There they were, all five of them, and I felt more than ready to jump through to my first portal experience. The border of the first of the five was glowing with a bright and penetrating light. I walked to it and tried to put my hand through. Blocked again. At first I was surprised, but then I recalled something Karine had said about the key to success.

I snapped my fingers, and the polka-dotted tie appeared in my hand. I tied it around my neck and again tested the portal. This time, I saw my hand disappear up to my elbow. I pulled it back for a second, took a deep breath, and stepped through.

I zipped though some sort of tunnel until I saw a bright light ahead. I'd spent only a few seconds in the tunnel but felt that I'd traveled very far. When I reached the end, I stopped moving and looked ahead to see an ancient city in the distance. I assumed it was Rome, since what looked like the Colosseum was in my line of sight. There was a light misty rain falling, and the sky was decorated with many clouds, including a few darker ones right above me.

I began walking around within a small village, passing through a large area with open-air shops around its perimeter. There were many people walking near me, most wearing sandals and dressed in tunics, yet no one seemed to notice me or care that I was there. I thought they should have, as I was wearing what would have been for them some very unconventional articles of clothing, including the now extremely inappropriate necktie. I took in the scene and then tried to figure out what to do.

This world within the portal seemed even more real than the places I visited in other dreams I'd had. It had such a different quality to it that I checked my watch, almost expecting it to be working. It wasn't.

The mild rain stopped as the darker clouds drifted away from the village. Ahead of me was a circle of benches filled with people, all gathered around a small boy who sat cross-legged on the ground in the center of the circle. I felt a magnetic pull forward.

Without looking at me, he raised his hand and waved me over to him. As I approached him, all the others disappeared. When I was close enough, I sat on the ground next to him. Almost immediately, I had the feeling I first had when I met the beggar. It was him, but he was now the small boy. I put my hands together in prayer position. He let out a small laugh and asked me to just sit with him.

“I wondered if I'd ever see you again,” I said.

“How likely is it that more rain will come?” he asked.

“I … I don't know,” I said. “I feel like it's taken me forever to find you.”

“How long do you think it will take for you to find you?” asked the boy.

He seemed to be about eight or nine years old. He had long dark brown hair and wore broken sandals and a small white tunic with a crimson border. I could feel the glow within him as I had back on the street in New York. It was amazing. He didn't confirm his identity, but I needed no confirmation. I felt braver than the first time we met and I jumped right in.

“What is this portal, and why am I here?”

“Portal?” He appeared to ponder the word. “Portal. Yes, I really like that!” he said. “This is the Portal of Awareness.”

“Awareness? Awareness of what?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “and also of who, where, when, how, and why. It is about seeing what is, not the illusion created from the mind. Here you will get the answers to some of your questions and, more likely, questions about what you believe are some of your answers.”

I contemplated the thought as a small salamander stopped in front of us. It was long and thin with greenish smooth skin. Its eyes seemed large in relation to the rest of its body. It looked directly at me, and I got the impression that it was trying to tell me something. I tried to figure out the meaning of it but couldn't. It was as if the clouds that were overhead before were suddenly now in my head, blocking me from thinking clearly.

“What is happening to me?”

“You're testing your awareness. How did you do?”

“I think I failed.”

He laughed with a sound that I didn't expect to hear coming from a young boy's body. “Oh, that's a good one! I said ‘test’ and so you decided that you either passed or failed. How fascinating.”

With that, he reached out his small hand, and the salamander jumped onto his palm. He brought it to his cheek and rubbed it against him. He then returned it to the ground, and it ran away. I was completely baffled by the whole encounter and felt as if I was missing the point.

“What does this all mean?” I asked.

“What do you mean by ‘this’?”

“This village, here, now. The salamander. Wait, I am dreaming, right?”

“You are asking a question to which you would not yet understand the answer. However, I will indulge you. Yes, you are dreaming. You have been dreaming all your life. You just do not remember.”

He was right. I was more confused than before I'd asked the question. “Do you mean that up until recently, I have not been able to remember my dreams?”

“I mean,” he said, “that every aspect of your life is a dream, and that you do not remember who you are and why you are here.”

He stopped and looked up. “I am just not sure if it will rain again, what do you think? I like the rain.” Now he sounded like a young boy.

“I really don't know if it will rain,” I felt I needed to say and did so. I then added, “I'm not sure what you mean about every aspect of my life being a dream.”

When he responded, he no longer sounded like a small boy. “It is a challenging concept. Just think about it, or perhaps consider not thinking about it.” We both laughed, but as was once the case with Lucena, I was unsure of what was funny.

He stood and dusted himself off. “When you dream, you are unaware that it is not reality. How real do your dreams feel to you?”

I stood then, too, and wiped the dirt from my pants. “They feel very real. So nothing in the world is real?”

“Let us just say that the world is an illusion, but your experience of it is real. So, it is not real, and it is not unreal.”

I chewed on that for a while but wasn't ready to swallow.

“Allow me to ask you a question,” he said. “How do you know that you are not just a dream character within someone else's dream?”

Suddenly the dark clouds moved over us again and it started to rain. This time, it was coming down much harder than before. When it did, the boy began dancing around in a circle with his arms in the air, his head tilted back, and his tongue stretched out to taste the raindrops.

“Hey!” he said excitedly, as if he'd just discovered a cure for blindness. “Want to jump the drops?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on!” he said, waving for me to join him.

Just then the rain stopped. And when I say stopped, I mean that literally. The raindrops just stopped all at once in midair, suspended where they were. He jumped up on a single drop with one foot and another drop with the other. He then began jumping around on different drops, one by one, up and down, yelling the whole time as if he was on an amusement park ride. He then stopped on a pair of drops, balancing his weight by holding out his arms like a tightrope walker.

He turned his head to me. “What are you waiting for? Come on!”

“I can't do that.”

“Why not?” he asked, curiously.

“I just can't.”

“Okay. No worries.” As if he was riding a bucking bronco, he held one hand onto an invisible rope and raised the other over his head as he rode the two drops until he dropped down to the ground in front of me. As he did, the clouds departed, taking the rain with them.

“Come with me,” he said, offering his hand to me as he'd done to the salamander. When I grabbed it, he snapped two fingers of his other hand, and we were then hovering about thirty feet over the center of the Colosseum. Below us, hundreds of spectators raptly watched two warriors engaged in a heated battle.

One of the gladiators threw a trident at the other, impaling the man through his abdomen and pinning him to a wall. He screamed out in pain and tried to break free of the wall as the first gladiator walked slowly toward him, drawing his sword.

“What do you see?” asked the boy.

I could barely answer as I stared in horror. “He's going to kill him! Can we stop him?” I asked in a panic.

The boy held my hand, and we flew out of the Colosseum and then over the village, setting down in a deeply wooded and serene area. There were two smooth and comfortable rocks, and we each sat on one and watched a single leaf float from right to left on a small babbling brook. Amazingly, my torment about the gladiators seemed to float away on the leaf as it passed us, leaving me immersed in the beauty of the moment.

“What do you see?” he again asked me.

I felt a tear beginning to form. “This is so beautiful. The movement of the water. The leaf. The sound of the brook. Just beautiful.”

“Ah, but this is no different from what you observed in the Colosseum,” he stated.

“Of course it's different. That was violent and horrible, and this is beautiful.”

“Nothing is as it appears to you to be,” he said. “Everything just is.”

“Is what? You must be seeing something very different from what I see,” I mused.

“The only difference between us is that I know who I am, and you do not yet remember who you are.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I am Awareness. I see everything.”

“Are you saying that I am Awareness as well?”

“Only when you remember. I'll be here when you are ready to see again.”

“Wait, what do you mean?”

6:59.