I was about to lift out when two hands held a book in front of my closed eyes. The book was riffled, turned around on all sides so that I could see t… - Robert Monroe

I would see and semiexperience an event or incident like a dream, except that I retained all of my consciousness and sense awareness. The dream would be superimposed directly over outside stimuli. I could perceive both quite readily. I could not and cannot produce the effect at will. It merely happened or was triggered by some non-conscious mechanism. At first, I paid no particular attention to the phenomenon, attributing the dream visions to release of material from the unconscious. A major event brought it strongly to my attention.

It is the purity of a truth of which you have had only a glimpse. This is the feast, and the tiny tidbits you tasted before, back there, had made you hope for the existence of the Whole. The nameless emotion, longing, nostalgia, sense of destiny that you felt back there when you stared at the cloud layered sunset in Hawaii, when you stood quietly among the tall, waving trees in the silent forest, when a musical selection, passage, or song recalled memories of the past or brought forth a longing for which there was no associated memory, when you longed for the place where you belonged, whether city, town, country, nation, or family—these are now fulfilled. You are Home. You are where you belong. Where you always should have been.

Each of the three times I went There, I did not return voluntarily. I came back sadly, reluctantly. Someone helped me return. Each time after I returned, I suffered intense nostalgia and loneliness for days. I felt as an alien might among strangers in a land where things were not "right," where everything and everyone was so different and so "wrong" when compared with where you belonged. Acute loneliness, nostalgia, and something akin to homesickness. So great was it that I have not tried to go There again. Was this heaven?