THE DIMENSION MAN

I've been able to transition into another dimension for a long time now. Hard as it is to believe, until recent events, the only other person who knew about it was my wife Joanne, now sadly departed. She made me swear never to use the ability for personal gain or for any kind of vigilante action, so the only way that I really got the most out of it was the freedom to walk around our National Parks in South Africa and really get insanely close up to animals completely undetected. I confess that on a few occasions I did use it to get free flights to the UK and the USA to visit my brother and my son.
When I switch into Dimension two as I call it, I am still in the same place and I can touch and feel inanimate objects like doors and walls, I just can't move anything. Even a lightweight object becomes too heavy and I can't, for that reason, open or close doors.
Living creatures fall into two categories, I can't touch animals, including humans, my hand just passes right through them. Plants are different, they way that they react is the same as it is in Dimension One, so, for example, I can walk through long grass with no problem.
I discovered the ability when I was a sixteen year old youth, still living at home with my parents. I was, and still am, a light sleeper. So the sound of breaking glass woke me and I sat up immediately, instantly thinking 'break in'. I pulled on a pair of trainers and quietly opened my bedroom door.
At first there wasn't a sound and I began to wonder if I'd imagined what I'd heard. Then the shape of a man appeared in the gloom at the end of the passage. He was heading in my direction and my mind was instantly in a turmoil. Then I heard my mother cry out and my father yell, followed by a gruff voice shouting at them.
Furious indignation wiped any fear from my mind and I resolved to fight back, so I stood with my back against the wall behind the door and waited for my chance to launch a surprise attack. The intruder was careful and stopped in the doorway before pushing the partially open door hard to slam it back against the wall. Instead, it hit me making it obvious to him that someone was there. He literally leapt into the room, pulled the door so that it closed with a bang and stood well clear of me with a gun aimed at me. There was nothing I could do except raise my hands above my head.
To my surprise, he lowered the weapon immediately, ignored me and scanned the room. He even went down on all fours and looked under the bed. Then he turned on his heel and left the room. I followed.
He entered my brother's room and soon realized that there was no one there. I moved until I was in position and hit him with a straight palm strike to the side of his head, a technique that I'd learned on the way to getting a black belt in karate. My hand passed right through him and he didn't notice.
Having had no success, I left him and hurried down the passage to my parent's room. Their assailant had put my father out of action with what looked like a pistol whipping to the head and he sat up in bed, blood dripping onto the sheets, watching my mother pull stuff out of their cupboards so that the intruder could see that nothing in the way of valuables was being concealed.
I think that it was the sense of helplessness and burning anger that suddenly took me back into the real dimension and I sensed it as it happened. I acted immediately, kicked the man's feet from under him and as he hit the floor, I was on top of him and hit him hard with an elbow strike to the face followed up with a finger strike to his eyes. He was out of action, so I took possession of his handgun.
At that instant the second man appeared in the doorway and taken aback by the tableaux before him, didn't act fast enough to prevent me from relieving him of his god forsaken life using his friend's gun.