Page Content (OCR)
AFTER GRADUATING from high school, the extent ofhis education, he moved to Kansas City for a time and thenjoined the Navy mostly for the experience of being on his own. He enjoyed these different experiences and the vague feelings were pushed to the background and did not bother him during that time period. The pulls of home were very strong and he always returned to the house he had grown up in. He always had a feeling of isolation when he was away for wen Teen very long. The climax ofhis life came when he was 22 years old and he had moved to California to live with his sister. About that time he began to experience strange dreams and out-of-the body trips. He had read of such things but had never discussed them with anyone. He believes now that things might have been different if he had had someone during those days to share these things with. Someone to tell him that these experiences were not unusual but were shared by wa many others. One of his first out-of-body trips occurred spontaneously one afternoon while he was trying to take a nap. With a strange tug he came out of his body and found himself floating upward out of the bed. He then drifted up through the ceiling and through the apart- ment above. He explained that the experience had a strange texture, a grainy feeling-like being in water with sand stirred up. Then inexplicably he found himself in the presence of a woman who was reciting something. He said, "It was like a litany or a history. It was the history of my soul, my existence or existences. And of it all, the only thing I really remembered was that she said, 'You were some- thing greater in another universe." It was not frightening, but instead was a very pleasant experience. He had several after that, mostly journeying back to look in on someone at home, his brother or friends. His dreams became more real, more vivid. They were becoming more powerful. "It seemed like here I couldn't communicate with people the way I could over there. The words were so inadequate in expressing things because I wasn't a very expressive person to begin with. And when I was back in this plane | always felt so restricted and cut off from people. I mean, over there, it's total. A thought is received and felt totally. You know all of the nuances and everything that go with that thought. And here, words express such a small portion of the whole thought. One dream that I had was like seeing this. We look at dreams in our awakened state here, but in that dream I was aware of seeing this 82 The Keepers ofthe Garden