionette doll controlled by unseen strings; like being awake in a dream she couldn't control.

With her eyelids firmly shut and her body motionless, Katia visualized the intimate details of her bedroom, a familiar vision. Her internal gaze, unseen, fell upon the cheap dresser, its veneer peeling, from water damage and age. Her mind's touch lingered on the sharp corner, a familiar sensation from countless reaches while dusting. Next to the dwindling bamboo lotus candle, which diffused a faint floral fragrance, lay Alan Watts’ “The Cloud-Hidden Heron,” its pages stained by tea—a relic once offered to a tasseographer for interpretation.

Just visualizing her bedroom wasn't enough for Katia. She aimed to deceive her brain, making it believe her body was awake and moving around the room, not just lying in bed. To achieve this, she heightened her senses, focusing intensely on the dresser and mentally recreating the sensation of rolling out of bed. She imagined herself smoothly transitioning over the edge, likening it to the gentle cascade of a waterfall.

At first, it felt forced, and her lower mind begged to return to sleep. But after persistent phantom wiggling, a different sensation emerged. A magnetic pull, she felt, drawing her energetic body. The feeling of spilling over the bed's edge intensified, crescendoing in realism until, for a fleeting moment, Katia was certain her physical form had actually moved.

Experience had taught her better. Instead of the expected jolt of waking back in her body, she found herself free – free from its physical constraints, hovering beside the familiar dresser, separate from the woman nestled beneath the airy lavender comforter. The woman, a physical shell of Katia, slept soundly, her red hair a fiery cascading contrast against the mismatched green satin pillowcase.

In the astral realm, the very fabric of materiality seemed fluid. Unlike the physical world, where atoms held tight to their determined patterns, here they danced freely, reshaping the environment on a whim. This time, Katia found her bedroom reverted back in time, to when it stood as a small farmhouse instead of a high-rise apartment. Drywall became wooden panels and photos of wildlife transformed into a worn set of pots and pans hanging above an old cast iron stove.

The familiar safeguard of reality checks felt more like a pesky routine than a source of wonder. She plugged her nose, inhaling deep the familiar scent of her bedroom despite the impediment. Good. Looking at her hands, she noticed her fingers, usually slender and pianist-like, now stretched impossibly long, looking like hotdogs, the amethyst ring she always wore on her right ring finger duplicating itself onto a second middle finger. A while ago, Katia would have found all of this amusing, but the novelty had worn off with exposure. Like the White Rabbit perpetually late, Katia had somewhere to be.

In her haste, she walked around the room, touching everything within reach—the cold pan, the dusty iron stove with remnants of a dying fire, a random notebook that appeared on the counter, its writing incomprehensibly shifting. She did all this to ground herself in the astral realm, making reality more vivid, flooding it with colors beyond ordinary sight. Whenever she felt herself drifting back to her body, she did something else to anchor herself further, even eating an apple that materialized on the kitchen table. Despite heightened vision, her senses of taste and touch remained somewhat muted.

Finally, two windows manifested, followed by a door. Katiannah walked over to the first window, appearing behind an old worn couch, and peered out at the ominous woods that continued to stalk her. She had seen these woods many times before but had never entered them. While Katia typically found herself fearless during these encounters, the woodlands, shrouded in darkness and fractionally visible by the faint glow of the moon, stirred up a deep, primal sense of terror.

The second window, displayed a mesmerizing beach beneath the Northern Lights, the ocean's surface reflecting the azure and chartreuse swirling hues of the sky. The waves threatened to crash through the window, and Katia knew that if she opened the latch, she would be swept away into the oceanic world.

But today, exploring mystical beaches wasn’t her intention. The manifested door stood out amidst the ephemeral surroundings. It appeared solid and sturdy, as always, its surface adorned with intricate carvings that seemed to shift and morph with each passing moment. However, before her hand could reach for the silver doorknob, a jarring intrusion shattered the projection. The untimely cry of her alarm clock ripped through the dreamscape, yanking Katia back to her physical form. The sensation most people dreaded – the plummeting feeling of falling asleep – was Katia's fuel, a jolt reconnecting her to her material shell. "Dammit," she muttered, her arm instinctively reaching from the warm embrace of her blanket to silence the insistent alarm on her phone.

The wallpaper on her phone had changed. Gone was the picture of her and Yoshio at the botanical gardens, replaced by a generic stock image of a monarch butterfly emerging from a cocoon. Katia barely registered it. This wasn't the first time an overnight update had rearranged her phone's digital display.

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More pressing was the shadowing disappointment of just a text from Linda confirming their appointment. No response from Yoshio to her message last night. Briefly, Katia's mind went into hyperdrive, instantly shifting from the calm, theta state required for astral projection, to chaotic beta brain waves.

Had six years of friendship just gone down the shitter after what happened last night? A knot of unease tightened in her throat. Maybe Yoshio was just busy. She left his house late, and perhaps, just for once, he decided not to wake up at the ungodly hour of five am.

But damn it, Katia already craved a text with a timestamp predating 5:30 – a full four hours past her usual wake-up call. Like a Moonflower unfurling its petals at dusk, she thrived under the silver glow, not the harsh transition of dawn.

After showering, putting on a plain charcoal gray dress, she brewed a travel mug of coffee, and grabbed the keys to her poorly aging black four door Wrangler. Traffic was horrendous on the thruway, and the coffee tasted different - coconut undertones? Raising a curious red brow, she took another sip, trying to comprehend the flavor profile. It had a tropical aftertaste, which baffled her because…

An antique dining chair, improperly latched down, flew off the truck in front of her, causing Katia to swerve, slam on the brakes, let out a scream of nearly heart-stopping surprise. A scream followed by a string of obscenities that would make a seasoned lonely trucker raise a seductive brow after the coffee spilled all over her legs.

The phone's terrible ringtone, which sounded like a fax machine from twenty years ago, rang once more, displaying Linda’s name.

When the hell did her ringtone default to something so obnoxiously primitive? “Ten minutes, I am ten minutes away,” she griped, her focus torn between trying to swipe her finger across the screen to accept the call while focusing on the road. “I am not even late,” she said out loud to herself, quickly gazing at the car’s digital clock, confirming it was only 11:43. The call connected, Linda's voice instantly blaring over the car speaker.

"Where are you?" Linda demanded to know, the scoff following louder than the question itself. “We have been waiting for almost an hour! I am getting eaten-up by mosquitoes! I am going to have bumps all over my skin for my wedding, and it will totally be your fault!”

Katia raised a brow at Linda’s startling audacity, briefly wondering if she should have bothered extending the made-up family discount to her cousin whom she saw only five times in her life. Her prices were already the lowest in all of Ashville out of a desperation to attract new clients in order to pay rent, and have something left over to eat; she wasn’t even close to living in the reality where she worked for National Geographic.

Frankly, Katia didn’t care much for photography. It wasn’t her passion. But if she saw the world void of the rich color and enchantment of her inner world, then at least she could capture the moments and scenery that left other people awestruck, the photograph serving as a concrete reminder of their celebrated occasions.

To her, all worldly beauty paled in comparison to her inner creations. Perhaps this was a great flaw within herself- difficulty finding beauty in the outside world when her soul could conjure such vivid hues. Normal waking life looked akin to a grayscale photograph compared to the higher-density planes she visited in her dreams or conscious projections. But the average human eye lacked the ability to see what she could imagine, and the human mind had lost the willingness to believe.

“Get here now,” Linda demanded, her disembodied voice filling the cab of the car, causing Katia to drift out of her thoughts.

Katia glanced out the window at the gridlocked traffic. "Unless my car sprouts wings like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, ten minutes is the best I can do. Yesterday, you said noon. You have no right to be upset if you arrived at the park over an hour before we agreed to meet,” resisting the urge to check her text messages while driving, Katia kept her eyes narrowed on the road.

“No, we said eleven. Re-read our texts. I am looking right at it,” Linda snapped. “THESE DAMN BUGS! STOP BITING ME!” Linda screamed.

Katia scoffed, pressing the glaring red disconnect button, leaving Linda to battle the mosquitoes with fiance Paul.

It took another fifteen minutes to reach Seaside Park, which despite the name, actually was a nature preserve which went deeply into the woods. Katia had done several photoshoots there, especially in front of the ancient twisted oak tree, memorable by its thick heavy branches stretching high into the skyline, looking tall enough to touch the clouds as it swayed gently in the wind, as if dancing to a song Katia pursued only it could hear. The tree had been a focal point of Ashville, estimated to be eight-hundred years old, greatly surpassing the average age of an oak by over two hundred years despite centuries of hurricanes and deforestation.

In frustration, Katia found herself tempted to turn the car around and tell Linda to eat bugs, and to find a new photographer. But the dreamer needed the money, and she still had a contract to fulfill on her end, which consisted of save the date, rehearsal, and wedding photos. A grand package consisting of hours of photo editing, all for a measly $500, which at this point, barely paid for her basic utilities for the month.

As for Linda, perhaps the stress of the upcoming wedding folded in on her, temporarily transforming her into a pissed-off banshee. While Katia had only met her a few times, Linda had seemed very proper, polite, and grateful for the deal she was receiving on Katia's services. Linda even sent her a hundred gift card as a 'thank you' present for the Save the Date Photoshoot. This Linda seemed like an entirely different person, an incredibly petulant one.

Finally, Katia reached the parking lot. Without bothering to check her history of text messages to see who was right or wrong about the time difference, she gathered her camera and got out of the truck. She followed the familiar rocky path into the nature preserve, her steps occasionally interrupted by the unexpected obstacle of twigs threatening to trip her. Every step further into the woods should have created a transition from the busy hum of traffic to the distant calls of woodland creatures, but all that assaulted her senses was Linda screaming up ahead, likely at her fiance, as she demanded he do something about the bugs.

“Sorry to keep you waiting, I am here,” Honestly, Katia just wanted to move beyond assigning fault, and just get the photoshoot over with, so she could go about her day, and perhaps try to wrap her head around the entire Yoshio situation.

Linda came into view at the completion of Katia’s sentence, but it was deadpanned, her fake smile turning into a look of confusion as her focus swayed between the man who wasn’t Paul, to a crooked pine with sad drooping branches that replaced the mighty oak once standing in its place.

"New fiancé?" Katia blurted, bewildered. Her gaze darted from the unfamiliar man with blue eyes and full head of hair to Linda, who swatted her arm dismissively.

"Are you crazy? Why would you ask such a disgusting thoughtless thing?" Linda snapped, her focus solely on the mosquitos. "These bugs are unbearable!”

The unfamiliar man offered Katia a reassuring smile. "She's just a little stressed about the wedding. We appreciate you squeezing us in for the photos." His voice was warm, a vivid difference to Paul's gruff demeanor.

Katia stared at the strange man, her legs turning weak. "But...Paul was bald," she stammered. "Six months ago, in November?"

Confusion flickered across the man's face. "My name is Gary," he corrected gently. “You took our photos in May of us at the lake. I've always had a full head of hair, and I hope to never lose any of it. I am not much of a looker bald." His forced laugh did little to ease the growing dread in Katia's gut.

Panic swelled, a dizzying wave threatening to topple her. "Where's the oak tree?" she demanded, gesturing wildly towards the scrawny pine. "Who gets married in front of this thing?" Unlike the oak tree, Katia saw nothing memorable about the pathetic limp-branched pine. If the tree didn’t fall down within a year, they would likely cut it down. Good riddance.

Linda rolled her eyes. "Agreed, it's hideous. But the ceremony is by the creek next to the pavilion, remember? No idea why I need to remind you of this when we just spoke yesterday.”

"Creek? There's no creek!" Katia's voice rose an octave. "There never has been!" Her gaze darted to a path cutting through the familiar woods, a path she'd never seen before.

With lightning speed, she snatched her phone from her pocket, only to fumble it onto a jagged rock, cursing as it hit. "Shit!" Katia exclaimed, momentarily abandoning her camera to retrieve the device. Glancing at the screen, she noted the time flashing 12:05. She looked away, then looked at the clock again before it flipped to 12:06. Anxious, she examined her hands, finding them unchanged, then foolishly attempted to breathe through plugged nostrils.

"Are you having a stroke?" Linda's irritation outweighed her concern.

Reality seemed to warp, blurring the scenery before her. Checking her phone again, she found no messages from Yoshio, realizing he wasn't even in her contacts.

"This can't be real," Katia muttered, leaning against a tree for support, refusing to believe this was happening.

This wasn't real.

It couldn't be.

Yet, somehow, she had awakened in a different reality, no longer a mere observer but an active participant. And she had no idea how to return to her old life, her native world, where there was something to work out with Yoshio, and where the ancient oak tree stood deeply rooted to Earth’s core in place of the limp pine.