The Bus Ride Home
A Woman Boards a Bus to her Ultimate Destination
By Linda Watts
It happened in the fall semester of college after I had spent my freshman summer working in a canning factory in Yakutat, Alaska.
I had enjoyed a great adventure there, expanding my horizons about life’s possibilities, encountering people of various backgrounds and religious beliefs, and developing a spiritual longing to understand Truth (as I put it then, Truth with a capital “T”).
I was experiencing a sense of dislocation and feeling let down after returning to the normal, mundane life of college. 
One evening as I was falling asleep in my room, I dreamed that I was boarding a bus, similar to the Greyhound bus that I had taken to Seattle, en route to Alaska. But I soon learned that THIS bus had a different destination. Each passenger had an assigned seat position. I knew intuitively that mine was near the rear of the bus.
There weren’t many passengers and those sitting near me all seemed very familiar, though I had met only a few of them. One was a Native American Tlingit woman named Valerie whom I had worked with in the cannery.
Since I believed the bus to be going “home”, which for me was then Buffalo, New York, I started complaining to Valerie that I would have nothing to show my parents from my summer in Alaska except for the clothes on my back. No money had been saved for college.
Valerie was kind and patient. She just listened knowingly and silently, as did the other surrounding passengers. It was as if she was waiting for me to realize something I didn’t as yet understand. Then I suddenly understood that THIS bus was going home; not to Buffalo but to Home, with a capital “H”!
I woke up.
I felt so moved by this dream that all I wanted was somehow to get back onto that bus! The experience seemed more real than any dream I had ever experienced.
Determined to go back to sleep, I sang silently to myself the opening lyrics from a favorite song that referred to dreaming, and I suddenly found myself back in the same dream. On the same bus!
This time it seemed that I had been riding the bus for at least ten years, and I was the only passenger who had not yet arrived “Home”.
I stood up and shouted out loud to “the forces that be”, “I want to go Home!”
Then suddenly, I found myself standing outside the partially opened door of a small meeting room. I peeked inside and saw five or six people seated on upholstered chairs and a couch around a wooden coffee table.
They also seemed very familiar to me, although I only knew one of them outwardly. They were involved in a deep religious or philosophical discussion. I longed to know what they were talking about. I felt drawn to share in their awareness.
A woman with long dark hair and a flowing dress saw me. She flowed over to the doorway, where I stood, still peeking in.
I asked her shyly, “Would you mind if I just listened?”
She swung the door open wide and motioned to a space on the couch that was waiting just for me. The implicit message I received from her gesture was, “It was here for you all the time; you only had to ask.”
As I sat down, the discussion leader turned and said to me, “I hope that you will not mind our nudity”, to which I responded, “No, but I can’t participate yet”. (I knew immediately on waking that by “nudity” this man had meant, metaphorically, that they would be speaking with total openness and honesty about Truth in a way I was not yet fully ready to comprehend.)
The group began talking about a very deep subject. The woman with the long flowing dress leaned over and quietly whispered a question about whether I would stay and I answered, “O-kay!” with a sense of having finally found and committed to my entire life’s destination.
I awoke and wrote down all I had experienced. In my journal, I drew a blueprint of the room I had been in. I was so inspired by the sense of reality in this dream that for the next three days I wanted nothing else than to go back to that place.
On the third day, I even skipped classes to spend time writing in my journal. I wrote twenty pages to catch up on the previous three years of my life. I was looking for an answer that would take me back somehow to those people and that room in my dream.
As I was writing, a woman came over to where I was sitting in the college cafeteria. She reminded me immediately of the woman with the long dress from my dream.
She introduced herself as Laurie and said she had seen me the semester before in a play about reincarnation. I had been in a play, I said, enacting the role of a woman who believed she was Joan of Arc in a comedy about women in a schizophrenic ward!
Laurie said perhaps schizophrenia and reincarnation might sometimes be related. Then she told me she was a member of Eckankar, a spiritual path that acknowledges reincarnation. She invited me to an introductory meeting at the Eckankar Center in Buffalo the following Tuesday. I went there, taking a city bus.
As soon as I stepped inside the Eckankar Center, I was dumbstruck, for this was the very room in my dream! Later I would meet two more of the people I had seen in my dream, both of them also Eckankar members in Buffalo. I felt that my entire life experience was summed up in that moment. I had connected with people who could help me finally learn how to go Home spiritually. I had found Eckankar.
As a finale to this story, I will always recall and treasure my father’s last words on this planet, first to me and then later, just before surrendering his physical body to cancer. He looked up, focused on an incorporeal Being of Light and Sound above him, and simply stated, “I want to go Home!”
Linda K. Watts lives near
Colorado Springs, Colorado.
She works as a university
anthropology professor.