Steak Night

I hear that familiar ringing in my ears. Not a physical sound as we know it. More like an internal alarm ricocheting through my soul. It arrives with the vibrations. Always the vibrations. A low electrical drumming that begins somewhere deep inside me and rapidly escalates into what can only be described as an industrial-scale catastrophe occurring in another dimension. The sensation builds and builds until it feels as though every atom in my body is being fed through an invisible woodchipper. Then — POP. Out I go. It hasn’t happened in a while. I’m never expecting it. It just… happens. One moment I’m drifting gently towards sleep. The next? Bam. Vibrations. Metallic screeching. Reality tearing at the seams. And suddenly I’m no longer inside the thing I’ve spent my entire life calling me. It’s time for another expedition into the unknown. I’ve been having these otherworldly experiences for as long as I can remember. As a child, I never had the language to explain what was happening to me. As an adult… Honestly, I’m not sure I do now. For years I’ve been detaching from my earthly body and wandering into places that seem to exist somewhere beyond ordinary reality. A nocturnal explorer in search of answers. Though more often than not, I return carrying twice as many questions as I left with. As a child, it scared the absolute crap out of me. Fear attracts fear. Or perhaps fear simply shines a spotlight on it. My early adventures were populated by things that seemed determined to ensure I never slept peacefully again. Monsters lurking in dark corners. Beings that watched from the edges of rooms. I would wake in tears and run to my mum. “It was just a bad dream,” she’d say. “No…” I’d insist. “It was real.” And it did feel real. More real than this reality sometimes. More convincing. As if reality itself were a veil — and for a moment, it dropped. There was one occasion when I slipped out of my body and found my grandfather standing in my bedroom. The interesting part being that I’d never actually met him. He’d died long before I was born. Yet somehow I knew who he was before the thought had even fully formed. Not because he introduced himself. He never spoke a word. He simply emerged from a wall covered in posters and stood there looking at me, a silent figure stepping out of childhood imagination and into the startling reality of the room. The moment he sensed my fear, however, he dissolved back into a papery sea of Spice Girls, Peter Andre and poorly applied Blu Tack. I kept that story to myself. Along with the time I was chased down the landing by an ancient Egyptian mummy. Which sounds terrifying until I tell you that after pursuing me through the house, it grew tired of the chase and spent the rest of the night asleep on top of my wardrobe. Meanwhile I remained frozen beneath the duvet. Too terrified to move. Watching an undead Egyptian pensioner settle in for the night above my school uniform. Plus… Who would believe me? Yet despite the fear, something else was growing alongside it. Curiosity. A small flame that refused to go out. One morning before school, I detached from my body again. This time, however, something was different. I wasn’t afraid. I simply floated. I moved through my bedroom with an ease that felt completely natural and utterly impossible. I remember stopping to observe everything around me. The wardrobe. The posters. The carpet. The faint morning light leaking through the curtains. Every detail was astonishingly vivid. Not dreamlike. Not hazy. Not symbolic. Real. More real than real. And in that moment I understood something important. There was nothing to fear except fear itself. Fear was the thing turning these experiences into nightmares. Remove the fear and suddenly the universe became much friendlier. Or at least much more interesting. And so the adventures continued. Hundreds of them. Maybe more. I’ve lost count. Some seemed to take place in parallel universes. Others felt almost identical to home, except tiny details were wrong. A road where no road should be. An extra room in a familiar house. I flew through space. Visited friends. Explored impossible places. I possessed free will. No consequences. No judgement. And let me tell you… The astral world can get weird. Very weird. One night, whilst wandering around in my soul body, I heard Jefferson Airplane drifting through the darkness. White Rabbit. Not from a radio. Not from a speaker. The song seemed woven into the experience itself. The lyrics pulled at me like a current, drawing me somewhere I hadn’t intended to go. I followed the music through my bedroom wall and into the neighbours’ bedroom. Not just any neighbours. Those neighbours. The ones I couldn’t bloody stand. And there they were. Having sex. Now, any reasonable person would have turned around and floated back through the wall. Instead, through a series of events I won’t attempt to explain to a panel of psychologists, I joined in. Not in a physical sense. But somehow our energies merged together in one shared experience. Three consciousnesses. One current. And, somewhat annoyingly, I had the time of my life. We all seemed to. Which was deeply inconvenient, because I still hated them. Then morning arrived. And with it, bin day. I stepped outside carrying my recycling box. The neighbour stepped outside carrying his. Our eyes met for a fraction of a second. And I nearly dropped the bloody thing. “Did they know?” Did they know their soul apparently had significantly better taste in company than they did? The neighbour gave a perfectly normal nod. I gave a perfectly normal nod back. Then spent the rest of the day convinced I’d accidentally become involved in the world’s most awkward supernatural threesome. Experiences like these change you. They stretch the mind beyond the limiting walls of our physical bodies. For years I wondered whether all of this was simply imagination. The mummies. The dead relatives. The impossible landscapes. The flights through other realities. Perhaps it was all generated by an overactive brain. Just dreams. Just stories. Just neurological fireworks. Right? Then… Steak Night happened. Up until this point, every strange experience I’d had occurred somewhere between sleep and waking. That hazy borderland where reality becomes negotiable. But Steak Night was different. Steak Night happened while I was fully awake. Wide awake. Painfully ordinary awake. Seven or eight years ago now. My husband and I were sitting at the dining table eating our favourite meal. Steak. Peppercorn sauce. Asparagus. Crispy potato slices. The culinary equivalent of wrapping yourself in a warm blanket and briefly forgetting the world exists. Nothing unusual. Nothing mystical. No chanting. No candles. No suspicious crystals. No recreational substances. I am entirely sober. Entirely conscious. Entirely present. These details matter. Because what happens next shouldn’t have happened. I’m cutting into a piece of steak while my husband enthusiastically recounts stories from his travels overseas. He’s deep into one of those wonderfully detailed explanations that somehow manages to include airport terminals, exchange rates and people I don’t know from Adam, Eve, or anyone else hanging from the family tree. Then — I’m gone. Not unconscious. Not asleep. Gone. One moment I’m chewing steak. The next I’m floating above the dining table. Looking down. And there we are. The two of us. Except… One of us had apparently left the building. My body was still sitting in the chair. Fork in hand. Eyes open. Staring into space. Meanwhile my husband remained completely oblivious to the fact that his entire audience had temporarily vacated her body. He was still talking. Still gesturing. Still enthusiastically explaining something involving helicopters and refugees. I found this absolutely hilarious. Even out of body, I was laughing. The lights were on, but nobody was home. Yet the presentation continued regardless, apparently undeterred by the complete absence of an audience. And that’s when it hit me. Not the steak. The realisation. I was no longer inside my body. Yet I am still me. Entirely me. My personality. My memories. My sense of humour. My awareness. Everything that makes me me remained intact. Only now I exist as something else. An invisible sphere of consciousness. A 360-degree awareness without my human senses. A self stripped of every physical thing I’d ever mistaken for myself. And suddenly a thought crashed through me. If I can exist outside my body and still remain myself… Then consciousness isn’t produced by the body. It merely operates through it. The body is the vehicle. Not the driver. And the instant that thought formed — SNAP. Back into my body. Back into the chair. Back into the steak. I stared at my husband and blurted: “Holy shit. I think I just died.” He didn’t even pause. Just shook his head. “No, you didn’t.” “I wasn’t in my body.” “You were.” “I wasn’t.” “You were.” “I left.” “You hallucinated.” Hmm. My husband has always had a remarkable ability to pop a pin through all my perfectly respectable spiritual revelations. Yet despite his scepticism, something fundamental changed inside me that evening. Every fear I’d ever held about death simply evaporated. Not because I adopted a belief. Not because I joined a religion. Not because someone convinced me. Because I’d experienced something. And experiences have a way of bulldozing theories. Steak Night lodged itself in my mind like a fork embedded in a particularly stubborn sirloin. I could never quite shake it. It transformed my understanding of reality. Of consciousness. Of existence itself. I no longer feared death in the way I once had. If consciousness can exist independently of the body — even briefly — then perhaps our loved ones never truly disappear. Perhaps the body dies, but the song plays on. Since then, I’ve had more experiences than I can count. Lucid dreams. Astral projections. Those alarming chemically enhanced adventures involving substances I absolutely should not have accepted from a man in a kaftan who bore an unsettling resemblance to Jesus. Each experience adds another piece to an impossibly large puzzle. A puzzle that seems to suggest reality may be considerably stranger than we’ve been led to believe. That consciousness may not be confined to the skull. That existence might be vastly bigger than the tiny corner of it we call everyday life. The puzzle remains incomplete. There are infinite pieces. Infinite possibilities. Infinite mysteries. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we’re not supposed to finish it. Maybe consciousness itself has limits for a reason. Because if we understood everything… If we knew exactly why we’re here… Exactly what happens next… Exactly what existence truly is… Then what would be left to discover? I don’t claim to know the answers. In truth, the older I get, the less certain I become about almost everything. What I do know is that, for a few brief moments on an otherwise ordinary evening, whilst eating steak and listening to my husband enthusiastically ramble about his travels, I experienced myself existing outside the boundaries of my physical body. Not as a theory. Not as a belief. Not as something I read in a book. As an experience. And experiences have a way of changing us. Perhaps it was an anomaly of consciousness. Perhaps it was a trick of the brain. Perhaps it was a glimpse behind a curtain we’re not normally permitted to draw back. I genuinely don’t know. But ever since that evening, death has felt less like a wall and more like a doorway. Not an ending. A continuation into something I can’t yet comprehend. And maybe that’s enough. Maybe the purpose isn’t to solve the mystery. Maybe the purpose is simply to stand before the mystery in awe. To ask questions. To remain curious. To accept that some truths are too large to fit inside a human mind. After all, if existence is infinite, perhaps uncertainty isn’t a flaw in the design. Perhaps it’s the design itself. And steak has never tasted quite the same ever since.