The Night I Traveled To Africa Without Leaving My Bedroom

Donna Frasca
12 min readJun 7, 2022

Here’s where my dreams took an interesting twist. This night, rattled me to my core. How do I begin telling you about the scariest night of my life? Well, like any other story, I guess, I’ll start from the beginning.

I was about 20-something years old and couldn’t wait to go to sleep that night. I was exhausted from the day’s work and just wanted to get horizontal so my achy body and tired mind could rest. The twin bed was just perfect for me. Since I wasn’t one to toss and turn a lot while sleeping, space to the left and right was unnecessary.

The bed felt so good, so comfortable. With joined hands across my chest and fingers intertwined, an onlooker would think they were viewing someone in their final resting position. As my body sank into the middle of the bed, my spine began to decompress from the day’s stress. My head submerged into a soft, rectangle of feathers, and in just a breath or two I’d be fully in the world of dreams.

As my breaths slowed, my eyes got heavier. Exhales and inhales now evenly spaced and relaxed. As time passed, every breath took the three of us — me, myself, and I — to a magical place. In what felt like just seconds, I found myself ultimately still, in a very comfortable position on my back. My hands were folded, my ankles crossed, my body turned to butter as I felt myself drifting into a deep state of relaxation, deeper and deeper as each moment passed.

Then something weird happened. Even though I knew my body was still, it felt like my upper body was flailing like a twirly girl at a Grateful Dead concert. I had to open my eyes to be sure, and there my hands were, still on my chest with my fingers clasped together.

That was a weird feeling. Why did it feel like my arms and hands were moving when, in fact, they didn’t budge? Oh well, just my imagination, I guess. I was too tired to care. With my eyes still closed, I fell into a deep sleep.

My view transformed into what looked like a black tunnel as I stared at the back of my eyelids. Standing in some space, this black tunnel was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I couldn’t help but look in.

Just an FYI here, I’m a lucid dreamer; have been all my life. What does that mean? It means that I’m aware that I’m in a dream state most of the time, so I have total control over how a dream plays out even though I am sound asleep. Dream events and time sequences could easily change with just a thought, like flipping through a book to get to the ending. It was really cool to have this ability. But on this night, things weren’t so cool.

Gazing at the black tunnel that appeared before my eyes, I thought walking into it would be a good idea, after all, dreams are perfectly safe right? What could possibly go wrong? Step by step, one foot in front of the other, I walked down to the end of the tunnel. Where did I go? Never thinking of looking back or trying to leave at this point, I felt safe and was excited to start another dream. It’s a lucid dream, and I can go wherever I want, right? As I’m traveling through this tunnel, there is a light of some sort, an orange-yellow glow like you’d see at a night-time campfire. Hues of yellow, and all shades of orange you can think of, like looking at the most beautiful sunset all compiled into one speck — that is what sits just at the end of the tunnel.

As my focus locked onto the fiery light, I found myself standing on some landscape that was foreign to my feet. It felt dry, hot, and hard like concrete. There were short, dry patches of stiff grasses that tickled my ankles, and I walked in a circle looking at my surroundings. What just happened? One minute I’m in a tunnel, and the next minute, I am somewhere else, but where?

What looked like a night-time scene, the realization now set it that my bedroom was long gone. It was dark, and the night sky twinkled with stars as I looked up to find my bearings. There were a few scrubby bushes that looked somewhat like tumbleweeds and very few trees, which looked weird, like nothing that I’d seen in real life. The only thing that came to mind were scenes from The Lion King when Simba was exploring his land for the first time.

Where am I?

I had only minimal lighting coming from the stars and the slight illumination of the moon. I was standing in the middle of what looked like Africa’s landscape; panic set in. This is NOT what I want to experience, so I’m putting a stop to it right now! I visualize myself in the mountains, by a lake with a fishing pole in my hand and a full picnic basket at arms reach — GO!

I wanted out but was not able to stop this dream. Why can’t I stop this dream? Where am I? What is going on? Looking around for a place to hide while I got my thoughts together, I heard screaming in the distance, a woman’s voice. The night horizon had that same glow I noticed before in the tunnel. Not knowing where to go, walking toward the firelight seemed the natural thing to do.

To note, this dream felt very different from my usual dreams that held only typical split-second random images upon waking. This was also very different from the lucid dreams where I had total control. This dream felt beyond real!

You know how sometimes you dream and say to yourself the next morning, Wow, that felt so real? When I tell you that this “dream” felt real, it was EXACTLY how we’d feel going about my everyday life. It was THAT scary real.

In the dream, the panic was now pumping through my veins. I was wondering what to do next. Still looking for somewhere to hide, I noticed some small shrubs that were only about three feet high but big enough for me to hide behind. There weren’t many bushes, but enough so I could run about fifteen feet to the next one and hide again. Darting from bush to bush, the sound of the woman screaming was more pronounced, and images of movement were in my sites. The fire was getting more prominent as well, then what appeared to be people came into view. While barely being hidden behind one bush, I was close enough to see that the movement was indeed several people, about twenty, dancing around a fire. They were men. They wore tribal attire with beads, feathers, and loincloths. The contrast from the blackness of their skin made the colors of their tribal attire very pronounced.

As if I was focusing a telephoto lens on a camera, the scene zeroed in on their ankles. Their bodies had layers of bracelets with feathers and beads on them that were significant to who they were. The close-up of their ankle bracelets somehow felt like an essential way to identify this tribe if only I knew what that significance was. The dancing continued around the fire, jumping, moving, and chanting, while the mystery lady was still screaming.

Then I saw it; probably the most frightening image I’ve seen in a dream to date. I got close enough to the fire and close enough to the tribe that I could see two of the men holding the woman very close to the fire. She was screaming bloody murder, you know, like how you’d scream if you knew you were going to die. Then I realized what was going on. I was about to witness a human sacrifice!

This woman, who I heard screaming for her life, was about to die, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it. Should I run out and try to save her? No, because I realized that I was not in a lucid dream and did not have control over what was happening. If it were a lucid dream, I’d run out like Superman, bonk every Native on the head, grab the chick and start flying away until we got to Hawaii. This wasn’t the case.

The woman was held up by two tribesmen, high up in the air at arm’s length. Drumming and chanting heightened as they threw her on top of the fire, and the screaming stopped. The flames of the fire consumed the woman. The ceremony was over.

Now I know you are thinking this is a bunch of bullshit and that I probably ate pizza before going to bed and was just having a horrible dream experience. I will tell you this; I just knew, to the core of my knowing (claircognizance — clear knowing) that this was not a “normal” dream — not even for me. I genuinely believe that my physical body was transported from my cozy little bed in Long Island, NY, to some angry plains in Africa at this point in the dream. As that notion popped in my head, I realized that if I tried to save her, my captivity would be a sure thing. They’d have a twofer that night, and I wasn’t up for that.

I looked around for somewhere to hide, somewhere else to go, and at that point, I spotted a hut of some sort. It consisted of mud and was only about five feet wide by ten feet long, and five feet high. I scurried like a mouse running from five cats and entered the small hut. It was big enough to hold two tables or what appeared to be beds of some sort. Hiding in the corner by one of the beds, I was scared for my life.

What is going on? I asked myself. I never had a dream like this before, and I am 110% sure I’m in Africa and just witnessed a human sacrifice.

I closed my eyes, and I guess I started praying. I don’t understand what happened next, but I do remember feeling a large, manly hand on my right shoulder. I looked up and saw a tribal man all dressed in his garb with beads and feathers on his headdress. Judging by his headdress, I had a feeling he was a leader of some sort or was high up on the food chain of command. I thought for sure I was going to die. I looked up at him from my mousy crouched position and stared into his eyes. He spoke to me!

He said, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

“I know that!” I said as I trembled.

“You must leave right away.”

“I am trying to but I don’t know how to get back, I don’t know where I am, and I don’t know what to do!”

He reached out to me and took my left hand. He didn’t grab it roughly. It was an odd feeling of gentleness that didn’t fit in this scenario. Still, I thought it was all over. He then proceeded to separate my ring and middle fingers. Was he going to break my hand or cut it off for some trophy?

The next thing I saw was a reasonably large needle, like the kind used for a tetanus shot, pointed right between the space of my ring and middle finger on my left hand.

Before I could blink, he injected whatever he had in that needle right into the webbing of my hand. I looked up at him and started feeling woozy. Everything started spinning and getting fuzzy looking. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say I was drugged.

The next thing I knew I was in my bed at home, unable to move. It was a similar feeling to sleep paralysis, and I was sweating bullets, while my heart was doing double-time. I couldn’t move my head but was able to look around my room with my eyes. I saw my clock as time clicked the minutes away. I saw my cat sleeping by my side. Then I saw him. His face appeared in my room. I looked up at him, totally terrorized that he’d followed me back to my room!

With just his face showing through what appeared to be a foggy window, he said to me, “You weren’t supposed to be here tonight. Don’t ever come back.”

“I won’t! I won’t! I promise I won’t!”

As quickly as his image had entered the sacred space of my bedroom, his face began to fade. I slowly started getting control of my body back. My feet were able to move, and my head was able to turn, I could move my fingers, and suddenly, I sat up gasping for breath. I was still sweating and breathing like I just ran 10 kilometers. The first thing I looked at was my left hand. Was there a mark? A prick of any kind? A trace of blood or bruising from where he gave me the shot? No, not one bit of evidence on my hand.

What the hell just happened? Where did I go? What did I see?

This was the first time I wrote down my story and remembered it in such vivid detail. I’ve had many wild dreams in my life, but this one left the biggest impression on me, one I’ll never forget. The unfortunate thing about this experience is that most people won’t believe that this happened. To this date, I’ve never heard of anyone else even coming close to having an experience like this.

How was I going to tell this to my family and friends without them locking me up? This dream, and I now know it was a time travel experience, rattled me to my core for years, thirty years to be exact. That’s a long time to be afraid.

Are you beginning to understand how I feel? Many experiences I’ve had so far in life were pretty profound for a young woman, and I knew I had to be careful of who I spoke to about all this, so for a very long time, I said nothing and bore my fear by myself, until now.

I will tell you this, the life of a medium, as you may have heard, is a lonely one. The experiences I’ve had and the stories I tell just freak most people out. People are afraid of what they don’t understand, and people are starting to be fearful of me.

I realized the meaning behind this dream. This was a significant discovery and taught me that just because our dreams are terrifying, doesn’t mean that they are bad.

My dream of that night in Africa was all about life and the passing of our spirit as we die. Did you ever go on a high-speed roller coaster or in a haunted house and were so scared that you said, “Oh, please get me out of here? Just make me safe and get me home! I don’t want to die!” You know, that little prayer or statement you say to your Source, your god, right before you think you’re going to die? In my African time-travel dream, the woman was praying to her god because she knew she was about to die. I believe I was that Source — my spirit connected with her spirit as she left her body. My soul heard her soul and I’m not even sure in what timeline. Is this happening present-day or centuries ago? Here, through this experience, time had no placeholder. What was some 8,000+ miles away as the crow flies, took just seconds to get there, it’s the timeframe that I’m not sure of.

I was there because she called my soul in. I couldn’t stop her from dying, but I could be there for when she passed. I was the spiritual Guide to help her soul transition from this realm to another. THAT is why I was in that place at that time. How did this process of transition unfold? I don’t know the answer to that now but the day my soul transitions, I’m sure that question will be answered.

This experience was most definitely a time-travel encounter and one that only a powerful mind, body, and spirit could endure without losing control of reality.

As I write this, my throat feels like it’s going to pop. My heart and soul pound, yet with incredible love and total Divine glory, because of this dream.

I spent 30+ years so afraid of the most awful dream I’ve had in my life only to find out that it was the best dream I’ve had in my life. This experience was a HUGE test for me. It took me over 30 years to understand and process, but it was way more than that. Spirit handed this experience to me on a silver platter to see how I’d handle it. Did I freak out? This experience could have caused me to throw in the towel and say, I’m done with this spooky shit, I just want a normal life and to be handed a new life as a soccer mom, that didn’t happen — not even close.

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I hope you enjoyed this wild experience of time travel! It is in Chapter Two: Dreams and Visions, in my book, From Color To The Cosmos: Inside The Mind of a Medium. You can purchase my book on Amazon.

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Donna Frasca

Author, A Psychic Medium, and Color Expert, who enjoys life, #FromColorToTheCosmos