The more I looked, the weirder it seemed. I’d never seen anything remotely like it. It wasn’t a particularly attractive being, in fact he seemed somehow intolerant or irritable and reminded me of both a doctor and a tutor I used to have an university who was never very impressed with me.

He looked like a kind of catfish and I was led to understand he was the guardian of the threshold. He said something to my spirit or etheric or astral self that I did not actually hear (I’ve no idea how to describe that bit of the self which goes on such journeys) and that part of myself said something back that I didn’t hear either.

I often find that communication in that dimension does not involve words or speech, as such, or even knowledge, there just appear to be right and wrong questions and answers that are predetermined elsewhere, as if by a script. The information is simply, somehow, relayed.

At that point I was still with my eyes wide open lying in bed, staring at the fish. Then – with no warning whatsoever – there was a split second where I lost consciousness and when I next opened my eyes I was no longer in the bedroom but was well and truly at the bottom of a murky green-grey ocean, half hidden by reeds or seaweed or algae or something, staring in absolute amazement – the word does not adequately describe how I felt – at what I later called a half man, half fish.

In fact it looked more like a half-man half-serpent, but at the time I was thinking fishes. I was gobsmacked by both the sight and the situation I’d somehow arrived at, which bore no resemblance to anything I’d ever imagined.