"This contact between the two aspects of existence could be achieved from the opposite direction, too: that is, humans could travel there and participate in what was going on there. Some of the means of accessing the otherworld mentioned in Old Norse literature include travelling over a rainbow, over the ocean, into darkness, into caves, into bodies of water, over mountains, into grave mounds, through waterfalls, and into deep forests and bogs. These should surely be interpreted as journeys into extreme places and situations in order to continue the journey in a vision, or possibly as journeys undertaken while already in a heightened visionary state such as those that seers, sorcerers, and shamans trained themselves to reach. In any case, these methods for reaching the otherworld show that it wasn't thought of as being located in any particular physical direction relative to the world of everyday existence: up, down, north, south. The direction was simply 'away'. The distance was great, but not unbridgeable."