Part 2: A Conversation about The Gateway (Conversations with Michael)

Part 1 can be read here.

13th January, 2020
A Conversation about The Gateway

“I know why you’re here,” I say, not looking up from the tarot cards I’m rifling through for relaxation. The High Priestess looks back at me as Michael flickers somewhere to my right. I am sitting on the floor in my office.
     “Good. That saves a bit of time. You’ve been ignoring me.”
     “I haven’t. I’ve just been busy – sort of.” Okay, that sounds lame. I tell him the truth instead. “I haven’t been ready to recount what you want me to recount.”
     “But you know what that is, yes?”
     “Yes. It’s been on my mind. I don’t even know how to put it into words.”
     “You’ll find a way. You always do.”
     I sense him ‘sitting’ to my right. Do angels sit? I think they can appear to be doing anything if I focus on them with my mind’s eye. I sigh, and turn around. To anyone else I’d be staring at nothing, but I feel his energy in front of me. “Why do you want me to write down the dream? For everyone to read?”
     “It’s not what I want. It’s what you want.”
     I pull a face – a grumpy one. It’s that philosophy again. And I can’t argue with it because I know he’s right – I sense the ‘contract’ of the want. Is that the right word? I suddenly have a spark of inspiration that all the ‘wants’ in our lives could actually be contractual. But it flees too quickly for me to grasp. I’m really going to have to have a discussion with him, at some point, about free will.
     “It will help people,” he continues.
     “Really? I’m sure most of what I say sounds utterly mad to most.”
     “Well, most people are mad. You’re just one of the few to say it out loud.” There’s a smile to his voice. In my head, his eyes are twinkling like they often do.
     “The dream feels personal. Private.” But I know I’ll end up writing it all down, even as I can’t completely see how a dream I had for my own interest could help anyone else.
     He says nothing.
     “All right. How do I do this?”
     Get on the laptop and start typing – that’s how the words always come. And I have no idea whether that came from my own mind, or from Michael. It can be like that sometimes for he told me once that through this third dimensional, corporeal realm (Earth), angels can only really manifest themselves as extensions of our higher selves. He said that was how all channelling worked where spiritual beings or outside entities were involved.
     I open the laptop, aware he’s still here in my office – my meditation room; my prayer room; my work room; my peace room – my little eight-by-six-foot sanctuary that overlooks the horizon across the sea.
     “It’s going to take me a bit of effort to remember it – I didn’t write it down and it was a few nights ago.”
     “You should really start writing all your dreams down again.”
     I scowl at him. “Yes, I know.” I have told myself the same thing over and over again. I used to be disciplined about keeping a dream diary – I kept one for years.
     The document is open on my laptop. I try and block out distractions, and take myself back to the dream. “Can I talk to you while I recall it? It will help, I think.”
     “Of course.”
     In my mind, I travel back to a few night ago, to what must have been around four or five o’clock in the morning. (I never checked the time.) “Okay…” I close my eyes. The dream appears before me – me in it. “I’m floating, or something. Or maybe I’m wading. I can’t see anything around me particularly, but I feel like I’m bobbing in waves – or maybe I am waves. I can sense you there like I can sense you now. It was you in the dream, wasn’t it?”
     “It was. Do you remember why I was there?”
     “I wanted to know something. I asked a question. It’s coming back to me … I wanted to remember what it felt like to die, so that I could do it properly – freely – when the time came.”
     “And so I came to answer your question.”
     “And it’s happening.” My eyes are still closed as I try to recall. I only open them to type the words in between recollection… “Um … I feel weightless, but it’s hard to breathe, as if I am in water. I can breathe, but every breath is … so much effort. And each breath feels weak. I know it’s coming. The last breath. The air around me is harder to be a part of…”

And then it happens. I have taken in the last breath, and I can no longer breathe it out. I can’t take more air in either. I am in stasis.
     “It won’t last long,” he says in my ear, and I’m suddenly not sure whether he’s saying this now, or whether those were his words in the dream.
     This feels familiar, I say in my head. I can’t speak because there is no air.
     Yes. You’ve done it many times before. Can you feel your pulse?
     Yes. My heart is still beating, but I know it won't for long. In fact, my heart is all I can feel – a rhythmic thrum at my temples, in my chest, and vibrating through my whole being. But there is no air.
     This is the part where most people feel frightened, and they’ll try to fight it. Do not be afraid.
     I’m not. But it does feel overwhelming. It is an overwhelming transition.
     Yes, it must overwhelm you in order to take you. Most people resist this part, causing pain in the last minute, but there is no need to resist. On your next breath in, breathe IN to your pulse.
     I do not think I have any breath left in me, and I do not even know how I can breathe when there simply is no air, but even as I think it, I do it. I breathe, and the breath is different to before. Earths move. Everything moves as I do what he says and breathe into the pulse of my body … and I have shifted. I am out! I have shifted out of that lifeline. I did it! And there was no pain – none at all. Only the seconds of resistance caused the ghost of pain – or potential pain – but that was it.
     “Because you did not resist – you went with your flow; with your pulse. Now … wake up.”
     He brushes past me, or washes over me, or something, and suddenly I’m blinking and have a sense of gasping for breath as I stir in bed, pitch black of night around me. My hand moves up to my heart under my sheets. I think it hurts, or it’s my lungs that hurt, but as soon as I rub my chest, I realise that nothing hurts. And my heart is still beating.
     “You cannot die tonight. Your contract has not completed.”
     Half awake, and half asleep, I tell him I understand. And something else. It was you, wasn’t it? It was you who was there when I was five. It was you who saved me from drowning.
     Ask me again when you next see me.
     And sleep is already taking me, my sense of relief and revelation at what I had just experienced carrying me into a safe and lighter slumber than before.

Back in the present, I take a deep breath, and sit up in my chair. The words are both in front of me on the screen and in my head, the memory of the dream now clear. I turn towards Michael and wish I can see him the way I might see anyone else. It would offer some solidity. “Well … was it? Was it you?”
     He flashes blue behind my eyelids as I blink. “You know it was.”
     I nod. “I know now. I didn’t know then.”
     “It is two-fold – there is never just one layer to existence. It was I who was there, but it was also you who sent a cry – a silent cry; a resonant note – to the universe in that moment. That note reached a man sitting a hundred metres away, and he turned his head towards the note and saw you fall into the water.”
     “And he came running to pull me out.”
     “Yes. And I was the voice in your head telling you, you had nothing to fear.”
     “Just like in the dream.”
     “In a way. If that had been your time to go, I would have guided you across. But it was not. You will know when it is.”
     “I will? I’ve always wondered.”
     “You will. And I will be there when that time comes.”
     “Is everyone guided across?”
      “Everyone is offered it.”
     “Why? I mean … why you? Why me?”
     “You know why.”
     Silence filled the space between us. “I…” I don’t feel I can say it.
     “Say it. You should. There is no harm in it.”
     “It’s just that … I don’t feel … worth it.” And that actually felt sad to say that. And wrong. So I said what he wanted me to say. “You’re my guardian angel.”
     His light beams. “I am. And worth has nothing to do with it. It is resonance.”
     “I didn’t think archangels could be guardian angels.”
     “Why not? I’m guardian angel to quite a few at the moment. And like I said – it’s about resonance. That’s why it’s possible. Angels don’t have hierarchy in the way you perceive hierarchy. Our hierarchy is based on … it’s more like music. The melody dictates each note’s hierarchy, and every note is composed of resonance. You are a musical note. I am a musical note. Our notes resonate.”
     “It’s as simple as that?”
     “Well … no.”
     I smile.
     “There are also matters of origins and contracts, and destinies, and choice. But the resonance is part of it, and it will do for translation, yes?”
     “Yes, thank you. It makes sense. I’ve never felt … what I’m trying to say is, I think I always had a preconceived idea of what a guardian angel would feel like – having felt other spirits – so I never felt any guardian angel around me based on that, but you … I’ve always felt you around. Now I know why.” I’m suddenly very curious. Excitement rises. I want to know more. “What about Gabriel? He’s come to me twice that I know of. And Uriel – what about him? I’m not sure he likes me very much.”
     Michael laughs.
     It’s true, though. I feel this very stern energy around Uriel, like he’s constantly exasperated with me. “I have many questions now.”
     “And we will have many conversations about them all.”
     “Oh, that’s not fair. Those are exit words. You’re going now, aren’t you?”
     “Yes. But first … how do you feel now you have properly recalled the dream?”
     I think on his question. “I don’t honestly know. Every time I remember something, or awaken something in me, I feel like the world shifts and I have to find my balance again. It’s a little tiring on the emotions each time.”
     “Indeed. This is part of the shift through realities and dimensions. You can see why so many people don’t remember – or want to remember – anything at all, can’t you?”
     “I suppose so.”
     “Can you also see why writing it all down can help others?”
     I frown, unsure if I really can. “My experience won’t be the same as theirs.”
     “Actually everyone goes through that exact same process when they die, no matter how they die – whether it’s peaceful or traumatic; whether there’s resistance or not – that specific part where breathing ceases and the inward pulse breath is taken instead, is the point where the soul leaves its incarnation. How that journey is perceived by the soul who takes it, though – that’s different for each. And that is why everyone’s account of a death experience – should they survive it – might be different. In your ancient times, shamans or priestesses who had conquered their fears would take the journey through death’s gateway and back again, and map it out for others to follow so no one needed to be afraid.”
     My mind is buzzing. The High Priestess tarot card catches my eye. Michael had appeared at the point it was turned. Map it out… I wonder if that is, in a way, what I did – what I am doing – by typing it out. “So … that inward pulse breath – that’s the gateway?”
     “Yes. That’s the gateway.”
     I look back at the words – at our conversation. (At the map?) I think about my dream. A hundred more questions simmer in my mind. I turn back to ask another.
     But he’s gone.

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Footnote: It perhaps helps to add some context to the above dialogue, to say that it is completely normal in the realms my own life to ask “I want to remember how do die, so I can do it properly” because I have memory of training to do this in one or more (indigenous/shamanic) past lives - for others, not just me. I was some kind of “deathwalker/psychopomp” (which is what Michael was alluding to with the “mapping it out” comment - I have written about deathwalking before on one of my websites). From memory of those lives, rituals and discussion about death and even with death was really not unusual or “scary”, and any scariness outwardly portrayed (in dance, costume, and ceremony) was for show and a mark of respect for the transformation and a reminder that fear must always be conquered. 
     The process of this training is quite a clear memory for me. What I didn’t bring over into this life was the feeling of doing it, therefore I couldn’t remember how to, consciously and physically. I suppose in the dream state I was in, I found myself in a position to try and pull that memory forward. So I did. In the modern western world, “fear” for such a natural process (death) has become more than the trust in it ... because we no longer commune with death/transformation in the same way.
     (And please note that I am talking about healthy indigenous and shamanic death-acknowledgment practices - not psychotic cult practices that would encourage human sacrifice through delusion or force. This kind of (rare) behaviour is an unnatural, fear and power-based inversion of what should be a sacred connection to a natural life-cycle that need not be feared to the extent it is.)