How did I get here?

You set off from home and find yourself on a high mountain top, or another country, with no idea how you got here.
    You go to the rest room and come out in a completely different place: a forest, a space ship, a theme park.   
    You close your eyes and wake up somewhere else. Maybe this happens again and again.    
    You're in one place and then suddenly in another, without any recollection of how you got from A to B.    
    These are common experiences in dreams. If we are too quick, on waking, to flatten our adventures into a single linear narrative, without pausing to reflect on the unexplained transits, we can miss a very important opportunity to learn more about what goes on in dreaming - and about the nature of reality itself.    
    When you jump from one scene to another, you may have stepped from one dream into another, as you might step from an outer to an inner courtyard.    
    Make it your game to ask "How did I get here?" when a sudden scene shift takes place. Ask people around you, if they can see and hear you.
   These maneuvers may cause you to wake up to the fact that you are dreaming. Stay with your experience, and you may find yourself embarked on a full-fledged lucid dream adventure.   
    Look deeper, and you may find you are traveling between different realities, no less real than the one where your body is lying dormant in bed. You have not only switched dreams; you have changed worlds.

Art: Leonora Carrington, "The Inn of the Dawn Horse"