A GLIMPSE INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION
from page 47, Worlds Without Number (order)
I was in the seventh grade, and we had just moved to a new town. There were two very pretty girls in my grade, Mary and Chris, and they invited me to walk with them to the house of some boys from school. I knew the two boys in question and agreed to walk with the girls. As we arrived at the house, we walked up the driveway that led to the back yard. The detached garage was on the right, and there was an open walk-way to the left leading into the back yard. The boys were on the grass near a camping tent—the older A-frame canvas type. The boys greeted us, and we spoke for only a moment. They mentioned something about some beer they had brought out. The four of them headed toward the open front flaps of the tent and invited me to join them. I was somewhat apprehensive about it, assuming that they intended to engage in activities that were inappropriate for me, so I politely declined the invitation. The girls said they would see me the next day at an event I knew about, and told me goodbye as the four of them opened the flap on the tent and entered it. I said okay and turned and started to take a step toward the driveway to leave. I suddenly remembered that I couldn’t attend the event the next day because of something else I had planned, and decided to just pop my head into the tent and tell them about it so they wouldn’t think I had stood them up the next day.
I had just planted my foot and taken only a single step away at that point, so I stopped and turned immediately and took a single step back toward the tent. Because the last of them had just disappeared through the front flap of the tent only one or two seconds earlier, I thought it would be okay to just open the flap and correct my statement—which had only been three or four seconds before that. I lifted the right flap and looked in, and was surprised that I couldn’t see anyone inside. The tent was only about five feet across at the front, and I assumed it was about eight feet deep, so I gave my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the darkness inside because it was fairly bright outside the tent—a clear day with blue skies. Within a few seconds I could see what was inside the tent, and it was not what I had expected at all.
I could see far back into the tent, and it seemed to be hundreds of yards. There was a ravine, and I could hear water running down below as if there were a creek and small waterfall. Trees and plants covered the hills on the far side of the ravine, and it rose and went on for at least a few hundred yards as it rounded the top of a hill. It was a little dim in the sky above the treetops, as if it was evening there. I was shocked, to say the least, and wondered how it was possible to see a vast outdoors scene inside that small tent in the back yard. I looked up where I could see outside of the tent, and everything was perfectly normal. I saw the trees in the yard and the birds on the power lines. I looked around and saw how small the tent was, looked at the grass in the yard, saw a few toys that belonged to children, and I looked over at the house. Everything was perfectly normal. I looked back inside the tent, and the scene was exactly as it had been before. I stuck my head in farther this time, making sure I was actually seeing the panorama of a forested ravine and hillside.
For the first time I looked down, and I saw a young woman with very light skin and long dark hair sitting there, directly before me, facing away from me. She was unclothed, and her hair flowed over her shoulders and down her back beautifully. I was shocked. I had never seen anything like her before. I assumed it was Chris at first, because it actually resembled her, but that was impossible because I had seen Chris fully clothed and walking only ten seconds earlier. This young woman was the only person I could see now. No one else was around. There was no sign of my friends. I looked over her head at the forest24 scene in the distance, hearing the sounds one would expect to hear in an active wooded area, and noted how it must be the end of the day in that world, because there was just a little evening light left. I looked back down at the girl in front of me and confirmed in my mind that she was there; real, alive, unclothed, and absolutely stunning.
I fully realized how impossible this all was, and sniffed the air to see if maybe there were drugs present and I was hallucinating. I only smelled fresh, humid air. I looked back outside at the well-lit afternoon blue sky, and again looked around at everything I could see—to make sure I was seeing normal things in their normal context. Not a single thing seemed out of place or abnormal in any way.
I looked back inside the tent and saw the young woman. Then I looked over at the other side of the ravine and took one last look, scanning the entire panoramic vista one last time, noting everything in great detail to ensure there was nothing vague about it. It was all there, in three-dimensional full detail—the sights, sounds, smells, and humidity in the air. It was as real as it was impossible. I knew instinctively that whatever this was, it was not for me. I looked down at the girl again, and something told me that it wasn’t Chris. There was something slightly abnormal about her. I focused a couple of seconds to determine what it might be and noticed her skin had a slight glow. It was beautiful but not normal.
[My first impression was that it was a forest; the type that was common in Oregon, my home. However, I noted unfamiliar trees and bushes, interspersed, that looked more like palms and tropical plants. It was much later in life that I saw forests with mixed foliage like this.]
I glanced back up to the other side of the ravine, then took a step back as I looked at the scene, and closed the flap of the tent. I looked around the back yard and surrounding areas again, taking everything in—the sky, the birds, the power poles and lines, the grass in the yard, the houses next door—checking my perception of reality. All of that had happened in only fifteen or twenty seconds, and it was all so fresh and confusing that I had no idea how to process it.
I turned and started to walk away from the tent, making a mental note of everything I saw, heard, and felt. I kept thinking that there must be something wrong with my perception—because what I had just viewed and experienced was absolutely impossible. I looked around at everything, checked everything, touched everything—and it was all perfectly normal. I looked back and saw that the tent seemed completely normal—just an old camping tent standing in the back yard where I had talked with my friends and seen them enter just thirty seconds earlier. The grass was normal, as well as the sky and lines between the poles and the houses beyond the fence. Normal, normal, normal. I touched the house as I walked by it, running my hands along the chipped paint on the wood siding, and I reached down and touched the water spigot on the side of the house next to the driveway. I scuffed my shoes on the cracked cement and looked up at the windows in the side of the house. When I got to the sidewalk and street, I touched the cars, feeling the smooth paint and chrome trim and the side mirrors, all to see if there was anything off about my perception. Nothing was abnormal at all.
The thought of the girls slipping me drugs of some kind came to mind, but I couldn’t think of any way that could have happened—plus, there were no signs of any distorted perceptions outside of the tent. Everything seemed exactly as it should to me. I wasn’t having a psychedelic trip. I touched everything I passed all the way home, and touched my own arms and hands and face, just to check my own reality.
When I arrived at my house about ten minutes later, I immediately told my mother everything that had just happened to me—and I told her before I did anything else, because I knew it was important that I make a record of the experience before I fell asleep that night so I could never wonder if it had been a dream. Later that afternoon I shared the highlights of my experience with my friend Alex, and he said that he believed me, as strange as it was, but didn’t know what to make of it. The next morning, I asked my mother to repeat back what I had told her about my experience, and she told me everything I had shared. Every couple of years we have discussed the event, and she has always confirmed that she recalls it.
I have thought about that experience many times, wondering what it was and what it meant. Was there a message in it for me? There must be, because only a supernatural being could have created the extraordinary full panoramic glimpse into another dimension, the portal to which was there at the door of that tent. I saw my friends at school on Monday, and none of them said a word about me looking back into the tent after they disappeared through the front flaps. I had no doubt that they would have thought me mad had I mentioned what I experienced. I was sure that to them, they went into a very normal tent and drank and smoked and did whatever else kids of that time did inside a closed tent. Imagine my surprise decades later when I read the Harry Potter books and watched the movies, seeing how author J. K. Rowling had included tents whose inside dimensions were much larger than the outside. I wondered if she had experienced the same type of event but assumed she had only invented it as a literary fancy.
So . . . what did it mean? Who revealed that faraway land to me in such vivid detail inside the tiny confines of an old tent? No answer ever came. The only thing I ever knew for sure was that my instinct was correct—whatever that was, no matter how fascinating and alluring, it wasn’t for me. I was correct to turn and leave immediately. I’ve always had the distinct feeling that if I had remained, it would have been the end of me somehow. Perhaps it was a baited trap—set by a predator. If so, it was a very powerful predator. I felt fortunate to be raised in a manner that taught me to walk away from such traps. If it was some- thing else—a lesson to be learned—it escaped me. However, if nothing else, it taught me once and for all that there is much more to this life than we perceive with our five senses and that there truly is a very thin veil that separates us from other worlds. For me, that included the spirit world as well, providing me with a very solid “knowledge” of the absolute reality of the spiritual realm. That extended to angels and Christ and God—all of which I have been fortunate to never doubt.
Perhaps the dimensional portals we hear about are like the one I looked into. Windows into other realities or dimensions of existence. Doors that lead to other lands, through . . . what? . . . natural worm- holes? I don’t know how that could possibly function. The math says no. I only have my own experience to guide me, and even that gives me little usable information other than to share my concrete testimony that I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears, and know that there are such portals. If that is of value, then it is my gift to the world. I have not had a similar experience since my youth, and I don’t know who it was that facilitated my glimpse into another dimension.
