But I’ve Never Been to Paris

by Pamela Leigh

I was in my early thirties when a friend of mine was traveling to Paris for the first time. I had never been to France, so I could offer no travel tips of wonderful cafes to visit or must-see sights. I just wished her bon voyage and said I looked forward to hearing about the trip when she returned.  She left on an afternoon flight out of Dulles International Airport so taking into consideration flight time, disembarking, picking up luggage, and getting into downtown Paris, she would have been arriving at wherever she was staying around 5 a.m. Washington, DC, time.

Before I was diagnosed with and treated for sleep apnea, I spent a fair amount of sleep time in the REM state and most of my vivid dreams came between 5 a.m. to 7 a.m.  That morning, I had the kind of dream that unfolds like a movie. In those dreams I can see the place or setting, who is there, and what is happening—as if in real time. In this dream I was accompanying my friend who had arrived somewhere in Paris and was looking for a place to stay before she joined her bicycling tour group. She (with me as the observer) had arrived at a small hotel and was being shown up a narrow and dark staircase to a room at the top. It was a small room but perfectly  adequate and the best part was when the proprietress opened the shutters to a window that looked out on a picturesque street scene complete with a statue. At that point, my friend took the room and I took my (dream) leave, feeling good that she was safe and ready to begin her Paris adventure. I woke up remembering everything perfectly, as I always do when the dream is linear and logical with a complete storyline. I also awoke feeling that I had experienced Paris; it had a distinct atmosphere, a “feeling,” unlike any place I had ever been before.

When my friend returned we made dinner plans so I could hear about her trip. Hoping that she would not think me too odd, I recounted my dream of her arrival in the City of Light–exactly what I saw, including the dark staircase and the view from the window. She sat in stunned silence for a moment and then told me that everything I described was accurate, from walking down the street, seeing  the small hotel, meeting the proprietress, and taking the room with the view—everything. Then, it was my turn to be stunned.

Over the decades, I have had several more remote viewing dreams where I have been privy to conversations or events just before they happen or while they are happening—but sadly no more remote travel experiences. I say sadly because I love to travel and augmenting my “real life” travel with dream-time adventures to exotic locations would be quite wonderful. I guess the gift of this first and, thus far, only dreamed travel adventure is that I am now open to experiences that others share that cannot be easily explained. I expect I’m not too different from many others on this front—if it (whatever “it” is) has happened to me, then other inexplicable experiences  most certainly can and have happened to others. Another way of putting this is that my openness, in this case to the possibility (theory) of astral travel, became “knowingness” after this experience.