also Columbus day in USA, and celebrated in similar spirit in Latin America & the world
fiction
He jumped out of himself again, and it was midday.
It was a straight pushing out, once he went into trance, and no complex desultory ritual of chants & dance.
Having his intangible self leave his physical body did not require following any strict laws or unbending traditions.
Such as projecting one's spirit only in the nighttime.
Or being regarded as a ghost senselessly preoccupied with haunting purpose.
He was not much of a true conformer anyway.
It suited him well that in this bodiless space he now traversed, traffic was self-organising.
He would have been most irascible otherwise, if such was even possible in the dream state.
The numbers of wandering souls were just as high as in other popularly believed time zones, such as the dark hours of morning, or certain months of given lunar calendars.
Yet there were no netherworldly pedestrian jams or gridlocks.
Afterlife government did not exist here, just an optimising of ethereal space amongst present occupants.
He wasn't going far.
Just left his real-world table & notebook, and chair, and was moving across the room, to the ceiling-to-floor windows, to gaze at the expected scenery outside, below and towards the horizon.
Perhaps, hee hee, he thought, feeling ebullient about his currently detached state, the usual view would turn to seem otherworldly.
What he hoped to get was what he saw.
The usual high-rise view was now augmented with multifarious auras that wrapped each of everything.
Glows around buildings.
Colourful vibes standing out from vehicles & pedestrians down at street level.
They were enough to overwhelm him, and make his wraith-like presence step back in awe.
The next moment in this astral realm, he could sense the luminance all around intensify, and whatever around him which could emanate, got ever more garish.
That was when something moving in the skies outside hit inside very hard.
He would never learn if it was a bird, plane, spacecraft, meteorite or something else that did it.
His office's false ceiling and the dozen floors above it, crashed onto his unconscious body and pulverised it.
But this anima that remained of him, this presence with no more material signature, need not have moved amidst the sudden catastrophe, as this building level fell away.
It plummeted from under him, taking what used to belong, however badly crushed now.
There was no longer any impetus to return to his former whole being.
Only gradually did he realise why it was so much easier this time, to exit his corpus.
It was not due to his acumen at leaving his usual consciousness behind.
He was no scion to become a great psychic, adept at leaping forth.
If he could feel trepidation due to his current status, which he probably no longer could, then that he was doomed, would have caved in on him.
That was when he glided down, and first saw the true ghosts.
Was he become one of them now?















