It would appear that I had been able to travel back in time to when Shakespeare lived. Amazing! But how was it possible that William Shakespeare was a woman? Could history really have been so distorted? When I finally had a chance to ask the woman a question, I asked her to tell me her name, and it sounded as if she answered, "Joan William Shakespeare."

That helped explain it. Her first name was a woman's name and her middle name was "William." Somehow in the course of history her first name must have been lost, and since only the masculine name had remained, people had assumed Shakespeare had been a man.

I was going to have to leave very soon. I would like to tell the woman about how famous she would someday be, but I was uncertain that would be proper.

I next walked into what appeared to be a large, crowded auditorium. I could not calculate with certainity how many people were there – a lot. I spotted an empty seat in what looked like a booth which might be in a restaurant and I sat on the side of the booth directed toward the front podium. In the seat on the other side of my table was sitting Warnie (a fellow about a year older than I whom I met around 1970 during my last year of high school). Since his seat was turned away from the podium, he had to turn around to see what was going on up front.

As I looked at Warnie, an old memory returned which I wanted to tell Warnie. Although he was absorbed in what was starting to take place on the podium, I snagged his attention and I told him that I had once seen him perhaps 15 years ago in a frenzied state in a store buying a pornographic magazine. The incident seemed important to me, because I thought that Warnie used to masturbate compulsively, but that he had been able to give up the habit. That meant something to me, because I would also like to give up masturbation.

Warnie was not interested at the moment in talking with me, and he turned his attention back to the stage. I in turn, turned my attention to a paperback book lying on the table in front of me. It was turned sideways and across its cover I had printed a long line of words which focused on the woman with whom I had earlier been talking in the back room. The written words seemed to be the first lines in a story which I was thinking of writing. As I carefully read the words, I realized that most of them seemed written in poetic meter. The words seemed to flow quite well, except for the name of the woman, which did not seem to fit well into the metric scheme.

I reread the line several times, to see if I could improve it. I knew almost nothing about poetic meter, and I was unsure what to do, but I did find it very interesting. I concluded I could not change the woman's name - even if the name did not fit well, the name would have to remain as it was.

While I had been absorbed with my writing, activity had begun on the stage of the auditorium: a woman had walked onto the stage. Although I did not realize it at the time, she looked like a woman I knew named Joan Ieulie. She was standing extremely impressively tall and erect behind the podium. In fact, she seemed to have a certain luminescence about her, almost supernatural.

Suddenly I became lucid – I realized I was dreaming. I felt like proceeding and awakening; I questioned the validity of my lucidity. As usual when I was lucid, it seemed as if I were actually awake, but I decided I would continue with the dream anyway.

It immediately occurred to me that I had previously decided that when I next became lucid in a dream, I would try to find Angel, the imaginary character with whom I was establishing contact in my waking life. I was pleased with that thought and I looked more closely at the woman on stage, thinking she might actually be Angel. I did not think, however, that Angel would have taken the form of a woman; instead, I thought perhaps the woman was Angelina, the other imaginary character whom I had been creating in my waking life.

Suddenly my concentration and lucidity were broken as the woman began to speak. I was startled to realize that of all the people in the auditorium, I had been signaled out by her; she was speaking directly to me. I looked directly at her and concentrated with all my might on her words. Her sentence was long and she used big words, so understanding her was difficult. She seemed to be using words in quite a sophisticated way and she did not seem affected. I seemed a little dull in grasping what she had said.

It sounded to me as if she were saying that I had been very self-absorbed so far while I had been seated here and that I had paid little attention to what was happening on the stage. I had to admit to myself that I had been absorbed in what I had been writing and that I had not given much attention to what the woman had been doing up there. Finally I answered, "If I understood what you were saying, I think you were correct."

When the woman continued talking, I began thinking of the many people suffering in this world and about my responsibility to help them. My thoughts seemed to parallel what the woman was saying. It was almost as if I could see scores of needy people going to their graves and I realized I was unable to help them. At the same time, I seemed to be realizing I did not need to place emphasis on helping them. My main emphasis needed to be on saving myself. The real struggle was to save myself; helping others was simply a means to that end. I rather imagined my own soul being somehow entombed and my being able to somehow dig it out.

The woman was still talking; it was ever clearer that she was a spiritual guide. She said something like, "The first thing I do is relieve people from the adverse consequences of selfish behavior so they can become fully self-absorbed."

It also seemed that I was becoming slightly lucid again and that I was creating some of her words for her. I was unsure I had phrased them just right.