Suddenly we’re out of the dining room. The veil has split. We’re in a red desert with strange sentinels of rock standing guard, but it is not peaceful here. We’re being dragged across the red dust by an unseen force and she’s kicking and screaming the whole way, but the whole way to what? Suddenly I remember. Recall I’m part of the tribe and that, in fact, there is nothing to fear. Fear is the last illusion, the one that keeps us locked in the third dimension. I try to comfort her, letting her know there is a message waiting, that we must communicate with them.

I’m not scared. Not just yet.

THE DOORBELL rings. The doorbell? Clear as reality biting my leg, and I sit up straight in a foreign bed halfway around the world from my own. The dinner party was a dream and the red desert was a dream within it. I didn’t know the woman and yet she knew my secret. She has one of her own.

I reach out to make sure he’s beside me. He’s burning hot and sweating, though I hear the air conditioner hum a steady rhythm.

Now the fear slithers around the room and threatens to inject its venom to paralyze me. I must move quickly or I may not be able to move at all. I strike my hand out to the bedside lamp, as if the darkness between might be swimming with spiders. Grabbing my watch, I look at the time. One thirty in the morning.

“Babe, wake up.” I nudge him. “Did you hear the doorbell?” I ask, though I’m well aware there isn’t one installed in our little bush house in Africa. “Who’s here in the middle of the night?”

He doesn’t answer me and I decide my mind is overactive and on guard in this, the Dark Continent. I flick off the light, and after a moment’s pause hear him slip from my side and disappear into the darkness over the lip of the bed.

Now I know. This isn’t a game. I’ve called them and this is my hour. It makes complete sense. I’ve given the okay, manifested it perhaps. They have arrived when I’m a million miles from everything I know, completely out of my comfort zone.

“I’m sick,” he calls from over the bed and I’m scared to look, scared to see what they may have done to him already. I flip the light back on and see the sheets on our bed undulating lazily, though no wind blows through.