Last night I had a great deal of difficulty sleeping. I had a sinus headache as well as a regular headache, which is highly unusual for me. But that alone didn’t keep me awake. It just seemed to be one of those nights where I remained somewhere between being asleep and being awake—not feeling sleepy enough to go into a deep sleep, and not aware enough to actually feel fully awake. While I’ve experienced this kind of thing before, I had never experienced what came next.

In this kind of “twilight” sleep I was in all of a sudden what appeared before me was a kind of swirling white and gray mist or haze. It looked like a super hazy day, but there was also a definite boundary around the haze or mist. I had a feeling that what waited inside this haze was absolutely wonderful, but that I just wasnt “allowed” or able to see a lot of what was in it just yet. As my spirit, my consciousness, stood outside the mist, but looking into it, I could feel the presence of my transition team (former relatives, my gurus, etc.) surrounding me, but they, too, stood just outside the mist with me. At the same time, it felt like we were all about to enter this mist, this haze.

As I stood watching this swirling haze, I remember thinking that this felt like it was the astral plane that Sri Yukteswar described, but I still couldn’t see much detail of it except for flitting, twinkling lights that I thought must be the fairies of the astral plane. And I got really excited about that because I have a real affection for the fairy realm. And then it all seemed to evaporate without me even realizing it did. It was just gone. But I was left with such  sense of awe and of peace and calm, and yet excitement at everything  the astral plane will contain.

The difference between this and other experiences I’ve had of the upcoming actual transition is that until now I’ve only seen the possibilities of what may happen during the actual journey from the material plane to the astral plane, whereas this was the first real glimpse of the astral plane–of where the soul goes in between one incarnation and the next. And even though it was brief, it was very profound and very comforting, especially since my “transition team” was right with me. And it provided me with a new and different vision of what will happen as my soul transitions from one way of being to another. What a gift from a night I originally thought was going to leave me feeling nothing but tired for the rest of the day.