Hello, my name is Gary R, Ph.D. and what’s written below is what I consider my ‘repeating dream’ that started very early in my life, approximately September 1946. I finally decided to write it down, since I’ve noticed that I’m not getting any younger, and it might be helpful to someone.
There are several points that might help in reading what I call ‘The Event’. The primary experience was, and still is, very lucid. The point of observation starts from outside of ‘me’. Then it joins and becomes ‘me’ as the scenario evolves. The event consisted of sound, bodily sensation, direction of some kind of motion, strong emotion, time dilation/constriction, and contact with something ‘outside’ my point of view. There was never any sense of discomfort or fear. I was interested in the developing awareness.
The sense of ‘other’ was what I call my ‘friends’; they were not visible as humans but showed as visible entities ahead of my point of reference. The experience moved from the immersion into darkness, then into the tunnel sensation. After the contact up and out, I moved to a point that I associate with being above the earth. Then I came back to my body when my Mom pulled me out of the pool.
The time seems to have been about 10 seconds of ‘real time’ on earth. This was corroborated by my Mom when I was about 19 years of age. There was no physical trauma or inhalation of water, probably due to the mammalian diving response. After the fact, I have sensed the world and my sense of ‘self’ as relating to that experience.
The Event
‘I’ am an observer but don’t appear to myself as a person in a body. This is more of an observing point. I see a small child sitting and playing in the water on a pool step watching a normal summer ‘pool scene.’ Children were jumping into the water and several boys were standing in line to go off the diving board. I know the child in the water is ‘me’, but I don’t have any sense of what’s going on or why he’s here. I just know that it seems safe and somehow exciting. I hear the boys at the board start laughing and one of them starts down the board and bounces into the air. At the last minute, he grabbed his knees to cannonball into the water. The sound is of a big splash and the boys are shouting.
I can see a wave expand from where the diver hit the water and watch as the small wave moves out toward where ‘I’ am sitting on the pool step. When the small wave gets to ‘me,’ I can feel a sense of unsureness from ‘me’ as he is gently lifted by the wavelet and rolls to the left. He looses his secure seat and submerges under the water. Somehow the observing point becomes what ‘I’ must have been seeing as I slip below the surface.
I can see some of the children’s bodies without heads. I sense my world turning as my body rotates. I’m looking at whiteness. There is no sound and I feel interested in my situation, but other than that, there is nothing negative. Then the whiteness morphs into a pearlescence that then becomes darker and darker until I’m just a point in the dark. I don’t feel any weight, temperature, pressure or direction. Although, somehow I know I’ve moved and taken a turn to my right. This stays a solid referent for a moment. Then I feel myself moving forward and a bit up. For a period I’m just hanging in the dark with no sense of time, motion, temperature or any emotion. Then I begin to sense that I am moving forward somehow; my point of view starts to morph and I begin sensing a lessening of a bit of the dark before me.
This continues and I feel compelled to move toward the lightening. Then I stop. The light becomes more intense as a circle becomes more and more defined somewhere ahead of my point of view. The light becomes almost dazzling and I start to move toward it. Then something slows ‘me’ down and I stop. Ahead, I’m aware of a body-shaped darkness in the circle of light; then two other dark shapes appear on either side of the front figure. There are no discernable features, arms, legs or anything; just a figure with two other figures behind. Then I begin to feel a presence before me and I know it is coming from the figures. I am feeling a great goodness from the figures and I really want to go to them and be with them. After a few moments, I’m aware that I’m trying to get to my ‘friends’ but can’t make any progress toward them.
Deep inside of me, I feel what might be a despair that I can’t get there and I start to force myself ahead, whatever that might mean. Then I feel the presence in front who was connecting with me. The connection felt like hands of Love; soothing me and whispering wonderfulnesses that calm me and let me relax in his Love-hands. I had the sense that, somehow he/it knew that I wanted to go with them. Then I heard him gently making things better as he was saying that I was doing fine and he knew what I wanted, but that it just wasn’t quite time. He/it said that I was certainly welcome to come back when time comes. That seemed to make all the difference to me. With that, the light begins to dim into the darkness. All the while I felt a great Loving from my friends and a sense of ‘Until Then…’, until the darkness becomes total.
Somehow there was a motion of opening as I moved somewhere else in the dark; then the dark began to morph into pearlescence again and I found myself looking through wispy clouds. The clouds seem to part to allow me to see a tableau below me. It didn’t make any sense but what I saw was a mixture of greens, some tans and browns, some black lines, some white; a veritable palette of colors and shapes below. Then I seemed to be floating above a green field with round dots clustered together directly beneath my field of vision. The round circles were made up of white and green or white and blue or white and red triangles. Above the circles was a larger blueness with white around it. I noted the scene for just a second as I felt myself drawn down and into the blueness. Then I felt myself pulled up and my dream stops.