Space was not like anything I had expected. All my life I had dreamed of the darkness, the silence, the weightlessness. The murky creatures floating through the void, feeding quietly on stardust. Or on me.

Reality was far stranger, and I was not at all prepared. In fact, the only training I had been given back on Earth was an hour’s worth of swimming in a pool with all our gear on, to test the sensation of zero-gravity and know how to check our oxygen and get back to the spaceship etc.

The spaceship was more like a space boat, to my dismay, but the captain had experience with these sorts of expeditions, and we exited the Earth’s atmosphere without much trouble, though the roar of the ascent was deafening, like massive waves crashing on a shore.

Once in space, however, it was just one great plain of silence stretching out before us, the myriad stars twinkling as light on water, the depths unknown. Into those depths we would plunge. 

Though equipped only with my suit and very little training, I felt safe under the guidance of Themba, who had done many spacewalks and exuded an air of calm competence. Once our suits were pressurised, we lifted off, into space.

The light faded but it was not half as dark as I had expected, and I could see everything perfectly clearly. The weightlessness was strange, though very much like swimming. The only sound was my breathing, eerily loud in the silence.

And then, there, below me, alarmingly close, the surface of the planet. It was a breathing thing. Everything moved – trees like giant funnels, midnight blue and studded with hundreds of tiny white stars; hills of undulating leaves like hair or like hands; branches fanning out in arteries of carnelian. Gently, gently, I reached out and touched these strange things. Some were rough and hard, and others soft and spongy but all animal, all living. I spent an eternity or five minutes – for what is time out here? – observing a small colony of creatures clinging to a rock, themselves tucked away like barnacles in their fleshy shells, reaching out tentacles in colours unimaginable, resembling alien flowers or clusters of gemstones or – words failed me. At the shadow of my hand, they recoiled, then slowly unfurled again into marvellous mandalas.

A slug crept slowly by, two shades of brilliant turquoise swirling on his back. 

An eel slept open-mouthed and ominous in her cave.

A flying beast, a ray with glistening hide, sailed by.

Themba spoke in interstellar sign language to Potato Bass, a great big ugly thing wallowing in pale lunar dust, himself pale and sandy, his thick lips stretched all the way around his face and stumpy fins protruding from his belly. However, when he lifted off in a huff, evidently insulted by his old friend Themba, there was an elegance to his uncomely form, in the way he moved through space, and when he settled further on, in the folds of some black coral, his pale skin changed, darkened, and he disappeared.

We drifted, weightless and in wonder, through these otherworldly landscapes. My body rose and sank with each breath, borne on some astral tide past melting forests and unfurling stone.

Ahead loomed an arch of stone, or an arm, or a hive of polyps, I knew not which. We swam slowly under it, turning on our backs and looking up, our breaths bubbling up and adorning the arch in pearls.

Alas, too soon, our oxygen ran out. Up, up we drifted, leaving behind the dreamworld, up into the light, where the boat lay waiting for us, humming above the waves.