All of that are just individual stories. There is one thing that unifies us all, us who travelled a few times and sooner or later you come to this.

Did you notice that I did not mention how returning to our reality works?

If you paid attention, you remember that consciousness and body are entirely separated during the trip. There is no way to pull a traveller back. He comes back. Or he doesn’t. Yes, we have lost people, and we are not entirely sure how. There are number of theories on what happened to them, and each of those is material for a horror story. I don’t want to frighten you with theory. I want to terrify you with reality.

So, how do we return? Lucid dreaming. During sleep, the consciousness is as far from the physical reality as possible. There may be other altered states of consciousness that serve the same purpose, but we have not found one that works reliably, and trust me that is not for lack of trying.

If you never heard the term, lucid dreaming is a special kind of sleep in which you are entirely aware of yourself during dreams. Instead of just more or less dimly remembering them in the morning, you are entirely aware and, for lack of a better term, awake. But since you are in a dream state, you can control it. Want to fly? Done. Want to a sunny beach? Done. Whatever you want, in your dreams you can. And it turns out that during lucid dreaming you can also wish yourself back into ordinary reality. The best part about it is that it can be learnt, and trained. That makes it accessible, unlike drugs or other chemicals which you may not be able to obtain in the alternate reality.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Of course, we did not start out knowing that. There is one other way. When you die in an alternate universe, your consciousness returns to ordinary reality. It is decidedly unpleasant, but it works very, very reliably.

We found that out the hard way. It was one of those theories that we had hoped not having to test, and then we had to, on our first trips. It took us many trips and experiments to figure out the better alternative with the lucid dreaming.

Of course it made us wonder if maybe this is an alternate reality and what will happen if we die in this one. Got our hopes up there, and made us think about life and all. Well, here is the thing, if people in their alternate realities die, they don’t come here. They just die. We travelers return because this is our base reality. If others visit us, they will return to theirs, but we are not visitors here. At least none of us have gone anywhere when we tried lucid dreaming in this world.



Now you know of the perils and harms of travelling between the worlds, or through time, or whatever you may call it. My apologies if I created a false impression by showing you around with such a focus on the victims. There are others and many advantages, otherwise we would not be continuing to run the program. I am lucky to be such an example. I have used my additional time in the past for knowledge, studied several subjects I had always been interested in and satisfied my curiosity about world events. We usually have some time to use as we wish during our travels, and anyway the moment of return is typically our choice. And as I said before: Memories and knowledge is all that we can bring.

It is a great invention despite its dangers, and many of us have used it without suffering ill consequences. One has to be careful, and knowledgeable. Our knowledge was bought at the price of many lives and much suffering.

Maybe it will make the path more smooth and less dangerous for others.

Or maybe the natural laws of time travel are different in the world you came from.