Illusions II: The Adventures of a Reluctant Student (Kindle Single) by Richard Bach

Chapter 1
     
    God doesn’t protect anyone. Everyone’s already indestructible.
     
       The landing was perfect, a word I rarely use for my flying. A few seconds before the wheels touched the land, they brushed the tops of the grass, the soft gold whispering. I don’t hear the lovely sound of wheels airborne above the grass that often. It was perfect.
       Just as the wheels touched the farmer’s field, though, I couldn’t see. Not unconscious not-seeing, but as though someone had slammed a black plastic visor in front of my eyes.
       There was no sound. The grass, the wheels, the hush of the wind…everything was still.
       I’m not flying, I told myself. That’s odd. I thought I was flying. This is a dream!
       I didn’t wake, didn’t stir from sleep. I waited, patient, for the visor to lift, and go on with Part Two of my dream.
       It took a long time, it seemed to me, before the darkness left.
       Way in the background, the gentlest sound, song of hummingbirds, whirring low, whirring high, lifting the dreamer up and away into the music.
       While the whirring faded away, the dream continued.
       Visor gone, I found myself in a room way in the sky, colored like a summer afternoon. There was a window there, and I looked down through fifteen hundred feet to the ground. A gentle scene: trees, bright emerald, fountains of leaves under the sun, a deep-sea river blue and calm, a bridge over it, a little town below.
       A ring of children, I saw in a field near town, some running around the circle, playing a game I couldn’t remember.
       The place around me was the gondola of a dirigible from a hundred years ago, though I couldn’t see the balloon itself. No pilots, no controls, no one to talk with. Not a gondola. A floating something?
       On the left side of the wall was a large door, an airline latch to lock it, and a printed sign:
       Do not open this door.
       I hardly needed the advice, since the place was a long fall from the ground. It was not moving. Not a dirigible. What kept the room in the air?
       A question all at once, in my mind.
       “Do you want to stay, or go back again?”
       Funny, that I should be dreaming such a question. I want to keep living, I thought. The idea of living beyond death is certainly interesting, but there’s a reason I need to go back.
       What reason? I knew somehow that my dearest friend was praying for my life. Was she my wife? Why was she praying?
       I’m fine, I’m not hurt, I’m dreaming! Dying is a journey for a later year, not one for now. I’d like to stay here, but I need to go back, for her sake.
       The second time: “Your choice. Would you prefer to stay, or return to your belief of living?”
       This time I thought, carefully. I’ve been fascinated with dying for a long time. Here’s my chance to explore what this place can tell me. And this place was not the world I knew. It was an after-life, I knew. Maybe I should stay here a bit. No. I love her. I need to see her again.
       “Would you care to stay?”
       I didn’t want to leave my life suddenly, without telling her good-bye. It was tempting to stay, but this is not dying, it’s a dream. I’ll wake up, please, yes. I’m sure.
       That instant the room, or the gondola, disappeared, and for a half-second I saw below me a thousand file folders, each a different possibility of a lifetime, all of them vanished as I plunged into one.
       I opened my eyes, woke in a hospital room. Another dream. Next I’ll wake up.
       I’ve never had a hospital dream, didn’t much like hospitals. No way to find what I was doing here, but it was time to leave. I was in a bed in the hospital, surrounded by plastic vines from somewhere into my body. It felt like not a nice place to be. A monitor showing something. My wrists were tied to the railing of the bed.
       What is this place? Hello, I’m awake! Vanish this dream, please!
       No change. It seemed, forgive