Page Content (OCR)
aroused his curiosity and he wanted to have asession to see if there was anything to it. We arranged to meet and Phil immediately began to tell me what he could remember about the dreams that had occurred in 1977 while he was living in Lawrence, Kansas. He was about 21 years old at the time and it was before he had moved out to San Francisco to live with his sister, and where he had the eventful suicide attempt Maybe we would finally be able to tie all these strange occurrences together, ifthere was any continuity. He remembered two separate incidents and he wasn'teven sure if they occurred on the same night, but he knew they happened while he was living in Kansas. He had been driving back to Lawrence from Ottawa after seeing a movie. Ithad been a light evening. The movie had been a comedy, nothing scary; certainly nothing that would have triggered the inci- dent that followed. The highwaywas a small two-lane blacktop, little travelled at that time of night. When the huge bird came out of the darkness it startled Phil so much that he ducked inside the car. He surmised that itwas a large owl skimming the road looking for rats or dead animals. It was flying very low and right down the center of the road. It came into the headlights suddenly and he thought he was going to hit it head-on. He thought this was a very unusual occur- rence, and it scared him because it was so sudden. This was the memory stirred by the mention of the owl in Communion. Phil then went home and went to sleep. He thought the next incident occurred on the same night, but the memory had become so dis- bated thas bw eee ee He remembered it was about four o'clock in the morning when he suddenly woke up, covered with sweat and seized with absolute raw terror. He said he had never been so afraid in his life. He had had a dream and itwas still fresh and real in his mind. He tried to tell it to me, and I could see that it still affected him even 10 years later. "First ofall, in the dream, I, or my soul, was like a ball of mercury ora blob ofwater ... a blob of something. And it was like this giant thumb came down from ... somewhere, and pushed on this ball or blob that was me. I never saw any thumb, but it was a very real feel- ing of pressure, of my soul or spirit or whatever it was being pushed out of my physical body. It was like I was a ball of awareness or con- sciousness, and Igave under the pressure ofthe thumb. It descended slowly, pushed down, and then went back up." He knew there was a lot more activity going on in the dream, but 210 The Keepers of the Garden torted that he wasn't sure.