I awoke to the dream flat on back, deep in wildflowers and thick green grass on a gently sloping hillside near the sea. The mottled spring sky above me was slowly spinning, as if I had whirled myself dizzy and fallen to the ground. I lay there until the sky became still again, listening to the rustling breeze, my stomach tensing with pleasure in the warm sun.

Then the scene changed, and I found myself kneeling in a clear spot a little farther down the hill. I was listening intently to an old Chinese man, who was very desperate. He had lost both legs just below the knee, where his black cotton trousers were knotted. He wore a traditional Chinese silk jacket buttoned to the neck and had long, dull black hair heavily streaked with grey. He was complaining bitterly about the world's injustice and his hard life, saying he wanted to commit suicide and had made plans to do so. It was about this time I noticed I was a nun - I glanced down at my habit, and the gold cross dangling over my breasts. But somehow that wasn't important, and I scarcely paid it any mind. I was much more concerned with the welfare of this hopeless man - I kept offering him my sympathies and trying to soothe him. But the more I tried the more frustrated and angry he became, and when his fervor found its highest pitch he bolted away from me, thrashing his way across the hill on his stumps toward a barrow mound nearby.

The long barrows found in England are dank underground tombs, single passages with chambers along the sides and an open entrance at one end. This barrow, however, had a heavy, planked wooden door, and the old man picked up an axe and began to frantically hack at it. I ran across the hill to stop him, then found myself struggling with him not in front of the tomb, but on the high cliffs overlooking the sea. I tried to wrench the axe from his hands, but in the scuffle slipped on some loose stones near the ledge, and letting go of the axe, tumbled into space.

The moment I fell I left my body, racing upward about fifty feet. I watched the sister plummet endlessly toward the sea, her black habit billowing and flapping. She landed flat on a large black rock on a narrow strip of beach, and I floated quickly down to her. Her head had snapped sharply to the left, and I could make out perfectly the right profile - not of her dead face, but mine.

I then found myself standing in the surf about 50 yards offshore (in my own body now, not the nun's). The tide was shallow and lapped around my feet in semicircles, and I felt peaceful for the most part, though a little uneasy at being so far out. Then I hear someone shouting and looked up to see Craig - a dear friend who died recently - on the beach, emphatically waving his arms, trying to get my attention. He was shirtless and shoeless, wearing only jeans.

"What? I can't hear you!" I yelled back, certain my words were lost in the wind. He kept hollering and began to point purposefully at the horizon behind me. I turned around just in time to see a monstrous wave - a hundred feet high at least - beginning to break. With a thunderous noise it pummeled me into the sand, and just as I stopped flailing and began to swallow water, I awoke in my bed.