Astral Traveling in 1850

Visual Prompt — #Starlight Prompts and #Lodestar Gazette

As is the custom of Mathilda, she was often bored after her workday fizzled out. She was sitting at her office window looking down at the rabble scurrying about in the streets of Boston. This was actually the 13th day of May 2010, and she was just finishing the final pile of irrelevant reports to read before she left her office on the 24th floor in a skyscraper made of steel and glass.

She hated working in the city but that is where the money was and, in her career, women were not afforded the same salary as the men in publishing. It has been said that publishing is a dying art and will soon be taken over by robots or some such nonsense pontificated by the Doomsday cult.

While she was contemplating the meaning of life as she often did when her mind was blank, she began to see images or better yet silhouettes of figures not quite visible to the naked eye, but then again, Mathilda had horrible eyesight and the afternoon sun was spilling over the streets and sidewalks, blinding anyone looking into the horizon.

Beneath the building down below, Mathilda heard the honking of taxis and impatient drivers trying to escape the city’s noise and the smell of rotting garbage. She traveled on public transportation, and often took the “T” or the occasional bus back to her neighborhood 10 miles outside of Boston West.

She was trying to figure out what to do with herself before she left to catch the 6 pm train on the Blue Line to North Station. From there she would take the train from North Station and get on the Green Line to Newton. It was an awful, slow, noisy commute in and out of the city, but it was affordable, as car insurance was almost $3,000 per year to own a car on the outskirts of Boston, Massachusetts. She would sometimes walk over to the Quincy Market for fast food on her way to the train station, but today she had other ideas of what to do next.

She had been experimenting with astral travel or astral projection for several months and was having little success being able to channel the energy necessary to clear her mind of the clutter and focus on her third eye through meditation. Astral travel can feel like an out-of-body experience for some. She had dreams of flying in the clouds several times and had felt like she had been to another century or favorite place that she feels native there. She was taking lessons to learn how to astral travel through a professional intuitive counselor when she could afford one-on-one sessions.

Here’s what she had learned thus far;

1. She had to be in a relaxed calm state of mind with her emotions in balance.
2. She needed to meditate on an empty stomach as to not feel sluggish while in transit.
3. She needed to create her intention. For example, where did she want to travel to in her mind’s eye journey.
4. She also needed to thank her guides for protecting her in her journey while in astral travel.

She had struggled to believe this could work for her for the past month and had only been successful in reaching number three in the above-mentioned list. When it came to thanking her guides, she wasn’t sure how to message them for an astral journey. She chuckled when she looked over her instructions and decided to try it today while she was alone in her department on the 24th floor.

She sat in her oversized leather chair that allowed for her legs to hang not quite reaching the floor. She positioned herself in the middle of the back of the chair and tried to get comfortable. She adjusted her body several times before she felt she was okay for liftoff. She closed her eyes and tried to sit in silence without effort in blocking images she had been thinking about just before this exercise.

She hadn’t eaten and her stomach was gurgling and making odd noises which now sounded deafening as she wasn’t listening to anything else. She worried as if she had gas and was distracted for a few minutes before her stomach settled and so she sat down softly in her chair and got relaxed again. She put her feet on the corner of the wooden desk at a slant and crossed her covered legs. She had written down several places to travel if she could figure this astral stuff out today. She had Victorian Boston in the mid-1800’s or visiting the Pyramids in Egypt. She was kind of hoping it wasn’t Egypt because she was afraid of deep water, and she would have to travel over many bodies of water to get there.

She was stuck on Step 4 again, when she decided just to make a generic message of thanks to whomever was going to take her somewhere back in time. She began to breathe slowly and could hear the blood flowing in her ears. She kept slowly breathing and looked in her mind’s eye, and at first, light darted back and forth from one side of her visual field to another. She relaxed her eyes and was beginning to feel sleepy. She could feel her body going limp and once had even tried to shake herself up awake without success.

She began to dream about the sky and the clouds above her where she was, unknowing where the ceiling of her office had gone. She was feeling the north wind on her face, and the smell of the fish pier nearby. She could feel the rustling of her skirt down by her feet. She looked down and saw a long pale blue chambray woolen dress, with a hint of white eyelet lace just hanging below the hem. She thought this dress was beautiful and although her shoes were frumpy, they were practical. They were somewhat like a man’s leather slipper but with leather tassels and a low heel.

She had some pressure around her waist and was having trouble breathing as deeply as she had been when she first started this meditation. She looked down at her tight-fitted waistcoat and tried to pull her coat sleeves down towards her fingers. No, they were fixed where they are now. She raised her head to feel the sun on her face, which was not as warm as earlier in the day, and now was shrouded by clouds in the sky. She saw other women scurrying all over the streets. But wait, this was not Congress Street or Summer Street because there were old-fashioned cars and only a few of them in two lanes. When does that ever happen in downtown Boston? It’s usually a free for all with the traffic!

She was watching the other women strolling without a care and moving towards the cars which allowed them to cross in front of them. Sometimes there was dialogue between the driver and the pedestrian. The whole scene was surreal, and she couldn’t believe the old historical buildings downtown had so much character and had a sort of a federal-style kind of architecture. But then all of a sudden, Mathilda saw the looming skyscrapers rising behind the lower brownstone buildings. She couldn’t remember this scene when she was walking earlier that day in the center of the city.

She had never seen these buildings or all these people walking all over the square. When did this get built, she wondered? It wasn’t here in the morning when she had almost got hit by an overzealous driver going 30 mph in a 10-mph pedestrian zone. She was watching the scene of this movie and couldn’t process the two stark contrasts of time. How could there be Victorian buildings and modern buildings transposed onto one another right in front of her eyes?

She started to walk, not knowing if she would be able to move in this tight-fitted skirt and awkward shoes, but she did walk a few steps, looking all around her in wonder and disbelief that she was in the right part of the city. She shook her head a few times and closed her eyes. When she opened them, everything was still the same as a few seconds ago.

She picked up her pace and was trying to get across the square as fast as possible. She had no clue where she was going and when she was almost trotting, other women were gawking at her and covering their mouths, some of them with gloves. Her hat fell off while she was starting to pick up her gait and her hair began to slide down her neck and onto her shoulders in a clump.

She was feeling a large knot in her hair and remembered she had pixie length dyed red hair, not long light brown hair. She felt herself grab her neck and couldn’t feel the touch of her fingers. She wasn’t wearing gloves. She started to hear the din of the cars honking their horns and the whistles of the boats in the harbor which began to fade ever so slowly until she couldn’t hear anything, but the sound of her fast breathing. She had to slow down at one point and tried to bend over to catch her breath. She was beginning to feel dizzy and felt an anxiety attack coming on, and not being able to support the weight of her body. She sank slowly to the ground trying to protect her face with her arms.

She didn’t feel the thud of her body on her chair in her office. But when she raised her head from her arms, she saw that she was now hung over her desk in her chair, she had pressure in her head, and she was slightly dizzy. She wondered if she was having a migraine headache coming on, which sometimes happens when she is hungry.

Once she was feeling she could sit upright in her chair she looked around her office and through the window outside, noticing the tall skyscrapers, the honking taxis and the buses screeching their brakes. She heard a fire truck and a police siren. The sun was now behind the clouds, which paled the colors of the now drab looking architecture. She thought she must have fallen asleep for a while and realized only forty minutes had passed since she began to meditate.

She looked down at her attire and it was the same blouse and leggings she had on all day. She wasn’t quite able to interpret what had happened that evening, but when she wrote in her journal later, the experience she had was the closest to what she imagined astral travel to be like.

Thank you for reading this story for at least 30 seconds and clapping 50 times if you would. It has been my pleasure writing this story prompt for Starlight prompts. Thank you both Jessica, Jessica's Quill and CJ Coop for availing me of this new experience!

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Jezebelle Darling — © February 2024