The Monk Beneath the Himalayan Stars

A woman waited until the end of her consultation to ask an unusual question. Since childhood, she said, she had experienced leaving her body while asleep.

At first, she seemed to move through her house, float near the stairs, or visit her parents’ room. As she grew older, the journeys extended into the garden, around the neighborhood, and eventually to another town. She had kept these experiences private, even from people close to her.

A Landscape She Did Not Recognize

She described a pattern: the sensation began as she turned over in bed. She remained floating rather than walking, and although she sometimes passed people, no one seemed to notice her. Returning felt like lying down into her sleeping body and becoming one with it again.

Recently, she had found herself somewhere unfamiliar. Wind passed through mountains whose peaks still held snow. The stars were exceptionally clear. Below her, a man who appeared to be a monk sat meditating on a stone.

She drifted around him, feeling an unexpected affection and familiarity. Eventually she felt she had to return, but the feeling stayed with her. She wanted to understand her connection with the man.

The Scene in the Cards

As I began the reading, I saw a high place in the Himalayas, which I perceived as belonging to roughly a thousand years ago. There was little sound beyond the wind. The sun had just set, and stars and shooting stars filled the sky.

A male ascetic sat chanting a mantra and meditating. I understood him, within the reading, to be an earlier incarnation of the woman before me.

Then another figure appeared in the scene: the woman as she was in this life, floating above the monk and looking down at him.

I was startled. The reading seemed to show her recent experience taking place inside the earlier life I was watching. I understood it as an encounter across time, although that was a spiritual interpretation of her report and the imagery, not a verified account of physical time travel.

The Familiarity She Had Felt

When I described it, she said that recognizing the monk as herself made sense of her reluctance to leave. She also connected the reading with her attraction to mantras, fasting, and spiritual discipline.

I felt that her present experiences might, in the terms of the reading, be connected with the monk’s meditation beneath that immense night sky.

She left smiling. I remained astonished by the overlap of the two scenes and wondered how many people might keep unusual experiences private simply because they did not know whom they could tell.