It was like when your grandpa pulls a quarter from behind your ear and says it was magic, except if your grandpa was Freddie Mercury and instead of your ear it was your spine, and it really is magic.

The coin, when I get to look at it, seems like copper at first, but it has an oily sheen. At first I think the image on top is Death, but when I look closer I realize I was mistaken. The face is gaunt but not skeletal, and one eye is hidden in the shadows of the hooded cloak. I flip it, and it lands face down. The other side seems to have a number, and some foliage.

Now the back of my neck feels loose, my spine rattling like teeth, and the dragon comes over to inspect it. I fight the temptation to flinch when I feel their claws brush the back of my neck.

"Rusted."

"Par for the course. Probably once you get in I'm full of knob and tube wiring, too. Any idea how to do astral asbestos remediation?"

"Stop babbling," they say, but with affection, and I do.

The sensation starts with a gentle rubbing that moves deeper, loosing what was held tight, and then peeling back like I'm shedding skin. It'm warm and then hot, much too hot for a January night. There's a crack like my bones are loose, or maybe like my skull has split just a little, or maybe like hinges oiled for the first time in twenty-mumble years have given up their rusty grip.

I'd swear that was a breeze rifling my hair, though the windows are closed.

"That's because you opened a door," they tell me.

It's just a crack, enough to let in fresh air and maybe enough to get some leverage for further exploration. It's something, and something is always better than nothing.

I move out to sit in the living room and clear my mind, too worked up to sleep yet. The meditative beats help me calm down and take stock, and then as I sit there I see an image.

Imagine a child with a wooden shield, the handle carved in the back for her hand to fit through. She carries this shield everywhere, training with it, letting it rest against her wrist and cover her like a blanket at night. One day she goes to put the shield down, exhausted, only to realize that her hand is grown, and she cannot remove the shield. I know she is expected to cut the hand, not the shield, if she should decide to put it down permanently, and she's no longer sure she likes that trade.

I'm not sure what I'm opening the door for, but it seems to be time to put down the shield and see what else is out there.

The kid's been doing it since before I got here - one of his first guardians taught him it along with astral travel.

The way he does it is he pictures the multiverse kinda like a book open on the table. We're on, I don't fucking know, page 539. He leaves the body and goes through a central location I guess you could call an Akashic Library or something like that, I guess in this metaphor it'd be the spine of the book, and from there he can wander onto other pages. Closer ones - ones that are more like this reality - are easier. He regularly checks in with pages 535-427 or something. Going all the way over to page 12 would be a hell of a lot harder.

It's not something I did at home but I've picked up the knack of it from him. As far as I can tell, getting to the Akashic Records or whatever you want to call them is a pretty common destination for astral journey-type stuff. It's one of those archetypal destinations. If you need something to focus on while meditating or journeying, you can picture your favorite library, the one that comes to mind when you think of Capital-L Library. (The kid used to actually go to the library when he was young for this, but I think he just likes hanging out there.)

If you need help when you're there, I suppose you could always ask the librarian, but I think it's pretty intuitive as long as you're not doing anything too complex. It's not unlike the past life research some people write about doing there, so if you've read or used a meditation for that purpose you could probably re-purpose it for this.

Once you're comfortable doing it, you might start getting flashes of other choices at relevant times - when the lesson learned was something that'd be useful to know at whatever you're doing now, or when you're thinking about doing something you already did somewhere else.

Another way to approach it if you're not into guided meditation stuff is as a thought experiment. Pick some big decision in your life and ask yourself what happened if you went the other way. You can consciously direct it as a fantasy for a little while, if you want, and see what details start popping up that you wouldn't pick on your own, or you can relax and let it run like a cross between a daydream and automatic writing. (In fact, writing is a good way to focus on this, if you're having trouble.) And again, the more you do it, the easier it gets.