This was only the most important thing to ever happen to me. I've tried to explain it many times, but in most ways it was very simple. I was an ordinary person in a strange situation, and I dealt with it as though it couldn't be happening. I thought at first, in spite of all that had happened, that it was just a dream and any moment now I'd wake up. But I didn't. I pinched myself, because that's what you are supposed to do when you're in a dream and you need to wake up. I didn't wake up. You aren't supposed to feel pain in a dream, either, but I did. Everything felt real. I felt real. Considering all the things that had happened that led up to this moment, I decided I'd better start acting like it was real. So I checked myself out, still thinking I'd been falling, still thinking I might be hurt, and I wasn't. I was dressed the same way I'd been dressed, felt the way I should feel. I was even in the same place I had been when I started falling. It just wasn't the same time.

Follow up:

That was clear enough when I started looking around. The cave where I spent that night was a huge half dome bluff cave, like a big open eye socket a hundred yards wide, and from where I was I could see out through the cave mouth, across a little creek and up a slope where CCC workers had built limestone steps during the Depression. It was a pretty well traveled place, a popular spot in a national park actually, and I wasn't even supposed to be there--no camping, no being on the trail after 10 p.m. I'd ignored that because I'd been told I should be there that night. Across the creek between me and the trail there should have been small trees, tall skinny pawpaws growing up in a bed of ferns, and further up slope there would have been hickory and oak trees, nothing big. I didn't see any of that.

What I did see was the same terrain but different in a lot of details. The creek was there, but during the night it had been up and pretty wild with runoff from the storm that went through. The cave had been awash with noise from it, booming sounds of rock slabs on the creek bottom lifting and dropping in the current. This was the same creek, but it was just a trickle of water.

Everything was different. The first obvious thing was, it was daytime. Afternoon, actually, I could tell that from the shadows of the trees. The trees weren't the same, either--I started noticing all sorts of things that had changed. The stone steps of the Park Service trail were gone. The ferns were gone; the paw paw trees were gone. Where they had been there was a red clay slope covered with forest debris, bark and conifer needles. There were trees, but not like any trees I'd ever seen. They were huge trees with dark brown furrowed bark, and they must have been hundreds of years old. They were about forty feet apart and there wasn't a lot growing underneath them. It felt like dry country, like something was fundamentally different there, a different climate altogether. It felt like Fall--I could smell that tang in the air that happens at that time of year.

It was a lot to take in all at once and I paid attention to all the details I could spot, because I was starting to feel like my life might depend on quick decisions. I didn't have anything with me but the clothes I was wearing and a few things in my pockets, and none of that was of much use. Credit cards don't do you any good when you've traveled back in time. I almost started laughing because I imagined myself trying to walk to a bus station to get home, and by that time I was pretty sure there weren't any bus stations around. I felt very poorly prepared for the situation I was in. I started seriously wondering what I would do if I was stuck ten thousand years in the past. I wasn't sure there was a way home.

Then I got really scared, because I heard people coming. Maybe you know how a little frog reacts when something big is right on top of him and there's no chance of getting away, how he just sits there and half closes his eyes and looks like he's pretending nothing's happening? I felt like that, like my only chance was that this was all just a dream and nobody could really see me, and if I just stood still then any moment now I'd wake up and I'd be back where I was supposed to be and I'd laugh about it and go home.

I watched four men come down the trail and across the creek toward a rockfall at the downstream end of the cave. They were Indian men, traveling two at a time, with each pair carrying a woven basket filled with ears of dry corn, hanging from a pole they carried on their shoulders. They were dressed in moccasins and loincloths and they had long hair. I didn't see any weapons, but they looked pretty tough and I was suddenly very sure they were going to look at me in an unfriendly way, so I kept doing the little frog thing and hoping I was wrong about all of this.

I heard somebody call out from the rockfall area, a woman's voice and then another, and the men were laughing and talking back, and I realized, Wow, I don't understand a word of that, that's a language I've never heard before. Then they saw me. One of the men looked back in my direction and stopped still and looked right at me, and then looked away and said something to the men around him, and they all glanced at me and then looked away, but they got serious all of a sudden. My knees started to shake.

Another voice, an old woman this time, talking very loud and non stop, and the men look down at the ground respectfully and say something back to her quietly. I look sideways a little and see this old woman walking up to me along the ledge at the back of the cave--grey hair, stringy, dressed in ragged old skins, wearing some sort of bone bead necklace and looking fairly dirty. She was looking straight at me and babbling away about something or other, intending for everybody to hear her.

I was still hoping I wasn't really there when she grabbed my arm and started tugging on it, hauling me back the way she had come while the men looked a little embarrassed and fell in behind us. Seemed like she was berating all of us for being scared.

That was my introduction to the people there, twelve of them altogether. Six men, six women. One old man and the old woman who were sort of in charge but only because they knew things, and the rest from mid twenties to maybe forty at least in appearance. I can't be really sure how old they were, for lots of reasons. I had expected them to kill me, either right then or by slow torture, but I was wrong about that. They were very friendly to me and taught me a lot of things I couldn't have learned otherwise.

I think I probably stayed with them about two weeks. Maybe it was longer, I'm not sure. I was very happy there, and when I left I knew their language, even though I don't remember it now. So I may have been with them a long time. Sometimes the words come back to me in dreams, or I hear them in meditation and pick up a few to keep--I look them up in books, find out what they mean, and it's always important. Sometimes I get songs, but not often and not complicated, just a phrase repeated like in the old times, and I find out the words mean what I think they mean. I know a lot of what happened while I was there but I don't remember it all, and that's the stuff I can't talk about. It's an old tradition that they explained to me and I confirmed later on by asking people about it and doing some research on my own, not entirely trusting what people told me.

When it was time to go we were all standing in a circle around a pool that's still there on that creek, downstream aways from the big cave, and I remember asking the old man "in charge" if I could maybe just stay, because I think for the first time in my life I'd been really happy, while I was there. I didn't want to come back--that place felt like home. He kind of chuckled at that, like I was being silly, and told me I had work to do. So I started making the rounds, shaking everybody's hands and saying Goodbye in English, which made everybody a little awkward because they weren't familiar with the hand shaking thing at all, and then I said goodbye to the person there who had been my teacher. There was a flash of light and I was back.

It's not really simple. There was a flash of light, but it started inside me, like an expanding vibration, and while that world stayed real I started changing, shifting out of it more and more, turning into a bright yellow light and suddenly, poof, I'm back. Took me a second to realize where I was, but I was lying on the stone slab that had given way underneath me, and it was solid again, and not too much time had passed. Maybe fifteen minutes, maybe half an hour, I'm not sure. I thought right away, ok, it was just a dream, but I realized because of the position I was in, I hadn't been sleeping. And, it was cold there, early Spring with a storm just passing through, wind and rain and now the morning dew setting on everything, and when I'd stretched out there I'd been damp and cold and my legs had been numb up to the knees. Now I was warm, all the way to my toes, and it took me a few minutes to even start getting cold again, because I had just left a place that was warm and sunny. So I sat there and thought about things and in about half an hour the sun starting coming up. I wasn't sure what had happened or whether it was real, but I knew some things I hadn't known before, and I promised myself I'd check those things out and see if they had any real application. I went home and began learning things, studying things I'd never have taken seriously before, doing things I'd never have had the courage or the reason to do before, and it turned out that what I learned in that place, that other time, was real.

Not that it matters a whole lot. Most people don't believe me and wouldn't care to do these things themselves. I understand that, but I don't think the way other people do. Not any more.

Photo by Wellies http://www.morguefile.com/archive/display/82352