escape technique.
I, on the other hand, was having a lot of difficulty getting it off my mind. While I went through my usual daily routine, I was not quite with it. A part of me lingered with my unusual experience and longed to return to it.
I decided to do a little research on dreams and dreaming. Bundling up against the biting cold, I headed for the bookstore, where I went straight to the dream books.
Scanning the shelves, my eyes fell on a single word.
Macro!
My eyes seemed to jump from my head! There it was. The light brown booklet I had seen before. The word I couldn't remember from its title was Macro! 'Incredible!' I thought. 'Interpret Your Dreams from a Macro View.'
I promptly bought it and spent the evening hours studying it and applying it to dreams I remembered.
By ten-thirty I retired convinced that 2150 and Lea were a valid reality-perhaps a parallel reality or something like that which I didn't really understand, but which I, none the less, was now sure existed somewhere in our universe; our macrocosm.
CHAPTER 3: Carol
I awakened, to my delight, in my library room back or should I say forward?-in the year 2150. The pleasantly feminine voice of Central Information broke into my awareness and I realized that she was still answering the last question I had asked before falling asleep. While I had spent eleven days back in 1976, I had returned to a moment in 2150 time only a few seconds later than when I had left. Did C.I. know what had happened to me?
'Excuse me,' I interrupted, 'can you tell me how long I was asleep and what happened?'
'You fell asleep,' C.I. answered, 'three seconds ago approximately ten seconds in 2150 metric time. However, during that three seconds you experienced a time translation of approximately eleven days in 1976 time.'
'How do you know this?' I asked, perplexed and somewhat uneasy.
'Your chair,' C.I. responded, 'monitors all your major physiological changes. Also, Lea, 7-927, and others use this computer to make your time translation computations.'
'What's the 7-927 for?' I asked.
'When Lea was born she was the seventh child to be given the name Lea in Delta 927.
My curiosity being fully aroused, I asked the next logical question, 'How do you assign names?'
'The Macro society has thirty thousand names which fit the major soul patterns, or vibrations. When a soul incarnates into the Macro society, its vibration pattern is calibrated and the name most closely fitting this pattern is then assigned.'
I thought about this for a moment, then asked, 'Can you tell me how closely the name Jon fits my vibration pattern?'
'It fits very closely indeed,' C.I. responded. 'But this is no accident, since your mother had a talent for this type of name selection. She was very highly evolved. What you, in 1976, call psychic.'
Since Mother had died during my early childhood, I really couldn't remember her too well-psychic or otherwise. I was just going to ask C.I. how it (or she) had known about my mother when Lea came bouncing into the room looking even more beautiful than I had remembered. Before she could say anything, I blurted out, 'Why couldn't I come back? I've missed you.'
'We tried every time you slept, Jon, but your anger at Karl prevented translation the first night. After that your belief in this reality was not strong enough to make translation possible until tonight.'
'Well, how could I be in 1976 for eleven days and return here only three seconds later than when I left?'
'You were never really gone from either place, Jon. But I think that the concept of time as simultaneous flexible subjectivity is beyond your current comprehension.'
'Speaking of time, how old are you, Lea?'
'Hmm,' she said, 'that's at least one question you forgot to ask Central Information. Before I answer I'm going to ask you how old you think I am.'
'Well,' I said, 'I'm not sure, but you must be somewhere between eighteen and twenty-five, and I'm hoping over twenty-one.'
'You'll get your wish and then some,' she replied. Then with an impish grin she said to the computer, 'Please tell us my age.'
C.I. promptly replied, 'In 'time' as understood by Jon, Lea 7-927 will have forty years in three weeks and three days.'
'You were born in 21101' I exclaimed incredulously. I couldn't believe that Lea was almost 40 years old. Or to say it in their Macro way-they speak of years of a lifetime as we speak' of years of study-she has had almost forty years.
'That's right,' she replied. 'We have learned to arrest the physical aging process. The only elderly-looking people you will see in the Macro society are the very few who were born before the year 2000.'
'Wait a moment,' I interrupted. 'Do you mean there are people living over a hundred and fifty years?'
'Yes. Theoretically level tens could have as many years as they want, for greater mental awareness means greater physical control. Unlike micro man, our high Macro beings can move at will between their physical and astral bodies. They only remain in physical bodies as long as there are lessons to learn at the physical level. Our goal is to free ourselves completely from the limited, low vibration, physical existence.'
'But, my physical body is enjoyable. I don't want to give it up as long as it's still young enough to bring me more pleasure than pain,' I complained.
'Naturally. Nobody does,' Lea replied. 'That's the major reason we inhabit physical bodies; we want to. But, like all children, eventually we grow up and tire of our childish activities and seek new, more satisfying experiences. Thus, all souls evolve inevitably toward greater awareness.'
'But I don't–'
'I know,' Lea interrupted. 'You aren't ready for that yet. But you are 'ready to start experiencing one of our students Alphas. Let's go. I'll answer more of your questions on the way to your Gamma building.'
As we walked hand in hand around the lake I said nothing for a while, and Lea respected my silence. I was contemplating what C.I. had told me about the social structure of the Macro society.
'It seems to me,' I said, 'that this is a terribly regimented and over structured society if everybody remains a student for the first thirty years of his life and must live in a student Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. One of the problems of the 1970s is that most young people in the industrial societies are kept much too long as students-'nonproductive' members of society.'
'Yes, that's true. But our students are learning how to live satisfying, productive lives. They're not wasting their time memorizing facts and studying irrelevant materials which they'll soon forget because they don't use them in their daily life. Perfect examples would be memorization of historical or geographical details, or your society's devotion to learning foreign languages, algebra, and geometry, which most people never need to use.
'In order to survive,' Lea continued, 'we learned that we had to remove from out lives the nonessentials and the divisive concerns of micro man. These included his micro family, economic class, religion, nationality, language, cultural and racial divisions.'
'That's what I meant by massive regimentation,' I said. 'There's no freedom left!'
'You mean,' Lea answered, 'freedom to feel separate from and better than others. Freedom to be selfish and to put your own welfare above that of others. Freedom to compete, to fight, to destroy others. Freedom to pollute by over consuming and overpopulating and by refusing to cooperate.'
She looked at me searchingly for a few seconds, then continued. 'You see, Jon, for man to survive on this
