I vividly remember when my biological mother’s spirit would come visit me. She’d pick me up and carry me off to my bedroom in the evening when there was no one around to witness the strange occurrence. My step father was already sleeping while my stepmother was usually listening to the hit parade playing on the radio and reading one of her many fan magazines in the kitchen way across the house. I can still feel my little body rising and suddenly going limp as all my muscles refused to obey my brain even my tongue and throat became inert and left me voiceless.

   Of course when these episodes started I recall being in a total state of shock; my body frozen in complete panic. I had no way of knowing what was happening to me and even less why this was happening to me. But in my four year old mind after this had gone on a few times I slowly began to accept the inevitable phenomena that I of course couldn’t understand. I soon realized this wasn’t death coming to take me away to some strange land of lights and shadows. After a while I knew from experience that once I would be carefully laid down in my warm bed; my eyelids would close and thus shut my infantile consciousness. But not for very long as only a few hours would suffice to bring me to a complete and amazingly beneficial state of rest. My eyes would quickly open but could barely see past my oak wood bed post, that’s how dark it was when all the lights in the house were out!

  I would awake feeling wonderful, get up off my bed and make my way towards the bluish night light. Indeed I would always spend the remaining couple of hours of night on the deep windowsill at the far end of my bedroom. I loved sitting there four flights above the world watching the stars and her majesty the moon glowing like diamonds and silver. I had no recollection whatsoever as to what I’d just been through at that time; I remember quite clearly feeling nothing but amazement on my ledge between the sky and the ground, this was my private balcony. It felt wonderful to be alive up there just watching the light slowly appear above the horizon and then rise as the deep blue curtain of the night was lifted to reveal more and more of  the vast stage on which the intriguing play of life was about to begin. How mysterious life seemed for me already at that young age.

   Experiences such as these unpredictable early nocturnal visits from an invisible guest opened my mind to realities that aren’t easily described yet they  can’t be denied by one who has lived through them. My unexpected guest visited me many times during the next few months and I can’t say that I ever really became comfortable with this presence or with the fact that it could come in and out of my life without ever even asking for my consent