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Introduction
Illusions. A book that I knew would never have a sequel. Add a word to it? Write a different story? Not possible.
I believed this until thirty-five years after it was published, until August 31, 2012.
That day, for the first time of my life, flying, fifty-eight years of an injury-free flying record, I had a little problem. It killed me for a few days and it demolished my airplane.
I was blissfully dreaming, while they helicoptered me to a hospital. They figured I was going to die, did all sorts of things to my pretty well lifeless body.
I woke up a week later in this astonishing scene: I was in a hospital! It is so easy to die, when we’re over the edge of dying, knowing “death” is a lovely beautiful part of life. Painless, distressless, perfect health.
When I came out of my coma, I was told that it would take a year to get better, to learn how to speak, stand, walk, run, read, drive a car, fly my airplane. The airplane was wreckage.
I didn’t know why I lived, something I promised on the other side of dying? There was no question that Puff, my seaplane, had to fly again.
My life today, it took my little crash, a near-death event, Sabryna’s certainty that I would be recovered from every suggestion of injury, my meetings with Illusions Messiah Donald Shimoda, with my other teachers, with Puff rebuilt; for this story to be told.
There’s no blessing that can’t be a disaster, and no disaster that can’t be a blessing.
Violent disasters, do they always become blessings? I hope so. I hope I can have my quiet little adventures, and write them, without needing to die.
—Richard Bach
December, 2013
34. The Master, having finished the tests he had chosen, left them for a lifetime beyond Earth. He found, in time, he could surpass a Messiah’s life by becoming not a teacher for thousands, but a guardian angel for one, instead.
35. What he could not do for the crowds of Earth, the Master did for his friend who trusted and listened to his angel.
36. His friend loved imagining an immortal friend who suggested ideas at crossroads in the worlds of space and time.
37. When his mortal sought understanding, the Master offered ideas, spoken through coincidence, in the language of events and in the adventures of life.
38. The Master whispered stories, tests that his mortal friend thought were built of his own imagination, tales sunk in the illusions of human belief, he wrote as he saw within.
39. From the stories, beliefs changed, for his mortal. No longer a pawn the powers of others, he began to chart his own destiny, became a mirror of his highest self.
40. No longer a distant savior far away in space and time, the Master became with practice a teacher, offered sudden lessons, ideas ever more perfect for his mortal’s understanding of life itself.
41. Every test, most of them, the Master designed to be a more advanced challenge for his dear mortal, eac...uthor Richard Bach was listed in critical condition Saturday at Harborview Medical Center, with a broken back and a traumatic brain injury after a landing accident in his experimental seaplane. Bach's plane struck high-tension wires, crashed inverted, leaving the pilot unconscious in the cockpit, near fires from broken wires. The author remains in a coma to date.
Chapter 1
God doesn’t protect anyone. Everyone’s already indestructible.
The landing was perfect, a word I rarely use for my flying. A few seconds before the wheels touched the land, they brushed the tops of the grass, the soft gold whispering. I don’t hear the lovely sound of wheels airborne above the grass that often. It was perfect.
Just as the wheels touched the farmer’s field, though, I couldn’t see. Not unconscious not-seeing, but as though someone had slammed a black plastic visor in front of my eyes.
There was no sound. The grass, the wheels, the hush of the wind…everything was still.
I’m not flying, I told myself. That’s odd. I thought I was flying. This is a dream!
I didn’t wake, didn’t stir from sleep. I waited, patient, for the visor to lift, and go on with Part Two of my dream.
It took a long time, it seemed to me, before the darkness left.
Way in the background, the gentlest sound, song of hummingbirds, whirring low, whirring high, lifting the dreamer up and away into the music.
While the whirring faded away, the dream continued.
Visor gone, I found myself in a room way in the sky, colored like a summer afternoon. There was a window there, and I looked down through fifteen hundred feet to the ground. A gentle scene: trees, bright emerald, fountains of leaves under the sun, a deep-sea river blue and calm, a bridge over it, a little town below.
A ring of children, I saw in a field near town, some running around the circle, playing a game I couldn’t remember.
The place around me was the gondola of a dirigible from a hundred years ago, though I couldn’t see the balloon itself. No pilots, no controls, no one to talk with. Not a gondola. A floating something?
On the left side of the wall was a large door, an airline latch to lock it, and a printed sign:
Do not open this door.
I hardly needed the advice, since the place was a long fall from the ground. It was not moving. Not a dirigible. What kept the room in the air?
A question all at once, in my mind.
“Do you want to stay, or go back again?”
Funny, that I should be dreaming such a question. I want to keep living, I thought. The idea of living beyond death is certainly interesting, but there’s a reason I need to go back.
What reason? I knew somehow that my dearest friend was praying for my life. Was she my wife? Why was she praying?
I’m fine, I’m not hurt, I’m dreaming! Dying is a journey for a later year, not one for now. I’d like to stay here, but I need to go back, for her sake.
The second time: “Your choice. Would you prefer to stay, or return to your belief of living?”
This time I thought, carefully. I’ve been fascinated with dying for a long time. Here’s my chance to explore what this place can tell me. And this place was not the world I knew. It was an after-life, I knew. Maybe I should stay here a bit. No. I love her. I need to see her again.
“Would you care to stay?”
I didn’t want to leave my life suddenly, without telling her good-bye. It was tempting to stay, but this is not dying, it’s a dream. I’ll wake up, please, yes. I’m sure.
That instant the room, or the gondola, disappeared, and for a half-second I saw below me a thousand file folders, each a different possibility of a lifetime, all of them vanished as I plunged into one.
I opened my eyes, woke in a hospital room. Another dream. Next I’ll wake up.
I’ve never had a hospital dream, didn’t much like hospitals. No way to find what I was doing here, but it was time to leave. I was in a bed in the hospital, surrounded by plastic vines from somewhere into my
