LUCID

CHAPTER 2

I was getting pretty warm after a while. The sun was burning down from a clear blue sky and, being a desert, there wasn't any shade. The road ahead and the mountains on the horizon shimmered in the heat. There was no wind to cool me. I was getting thirsty too and was about to manifest a bottle of water when I noticed a billboard up ahead. I forgot about the water and hastened to the board, hoping it would give me some information, or instructions. It didn't – well, not much. The board was old and weathered. The sign that had been painted on it was bleached and peeling, leaving only traces of unconnected letters and part-words I couldn't decipher, and the remains of what was an arrow pointing the way I was heading. Well, something was up ahead, but what and how far the sign wasn't telling. Still, I decided I should go find out.

I manifested another cigarette and smoked it in the shade of the billboard while weighing up if I should walk or fly onwards. Then a third, much more fun option came to mind. I stepped back into the sunlight and gazed at the road stretching endlessly to the horizon. What I needed was a motorcycle.

No sooner said than manifested. I can do this as easily as manifesting a cigarette – it's such a kick. The first time I did it was in a lucid-dream and I became frustrated with the idiotic contraption I was riding at the time, which was supposed to represent a motorcycle but looked and handled more like a squashed-up go-kart, so I tried changing it. And it worked. I created a Honda Goldwing out of nothing. Really! Even found my registration papers, license and passport in pouches flanking the headlights. It blew me away.

But this road screamed for a 'cooler' bike – a Moto Guzzi California to be precise, which had been a dream-motorcycle for me since I was a teenager. So, within moments I was straddling a 1400cc Italian metal stallion, clicking into gear, rolling back the throttle and tearing along that endless dusty blacktop towards that signposted somewhere in the middle of no-where-in-particular.

Yeeeeeeehaaaa!

You know what else blows me away? Details. The details the Universal-Consciousness deems important enough to add to these dream-scapes: the roar of the engine and the heat I felt coming off it between my legs; the rushing wind streaming across my face and sweeping my hair back in its wake behind me; the dusty scent of the dry desert landscape; the bleached-out grass and broken rocks that fringed the roadway; salamanders scurrying across the tarmac; the smeared, bloody carcass of some (recent?) furry road-kill, flattened beyond recognition...

And a pothole – whoa! – luckily just missed it.

A pothole for crying out loud! And road-kill! These are exactly the sort of details that reinforce my conviction that these astral worlds are real worlds and not just some trick of flickering neurons in my brain, creating illusory realities from snippets of sensorial memory hauled up out the depths of my subconscious.

I thought briefly about this as I swerved, but only briefly – I had to keep my eyes on the road, could be more potholes.

There was another detail that's important to mention: far behind me, there seemed to be a storm brewing. A darkness was evolving, merging horizon and sky. All visible in my rear-view mirrors but, maybe fortunately, I didn't pay it much attention at the time.

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I'd been riding for twenty minutes or so and hadn't been thinking much beyond the exhilarating experience of the bike and the road. I hadn't been thinking of where I was going or what I'd do when I got there – wherever 'there' was. I certainly hadn't been thinking about fuel, but now I saw a garage up ahead and coincidently the bike started spluttering and losing speed. Another sign? Was this where the billboard was pointing to?

I pulled into the garage forecourt and it fitted the decor of the landscape perfectly: a run-down shack of a store; two rusty, grease-smeared petrol-pumps; another weathered sign hanging from chains above the porch, swinging and squeaking in the light breeze; the gutted wreck of an old Ford truck covered in brush and briar – its paint blistered and peeling under the heat of an afternoon sun.