Some dreams feel like short stories or at least no longer than a novella. This one felt like a long novel. I will try to condense.

I was with a group of space explorers. We had come to a particular sector expecting it to be a nexus of commerce and travel for many different worlds, many different sentient species.

We were surprised to find no one. Some other spaceships were floating, seemingly abandoned.

We went to the main planet, the one that would be inhabitable, the one we expected to find a well-populated world of many natives, plus all the visitors from all over the galaxy.

The world was empty. The city we were exploring looked like no one had lived there for maybe a decade. The pavement was cracked and buckled with green plants growing in between. Building were unmaintained, windows missing, or falling over. Vehicles – not like cars that we have, but different – were sitting unused, askew.

We had no answer. We didn’t know what was going on.

Back on our spaceship, later, I don’t know the mechanism, I could see some of the people who were no longer there. They were there, just not in our ordinary physical reality. They were in a different kind of reality. I could see their projection of what their bodies used to look like – different forms because they were different species.

They told me that they had given up their bodies because they were better off living in this different reality. They could communicate telepathically. They didn’t have all the ailments and difficulties of a body; they could live as long as they wanted to.

As we talked, I wondered about this choice. Their planet had contained billions. Had everyone decided to essentially die and give up their body to live on non-corporally? They told me that for the sake of their planetary culture, everyone had to give up their bodies. They all needed to make the change together, so that their culture could survive. They communicated the image of thousands being lined up (willingly?) and separated from their bodies.

I had the thought that maybe not everyone had participated. People are pretty good at hiding when need be. I wrote the equivalent of an email about the topic to another woman on our spaceship, feeling like this form of communication was the most secure. Then I had a fear that because that these aliens were telepathic, that they could read my mind and that they were aware of this thought, which could be viewed as threatening, or could threaten anyone who otherwise was still living on the planet. I asked them about their telepathic abilities, and they told me that they were aware of me having a thought that I wanted to hide from them, but they didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t sure if that was true or not.

We returned to the planet, to look for survivors. I was on a road by an elementary school. (Rather like the road that goes by Laura Ingles Wilder Elementary that we bike past from time to time.) Like other places on the planet, there were all the signs of abandonment: debris, plants growing through, broken buildings and broken pavement. But I thought I saw three children, on separate occasions, running across or along the road. I thought these were survivors.

We located a refugee encampment. They were nomadic, hiding from their fellows. They confirmed that despite many choosing to live this higher form of existence, non-corporally, many did not want to make the choice, but were forced into it. Millions were executed. They were a rag tag group, one of a number of rag tag groups, who managed to escape and hide.