if you can stay safely on the path

you can walk out of your local here and now to the here and now one dimension over....and, when you want to return, you can (they say) merely skip back through your native realm to the realm one step over the other way, and then come in through the back door to right where you left. Well, there might be complications somewhere in all that.....When I got ready to go, it was a full moon Monday, high Summer.....the witchy-woman had cashed my check, and given me my instructions.....I had stopped my mail, just in case the temporal shift was off by a week or so, which happens sometimes.....didn't want to draw any attention to my vacant abode, while I was elsewhere and elsewhen......I had the mistletoe, and the crystal, and the dragonblood all at hand....and, at midnight, I said the Words......and nothing happened. I sat there on the sofa going "crap, damn, fuck....this is a pisser....." I got up and opened the front door....and found myself in a different city....my house looked much the same..... but the street was alien.....old cobblestone was there, not cracked asphalt......the neighborhood was all changed, the other cottages were gone, replaced by what looked like tenements from some past age.....two and three story rambling buildings jammed next to each other.....gaslamps sparsely lit the gloom.....light spilled out of a public house half a block down, where there should be a vacant lot.....drunks stumbled out, singing loudly, waving their bottles, trying to dance, falling down and laughing.....

I went back inside, and noticed that things had changed.....there was no light switch.....a lamp burned on a table.....there was no TV and stereo.....there were more bookcases than there should be, and the bathroom was gone....out back, I could see what must be an outhouse to replace the bathroom....there was a wood-stove in the kitchen....the garments in my closet were of a strange fashion.....in fact, what I was wearing had somehow changed.....I had gone over....

Feeling overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all, I lay down in the bedroom and fell into a deep sleep.....

I awoke at cock's crow.....and visited the jakes, and then searched through the kitchen cupboards, and made myself some oatmeal and tea.....the hand-pump on the kitchen sink delivered cold clear water.....the banked fire in the stove of brick and iron came to life with some fanning and kindling.......I said "This is amazing!" but the words came out in a strange language......