Beyond The Chaos Gate

1 DARK OMENS-2

April 4, 2019

IAN BLINKED A FEW TIMES as he tried to bring his eyes into focus. He was okay, but there was a low-level persistent sense of dread, which had been present even before he went to sleep.

He had the dream, and he knew that it meant that someone had died this morning. Ian felt the tension level go up in his mind with his every contemplation of the dream.

Ian knew himself to be very bright, with a high IQ, and he knew himself to be anti-social, or, as he preferred to say, he was asocial. He lived on the family trust fund, and he had plenty of time on his hands, not needing to consume his time with a job, or any actions to collect survival funds.

Ian was introverted, and he did not socialize easily. As a matter of fact, he only had a handful of friends and acquaintances, most of whom would frequent the town's only bar or pub, known as the Starlight's End.

Thinking of the bar brought Freya to mind and a slight and rare smile to his face. Of the outside world, she was probably the only aspect of the objective world that he preferred to the interior world in which he usually dwelt.

Ian had recurring precognitive dreams throughout his life, and the history of his family featured similar talents, making the psychic world a legacy for him. Over the years, he had expanded his skills to include a kind of hybrid astral projection in addition to the precognition.

Ian decided that he needed to give the situation a good old college try while it was fresh in his mind, so he settled down into his favorite meditation chair, and began the process of visualizations that had become his shortcut into a meditative state. After about five minutes, he felt the floating sensation that told him that he was in a deep Alpha state. When he noticed that he was slipping into a Theta state, he began directing his point of view into a nonlocal form.

What he practiced was not really remote viewing. A more traditional practitioner would have called it astral projection, but there were many reasons why Ian did not see it that way.

In astral projection, the common viewpoint was that you project yourself into your astral body, an ectoplasmic body connected to your physical body by a cord of ectoplasm. In remote viewing, you simply see things non-locally, but it is usually an intuitional process, where you simply know things, which you subconsciously express in some medium of pictures or painting, or some other means of expressing your intuited knowledge.

A long time ago, Ian had discovered that both arts were the same thing. They were different expressions of the same process, due to a difference in beliefs about what was going on. He practiced astral projection but projected only his point of view, with no astral body or cord created or visualized.

One of the good things about remote viewing is that it is not limited by time. It is as easy to see events in the past or the future as it was to see events in the present, as long as you believed you could see those events.

Ian felt his point of view disengage from his body, and expand around him while he decided on a direction to search. He felt the Darkness to the North of him, and his sight sped over the landscape toward the source.

One moment he saw everything in the path he had chosen, and suddenly, he found himself engulfed in darkness. He could not see what was projecting the darkness, but he felt an ominous sense of dread, and he thought that he caught glimpses of something tentacle-like in the dark, composed perhaps of shards of shadow that somehow was darker than the total darkness he was already sensing.

No matter how he pushed, he could not get closer to the thing behind the stygian night. That was probably a good thing. Ian felt completely vulnerable, even though he had always thought himself untouchable when he was remote viewing. His unconscious mind now was screaming that he was in danger, and he let himself be reeled back to his physical body.

Ian opened his eyes, and painfully straightened his lanky body as he rose to his feet. He always found it almost funny how he could have such creaky muscle effects from a meditation that was essentially an exercise in relaxing those muscles.

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