Travelling Light

Travelling Light by Chris Green

It didn’t work out at first. Things often when you first you try them. Lucy and I only got into the idea because Max and Maya gave it the hard sell. It was simple, they told us.

‘You just lie down, close your eyes, relax your muscles, channel your thoughts, and gradually let go,’ Maya said. ‘You will experience a lightness of body and mind, and in no time at all, you will witness your astral body floating across the ceiling.’

‘Once you can do this, with a little practice, you can go anywhere,’ Max said. ‘As long as you can visualise the space, you can transport yourself to wherever you want.’

‘It is called astral travelling,’ Maya said.

‘It is natural,’ Max said. ‘Astral travelling is something we do all the time. In dreams for example. And what you create on the astral plane brings about changes on the physical plane. It is true magick.’

‘ Everyone should try it,’ Maya said.’Think of it as flying without wings.’

I was a little hesitant, but Lucy couldn’t wait to give it a go. It was time we tried something new, she said. She was excited by the idea of having an out-of-body experience, or OBE as she referred to it. When we failed miserably on our first attempt, she suggested we try again the following day.

‘I think I felt something happening that time, Adam,’ Lucy said after our third or fourth attempt. ‘I definitely seemed to drift off somewhere.’

‘I’m not sure I did,’ I said.

I felt like giving up there and then. It was fine for old hippies like Max and Maya. They were probably taken in regularly by nonsense like this. But as I saw it, astral travelling had little place in our lives. It was no more credible than many of the conspiracy theories circulating on social media. I liked to think Lucy and I were more grounded, less gullible.

‘You’re trying too hard,’ Lucy said. ‘You need to relax. Try those breathing exercises I showed you.…… Anyway, I think we ought to stick with it, don’t you? Can we do that?’

I wondered if it would be better to just stick with smoking weed. If you wanted to get mystical about it, you could say that this provided us with our Dreamtime. It was much more straightforward. But it did not seem worth mentioning it. Once Lucy got the bit between her teeth about something, there was no stopping her. I could tell she was determined to push this one. She was eager to please Maya. They had been friends since university.

Not many people were aware of it, but Maya was the heir-apparent to the FlowerPower fortune. I had only recently been introduced to her and Max when Lucy took me along to their wedding at Scott McKenzie Hall a month or two previously. Maya seemed to possess an almost childlike naivety. She was the archetypal hippie, all paisley pattern, peasant prints and patchouli oil. But I could not make out Max at all. He was an enigma. He dressed with dissident cool and talked the talk, but he came across as rude, edgy, opinionated, and overbearing. A bully. It didn’t seem the pair were at all suited, but when I mentioned this to Lucy back then, she told me to stop being a wet blanket.

‘Maybe I will read up on astral travelling on the internet to see if I can get any tips,’ I said now to placate her.

‘Good idea!’ Lucy said. ‘Do some research. There will be lots of information about astral projection online. It always helps to get some background when you are starting something new. You never know, Adam. This could change our lives.’

I discovered from Mystic Arts that astral travelling and astral projection were overarching terms used to describe an intentional out-of-body experience that assumed the existence of a soul or astral body separate from the physical body. Connected by an invisible silver cord, one’s astral body could travel outside the realm of the physical body. There were no limits to where the experienced traveller could go. You could travel beyond the earthly bounds of your physical body to anywhere in the universe. I entertained the possibility that it had been Max who had written this.

To please Lucy, I persevered. While she claimed her astral body had made it as far as the botanical gardens, I told her mine had hovered above my head and looked down on me. This seemed to satisfy her. She told me I was doing well. Wasn’t she right, she said, to get me to stick with it? 

However, the next time Max and Maya came to visit, they were too excited to listen to how we were getting along with our astral projection. Maya was vivacious. They had moved on; she told us. They had taken the process a step further.

‘Listen to this, guys,’ she said. ‘While our subtle bodies were travelling, Max suggested we tried swapping them. To take possession of each other. Just imagine that for a moment if you can.’

‘I don’t think Maya expected it to work,’ Max said. ‘After all, it was a pretty far-out proposition of mine. But I had faith. I knew we could do it.’ 

‘And it worked,’ Maya said. ‘We only occupied each other’s bodies momentarily, but it was a mind-blowing experience. I was Max, and Max was me.’

‘You have to work at it, of course,’ Max said. ‘Don’t get the impression that it’s easy. But eventually, we will be able to swap bodies whenever we want to. And for longer spells.’ 

‘You two should try it,’ Maya said.

Call me perverse, but I had never had any desire to be in Lucy’s body in any way other than the more usual point of entry. I was perfectly happy with this setup. Men were men and women were women. And so far as I could tell, this worked out well. I found these bizarre new permutations of gender you read about in the papers offensive. But Lucy wanted to know more. She seemed fascinated by Max and Maya’s crazy idea. Why would anyone want to swap, I wondered? What would be the purpose? It could be for good intentions, or it could be for evil motives, couldn’t it? What if one of the parties decided to make the arrangement permanent against the other’s wishes? What would happen then? More importantly, what did Lucy feel she was missing out on? What was she expecting to get from it? What could she possibly have in mind? 

It was all academic, of course. I had yet to even manage the astral projection part of the manoeuvre, let alone take matters further. This latest development seemed to me like yet more new-age hocus-pocus. In order not to disappoint Lucy, I had so far pretended to be well on my way to spiritual freedom, dropping in all the buzzwords they had mentioned in Mystic Arts at appropriate moments. I could not now admit my deceit, so reluctantly I agreed to give the transmigration malarkey a try. 

It was clear from the outset that it would not be a great success. Lucy’s astral body was apparently zipping all around the room, but as I expected, mine seemed determined to stay put.

‘You’re not trying hard enough, Adam,’ she said, returning to base.

‘Well, first I’m trying too hard and now I’m not trying hard enough,’ I said. ‘Come on, Lucy! Which is it?’

‘I don’t think your heart is in it,’ she said. ‘Don’t you want to see what it’s like to be inside me?’ 

‘Perhaps it would help if we tried the other way again first,’ I said. ‘That usually seems to work.’

‘I enjoy it too, Adam,’ she said. ‘But there’s more to life than sex. We need to treat astral projection as something entirely different. If we are going to get anywhere, you need to take it more seriously.’ 

To help things along, Lucy took me round to Max and Maya’s to pick up some tips. 

‘We need to find out what we are doing wrong,’ she said. ‘More specifically, what you are doing wrong.’

Lucy seemed pleased to find that Maya appeared to be alone. No explanation was offered about where Max was, but we both felt that without him, Maya would be easier to talk to. Max had a way of controlling the conversation, of always being right and not giving you the chance to get your point across.  

Within the first few minutes, we both noticed that something about Maya was different. She was dressed in her usual boho chic, and her hair and make-up looked the same, but her manner had changed. Normally, she was light and breezy and easy to talk to. She had hardened. Her voice sounded the same, but her delivery was different. She came across as rude, edgy, opinionated, and overbearing, the very traits I had previously attributed to Max. Lucy and I exchanged glances. I could tell she had never seen her friend like this. Something was definitely wrong. It seemed Maya couldn’t wait to get rid of us. Why were we standing in the hallway? Why hadn’t she offered us a cup of tea or invited us into the front room? Had something happened? If it had, why couldn’t she tell us? Why was the door to the main part of the house bolted? Where was Max? What was that foul smell like rotting flesh? Where was it coming from?

Copyright: Chris Green, 2025: All rights reserved