Spiritual Enlightenment via French Stick

I hear it before anything else — that familiar drumming inside my skull. A cosmic woodpecker tapping directly on my soul. Not so much a sound as a vibration, a low-frequency earthquake thrumming through my bones. My teeth chatter. My ribs feel like tuning forks. My whole body begins to buzz like an overloaded fridge left alone with its own thoughts. Oh. Hello. This again. It hasn’t happened in a while. I tell myself not to get too excited. “Calm yourself, Amanda,” I whisper softly into the dark, as though reason has ever worked on my nervous system. Too late. My body unzips itself from its meat suit. There’s a brief sensation of being both too heavy and completely weightless, like I’ve forgotten how to belong to gravity. Then — lift off. I ascend without coordinates, without intention, without even a vague itinerary. Normally I at least know whether I’m heading for flying, snooping, or emotional processing disguised as abstract furniture. Tonight, I’m drawing blanks. So I drift into the void. It isn’t dark exactly — more like the colour of forgetting. A vast in-between place where thought echoes and then gives up. I float through it, mildly offended by the lack of scenery, until suddenly I punch straight out the other side like a poorly aimed champagne cork escaping a bottle. I land on a road I’ve never walked in waking life. Grey tarmac stretching into mild disappointment. Slightly damp, like every British memory rolled into one. Somewhere ahead there’s a commotion — voices overlapping, the fizz of collective anticipation mixed with mild British scepticism. A crowd gathers around a metal fence. Naturally, I go and rubberneck. I stretch onto my tiptoes — the eternal struggle of being vertically challenged — trying to peer over shoulders and growing pessimism and the occasional rogue elbow. “Lily Allen is playing a concert,” a man sighs beside me, like he’s announcing a delayed bus. “Don’t know what all the fuss is about. She’s shit.” I nod. Not in agreement — Lily is mediocre, at best — but in general what-the-fuckery. Still, I stay. It’s not like I’ve got any plans in the Astral Realm, other than drifting and accidentally philosophising. CDs scatter across the ground like fallen tiles. I pick one up and try to read the sleeve, but the lettering wriggles and rearranges itself into something between ancient prophecy and scrambled Wi-Fi password. My psychic brain — which apparently moonlights as a dream librarian — informs me this is Lily’s best work. “Sure it is,” I mutter, returning it to the pile. Music starts. Except… it doesn’t. Instead, Lily Allen walks onstage and begins doing stand-up comedy. Not singing. Stand-up. The crowd implodes. Booing erupts like a flock of offended geese. Someone — a hero of chaos — launches a French stick at her head. “Alright, wanker!” Lily shouts, catching it mid-air and hurling it back with impressive gluten-based aggression. “You’re shit!” the man next to me yells, emotionally betrayed by bread. And suddenly — thunk — the realisation smacks me harder than a baguette to the forehead. I’m dreaming. Of course I am. Lily Allen doesn’t do stand-up. And if she did, it wouldn’t involve airborne bakery warfare. In the middle of this bread-based bedlam, I briefly forget why I’m here — my mission, my intention, my famously unreliable memory. Apparently as useless in the Astral Realm as it is in waking life. Lucidity clicks on like a hidden switch behind my eyes. The world sharpens. The colours get louder. The absurdity feels intimate, like I’ve been let in on the joke — or the universe has leaned in to whisper, “wakey-wakey!” with the sweet menace of someone trying to be helpful. I push my way to the front of the crowd, buoyed by a sudden godlike confidence and curiosity. Lily locks eyes with me and says, very casually, “Follow me. Let me show you my childhood home.” “Okay,” I reply, because why wouldn’t I follow a celebrity into her subconscious real estate. She takes my hand and off we go. Her childhood home turns out to be less semi-detached nostalgia and more Victorian gothic masterpiece. A towering mansion, moody and magnificent, stacked with staircases that coil upward like thoughts you shouldn’t finish. At least a couple of stories. Possibly more. Possibly a basement where old secrets ferment like wine. She lets me wander freely, which I do with absolute glee. There is nothing more thrilling than snooping through someone else’s life — especially a semi-famous stranger whose Netflix documentary I am yet to watch. Rooms stretch and multiply. Velvet curtains. Creaky floorboards. Dust motes suspended like tiny planets. Windows that glow like they’re remembering sunsets. I open drawers. Peer into cabinets. Touch banisters polished by generations of inherited wealth. Admire furniture I could never afford without selling several organs. “Wanna meet my dad?” Lily asks. “Not really,” I think, courteously. She takes me anyway. Her dad is ancient. Not just old — prehistoric. OLD old. Time has folded him inwards. He shuffles along with a zimmer frame, inch by painful inch, his back so hunched it looks one cough away from retirement. His voice is dry and husky, like it’s been tucked away in the back of a drawer since the war. “Gonna pop my clogs soon,” he wheezes. “This will all be hers,” he adds, gesturing vaguely at the mansion. Lily’s face lights up. “Yeah, just wish he’d hurry up and get on with it,” she laughs. The laugh lands wrong. There’s a blade behind it. A shimmer of hunger. Even in dreams, entitlement has teeth — sharp, polished, desperate to sink themselves in and suck a neck dry. We climb the staircases — plural — past enormous family portraits of sunlit holidays, champagne smiles, privilege sealed behind glass. Everyone looks moisturised by money. I feel briefly underdressed in my astral pyjamas. Then I notice the frames. They aren’t frames at all. They’re bamboo shoots — interwoven, organic, warm and raw against all that polished excess. “My god,” I gush, genuinely impressed. “I love these frames.” But Lily has already gone. The house begins to loosen. The walls lose their confidence. The staircase stretches and thins like a half-remembered thought. Lucidity slips sideways. The dream begins shedding layers. I’m suddenly back in bed, sprawled upside down like a stranded starfish. I’m faintly grateful my husband isn’t here — he hates my aggressive mattress colonisation. I grab my phone because obviously I must document this madness immediately. 1% battery. Absolute horror. Ah. This confirms it. I must still be dreaming. I would never allow my phone to descend into such reckless abandonment. I am anxious, not a monster. And then — click — I wake up. Properly. Properly properly. The room is still. The light is ordinary. My phone has more than 1% battery because I am, in fact, a responsible adult who fears technological death. I lie there quietly, letting the dream settle inside me. The French stick keeps returning to my mind — ridiculous, airborne, unexpected. A harmless thing turned into a wake-up call. A soft smack that jolts awareness into place. That moment where nonsense becomes a doorway and absurdity politely elbows you into consciousness. Maybe lucidity isn’t about control at all. Maybe it’s about noticing when life throws bread at your head — when something strange, uncomfortable, absurd or disruptive tries to get your attention — and instead of ducking, you pause and ask what it’s trying to wake inside you. I spend so much time sleepwalking through my own days, politely enduring, sensibly surviving, keeping my head down in the crowd. And yet a flying French stick in a dream can snap me awake faster than logic ever does. Maybe I don’t need to escape reality. Maybe I just need to let it hit me sometimes — to let the soft things bruise me into noticing, to allow the ridiculous to crack me open, to trust that even nonsense can carry a message if you’re brave enough to listen. Softly. Stupidly. Spiritually. Right between the eyes.