When You Are Ready

When I was about 22, I dreamt that I awoke to see a bright white light descending into our side yard, 20 feet outside the window. I was frightened, so I got up and ran from my room, but not before a dark form flew toward me. As it touched the ground, it became a beautiful blond woman dressed in a blue jumpsuit of the kind you might see in a science fiction movie. I asked her what she wanted. She said, “We have come for your brother. You are not ready yet.” Glad that they had not come for me, I went to inform my brother of their arrival. I found him kneeling tearfully in prayer. His head was shaved, and he wore a saffron-colored robe. He accompanied me to where the woman was waiting outside our bedroom window. She and her travel companions laid my brother down and slid his body through an opening in the luminous craft. Before they left, the woman told me that they had put something inside my wrist that would serve as a beacon to them. She said, “We will return when you are ready.”

Between that moment and this juncture in time I have been the recipient of countless experiences of spiritual ecstasy and religious encounter. I have written a book on lucid dreaming, a book on face-to-face encounters with Jesus, a book on visions of the Holy Mother, and a memoir on fly fishing as a spiritual journey that was inspired by luminous dreams. But throughout these important developmental stages, I have never forgotten the woman’s promise to return “when you are ready.”

One sign that I was nearing readiness for her return was an experience I had a decade ago aboard my fishing skiff, while spending the night alone on the Lower Laguna Madre, my home waters from childhood where I have flyfished since my 20s, and guided flyfishers for the past 18 years. I’d already spent several nights on the bay during the full moon, and I decided to do it one night while a tropical storm brewed over the open Gulf to the south of where I anchored.

  I lay there for a while, savoring the view of a clear, starry sky above me, and golden thunder heads to the south lit up with lightning, until I began to drift off to sleep. Passing into the realm between waking and sleeping, I heard something that I had not experienced in months. It was a familiar interior sound — like ocean waves or a rushing wind — and it had often preceded the coming of the Light or the onset of an out-of-body experience. A well-known Tibetan treatise refers to this phenomenon as the “gift waves,” and says that it indicates the presence of a spiritual master who is assisting in the development of the recipient. 

Regardless of its source, I have always considered it an auspicious event, so I surrendered to it without resistance or fear. A few minutes later, I lost consciousness briefly, but not before I felt myself rocking back and forth on the verge of leaving my body.

The next thing I remembered, I was sitting with a group of men in a wide, open work boat that was about 25 feet long. It was a very bright, cloudless day. I was fully conscious and acutely aware that I had somehow been transported from the Shoal Cat to another place. I wasn’t sure that the men could see me, so I remained still and just watched what was going on around me. Where was I? I wondered. I gathered somehow that the men were waiting to go to work inside a building that towered above us in the middle of an ocean. They all wore similar blue-and-white work clothes. I also observed several strange, otherworldly-looking boats passing by, each of which appeared to be exquisitely crafted and personally tailored to its owner’s tastes. 

Then I realized with a start where I was: I was on another planet, and the sun above me was another star! Reeling from this insight, I was suddenly back on lying on the deck of my boat, looking up at the stars again and listening to the retreating sound of the gift waves. 

It was another 15 years before the "portal" between this world and the stars opened up more completely. I have visited so many  planets in faraway star systems, and have said goodbye to countless loving souls whom I will probably never see until I am no longer tethered to this world. There have been so many experiences that I only write down the most memorable ones, some of which are included in this blog. Someday soon, I hope to write about them in a book-long treatment on the subject. But suffice to say, I know that we're not alone in the universe, and that there are countless worlds and souls who will welcome you as a long-lost friend ... "when you are ready."