Title: This Soul’d World: The Rise of Consciousness
Author: William Disdale
Genre: Enlightenment Fiction
Book Blurb:
This Soul'd World is the trial, tribulation and spiritual awakening of materially orientated space-time scientist, Callison Trebla, who has a destiny calling from a parallel universe.
Upon retirement from his life-long employer, Quanta Laboratories, Callison 'borrows' equipment to complete an unproven time-portal and smuggles it home to go solo on the project.
At the same time, his life takes a strange turn and offers him coincidences and synchronous events that begin to ripple through his awareness. The ripples build to unstoppable waves of change, culminating in a mysterious unfolding of the secrets needed to make the time-portal work.
The day Callison opens the portal, Quanta show up and reveal a lethal intent. They claim the portal is their intellectual property to do with as they please, including suppressing it and giving the knowledge to their shadowy investors.
Callison's only route of escape becomes the newly opened inter-dimensional doorway, so he makes the leap and unwittingly falling down a rabbit hole of infinite depth. He explores behind the veil of reality and in the process learns how to get around Quanta Laboratories. More importantly, he also learns how to process his grief of life itself and the loss of his young son 30 years previous.
This Soul'd World is a story of awakening for the coming age that will pull the reader down parallel realities and explore all the space between. It's a medley of Science Fiction, Forgotten Philosophies and Spiritual Enlightenment, and readdresses the balance between the search of the world for answers, and the search of the self for questions.
Excerpt:
End of Chapter 2: Callison’s visitor
Not knowing what to do as he sat on the bench, Callison unconsciously checked his watch. The digital display updated from reading 5:39 to 5:40pm the minute he looked at it.
‘I say?’
Callison lifted his head. A man in a cream-coloured suit with a matching cream top hat had settled at the other end of the bench. The man’s hat rested on his knees and a briefcase stood beside him on the pavement floor.
‘It’s a beautiful day, I say.’ The accent suggested he wasn’t from around here.
‘Yeah. It is.’ Callison continued smoking; this day couldn’t get any stranger.
The man took his hat and placed it on the bench between them. Two cars and a lorry buzzed past.
The man leant towards him. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Are you alright?’
‘No, it’s nothing. I mean – I’m okay.’
‘Have the coincidences started yet? The dreams?’ Came the strange man’s voice, as if knowing something.
‘What?’ Callison stared at the man. He was about thirty, with distinctive emerald eyes embedded in a thin face. ‘What’s going on?’ He felt a wave of panic. ‘You’re not real, are you? I’m going mad, I’m hearing things, seeing things.’ He touched the man’s arm and recoiled. He was real.
‘I’m as real as I think real is. I’ve been practising lucid dreaming for the past twenty years, and I give talks on consciousness. So will you, one day.’
‘Lucid dreaming?’
‘In lucid dreaming you consciously wake up inside your dream, but don’t leave the dream. Then you can explore and talk to other lucid dreamers, people who are dreaming consciously too. There’s a lot of valuable information in the dream realm.’
‘What sort of information?’ Callison asked, wanting answers now. ‘What should I read into a dream about a statue, then? The statue never says anything to me, just points at my house.’
‘In your dream, is the front door usually open or closed?’
He thought. ‘It’s normally ajar, I guess.’
‘An open door is a sign that you’re exploring yourself, opening your field of awareness. A house in a dream usually represents the self.’
‘Oh, okay.’ Strangely, it made sense. ‘What about writing that moves and morphs and is impossible to read in the dream?’
The man nodded slowly, ‘Maybe there’s information waiting to come into your life. Coincidences are part of the wake-up process.’ He added, ‘They trigger the mind to open other avenues of understanding. Go with the flow, Callison; coincidences often lead down the most meaningful avenues of life.’
Callison was intently interested but couldn’t bring himself to blindly believe this crazy man.
‘Do you read?’ asked the man.
Callison was blind-sided. ‘Err, yes.’
‘I have a book for you.’
‘A book?’ Callison said with a confused expression. ‘For me?’ Surely, I must be going insane he thought, but his presumed insanity took a back seat for now.
The man’s emerald green eyes sparkled as he handed the book to Callison. ‘All about dreams. Just a pocketbook. I hope you find it useful.’
Callison didn’t know what to say as he took the small book. His day was becoming increasingly surreal. ‘Thanks.’ He flicked through some of the pages. ‘But how did you know I was experiencing coincidences?’
The man looked ready to leave and smiled as he replied. ‘Maybe it was a coincidence?’
‘What do you mean? That doesn’t make sense at all!?’ said Callison.
The mysterious man picked up his briefcase, his hat already on his head. ‘This life you see around you,’ he gestured at the street, ‘it’s just a collective dream, created by the thoughts and emotions of its inhabitants, solidified into something we’re taught is material. It’s one of many collective dreams, or dimensions of perception, but you’ve been hoodwinked into believing this is all there is.’ The man stood up. ‘I have to be off. Read the book; it might help you.’
‘Please, don’t go,’ pleaded Callison, ‘I need more answers.’
The man held his gaze for a moment. ‘Answers are the fruits of questions, my friend. You don’t need more answers; you need more questions… You’ll figure it out.’
Callison was quiet for a moment. ‘But…’ The man was already walking away. Callison looked down at the small book in his hands, pondering why this stranger had given it to him. He opened it again and was stunned to notice a hand-written inscription just inside the last page. Somehow, he’d not seen it when he flicked through the pages earlier:
One day you will realise who I am.
The portal has already changed time.
You don’t need iron; magnetised steam will work best.
Beware the black suits.
Callison stared in wonder. Now, even more than before, he had to ask another question of the man, but he was nowhere to be seen. How did he know about the portal? What had Callison’s invention already done? He returned to the message, and reread it, incredulous.
Magnetised steam?
He leapt to his feet. ‘Peter Montague!’ he exclaimed aloud in disbelief.
He had to get back home – he had work to do. He remembered: and fish and chips to get. He checked the time once more, and to his astonishment, the moment he did so, 5.39 flicked onto 5.40pm again.
Meanwhile, in a car parked fifty yards up the street from Callison’s bench location, two of the black suits warned of by the note had been watching the exchange. But to them, the man in the cream suit had been invisible and Callison looked to be talking to himself like he’d lost all grip on reality.
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Author Biography:
William Disdale was born in 1980, and grew up in Reading, UK. He’d been divided between science and art at school, enjoying both, but science won him over and he studied engineering at university, going on to gain a PhD in mathematical simulation in 2007. Upon graduation with the big wide world beaconing, he fell into motor racing instructing for 8 years (you might get an inkling of this in chapter 17).
During this period, and all initiated by a strange coincidence, he came to question the interplay between thought and imagination and their relationship to experience. It was like there were things happening ‘out there’ in the real world, so-to-speak, somehow shaped by a parallel experience of things happening on the inside; emotion, thought and imagination. After more wondering and searching, and more synchronous events, he came to conclude that there was a subtle, hidden aspect to our consciousness that was outside of time and space in nature, commonly referred to as soul/spirit/energy/light/essence/life force – choose your term. This was a life-changing paradigm-shift for a hardened scientist, and one that triggered the writing of This Soul’d World in 2010.
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