Chapter 1

[Sunday, July 5th, 2020]

It was about 9 pm and I was making good time on the highway when I drove over a small hill and suddenly saw that there were two cars in view I hadn’t noticed earlier.

One of them was in the “Breakdown Lane” on the side of the road. What was noteworthy about this situation, is the second car that was stopped right alongside the first one. He was talking to the other driver through a rolled down passenger window. This second car was stopped in the normal travel lane. In case you don’t see the issue yet, he was sitting in the same lane that I was traveling way too fast in. I only had a split second to react, but I managed it.

I jerked the steering wheel left, and while I did miss the car, I needed to fix my new direction or I was heading “off-road”. Quickly spinning the wheel the other way, I overcompensated a little too much to the right when I was trying to straighten the car out again. Trying to fix that caused me to overcompensate again too much to the left ... well, I’m sure you can picture me fishtailing all over the road well enough.

All of that excitement quickly calmed down, however, I’m now having to look out my passenger window to see the highway ahead of me. The car and I are now sliding “almost” perfectly sideways down the middle of the road. I bet we were still going faster than the speed limit too. Our path of motion was slightly off from the direction of the road and we were drifting to the right. Sliding inevitably into the ditch on the side of the road. The brakes made no difference at this point, I might as well have been on ice for all the good they were doing.

I had a moment to think, “This is gonna hurt”, before one of my wheels caught on something and the car began flipping through the air. I closed my eyes and felt something shift inside me, not like broken bones or anything, but there was a lurch-like feeling, and I waited for the pain to come ... and waited ... and waited.

After a while of nothing happening, I opened my eyes. Well, that’s as close as I can come to describing the effect. One moment I was in darkness, then when I did whatever it is we humans do to tell our eyes to open, I could see again. But I wasn’t in the car anymore, and I had managed to lose the rest of me as well.

It was as if I were a ghost. I had no hands to move, no mouth to speak with. I had no arms, no legs, no feet, no torso, nothing. I could not feel hot or cold. Everything was silent, I could hear nothing. I had always suffered from tinnitus, so that was kinda new and even a good thing. I could feel absolutely nothing at all, but I did have a perspective to see from. I was also more than a little confused. My mind was going, “What the hell!” I might have screamed it, but I couldn’t.

I could shift my perception, just like turning my head, and I did so while taking in my environment. I could “see” that I was facing the end of some odd type of tunnel made up of many segments. I was reminded of one of those infinitely smaller “picture inside of its own picture” pieces of art as I gazed down the long end of the tunnel.

The segment of the tunnel I was in was notably different from the others. It was shorter, maybe only half as long as the other segments I could see. Every surface of it had a distinctive golden shine, while the rest of the tunnel looked to be made of a comparatively white or silver substance.

At the end of the tunnel near me, I could see a scene that looked like where I had just left. It was blurry and artsy, like a soft pastel painting at first, but it became a little more crisp and clear with focus. The scene’s perspective was from my own eyes, sitting in the driver’s seat of my car and looking toward the passenger window. Out of the car’s window, instead of the road or a landscape, I could see the night sky and there was a lot of debris in view inside the car.

Most of the debris was trash that I must have missed the last time I had cleaned out the car, the plastic lid and straw from a drink cup, a bottle cap, a receipt from a gas station, a lost french fry (wow, I need to clean the car better). All of it floating in the air inside the car.

I quickly turned my focus to other things around me. All of the segments of the tunnel had scenes on both sides, but they were too out of focus to make out from where I was.

I could see the tunnel extending until it got too small to see any more detail. There was no specific light source, but the surfaces of the tunnel were always clearly visible with no shadows or obstructions. It was cylindrical, perfectly straight, utterly empty, and almost clinical looking somehow.

I decided to try to move away from the end of the tunnel where I was. I mentally leaned towards the open tunnel that I was facing, wishing myself to move. I immediately found the sides of the tunnel slowly slipping past me. There was no real sense of movement. No inertia if you will, just the perception of the tunnel moving past me as I went forward. I “pushed” a little more, and the walls passed by a little faster. The open end of the tunnel ahead of me didn’t appear to change in any way, so after a short time, I “pulled” myself to a stop and looked behind me. I had definitely moved.

I could still see the gold segment at the end of the tunnel I had just left, but it wasn’t what I would call near it anymore. It’s hard to describe distances when you can’t use steps or feet or even a body length. The sense of scale is kind of meaningless there. You can determine a sequence, as in this is before or after that part of the tunnel, but everything kind of breaks down when you try to measure things, mostly due to a lack of reference. I could count segments of course, but if there were very many of them it was easy to lose count, having no finger, or anything else, to use as a placeholder. Plus they all looked identical in the distance, with only the scenes differing if you were close enough to make them out. I don’t think it matters for this, so I will just leave it there.

There was a distinctive golden tint to the light in the direction I had come from, I hadn’t noticed it before, but it was there. I could easily differentiate between the two directions with a glance by using the golden light as a reference. I focused on the side of the tunnel where I was and the scene showed me looking out the front window of the car at the Interstate highway stretching out in front of me.

I could see my left hand on the wheel and a rise up ahead that reminded me of the hill I went over just before finding the two cars. As I continued to focus on the scene, things like: the speed as indicated by the needle on the speedometer, the amount of gas in the tank, the mileage on the odometer, etc. all started getting clearer. I felt the beginnings of that lurch-like sensation again. The more I focused on the details of the scene, the more clear the details were to see and the more strong the sensation became.

Suddenly, I found myself in the car again and driving down the road. I could feel the wheel in my left hand, feel the texture of the armrest with the other. I could hear the sound of the engine, and the whine of the tires as the car sped down the highway.

I’d like to say that I took all of this as a matter of course, calmly and coolly deciding my next steps in a clear, rational, and reasonable manner. But the truth is, I was freaking out a bit. I slammed on the brakes, locking up the wheels of my old ‘98 Honda Accord.

My heart was racing at about 1000 miles per hour, and I was hyperventilating just a little bit too. Before too long, I realized that I was sitting in the middle of the road just like the idiot who almost killed us, so I pulled off the road for safety and parked.

I then proceeded to turn the car off with shaking hands and leaned my head back as I tried to calm down. I pulled out my cell phone and checked the time. It was still the same night and the approximate time I expected it to be. I hadn’t looked recently, so I couldn’t be sure exactly what time it had all happened, but it seemed about right.

Looking around some more, the rise up ahead looked more and more familiar, and I suspected I knew what I would find there. After a few minutes, my heart rate had dropped back to something resembling normalcy. I decided to see what was over the hill. I started the car again and pulled back onto the road. I soon got back up to speed, just slightly under the speed limit. I couldn’t see any headlights behind me, so I decided to change over to the passing lane to be extra careful as I approached.

As I crested the rise, there was that stupid SOB stopped in the travel lane, talking to the other car through his passenger window. I honked my horn, giving him a one-fingered salute, as I drove past. I was really mad, he could have killed all of us with his stupidity. I mean, who stops in the middle of the highway, in the middle of the night. And he does it at the top of a rise, where you can’t be seen from a distance. What an idiot!

As my anger cooled a bit, my mind was still racing. After driving for just a little while, I decided it was best if I pulled over to the side of the road again and parked. I didn’t want to risk another accident while I was so distracted with all the things going through my head. I stared at the billboard advertising a Motel 6 off the next exit as I tried to come to grips with what had just happened.

What the hell was that tunnel all about? Did that really just happen? Did I just move through time? It sure seems like I just got some kind of do-over. I tried to think about how I did it, to see if I could recreate the effect. I thought it best to focus on just the sensation itself, trying to make that lurch happen again.

It took a little while, but after just a few minutes of focusing on the feeling and willing it to happen, something did. I was able to reach down into the pit of my stomach and make that lurching feeling happen again.

I was back in the tunnel and facing an end wall once more.

Something was a little bit different though, this end segment wasn’t gold. Looking at the nearby end of this tunnel, I could see the scene from being parked on the side of the road. The Motel 6 billboard was clearly visible up ahead.

Before I got too focused on the scene, I decided to backtrack some more. I moved toward the open end of the tunnel and periodically checked the scenes as I went. Before too long, the scenes showed me passing by the two cars, safely from the passing lane while flipping them off. It made me a bit angry again just looking at it.

I kept going back to the scene where I had slammed on the brakes and stopped in the middle of the road, but then I noticed that the tunnel up ahead looked different. It looked like one of the ends of the tunnels, only different somehow. As I approached it I realized that what I was seeing was like a T shaped intersection where my tunnel was meeting up with another tunnel. As I moved into the intersection, I could now see three different directions. The golden tint was easily discernible as coming from one side.