those that had lingered in my thoughts because of their extreme clarity and almost rational content. In them, I’d visited places I’d only heard or read about, art galleries (paintings and sculptures had fascinated me from an early age), playgrounds, and homes of schoolfriends. I’d spied on my mother as she sewed the lapels of handmade suits while pausing every so often to watch her precious soaps and game shows on the small television we owned and which lit up an otherwise dreary corner of the room. There was no sense of adventure with these dream excursions, nothing exciting about them at all really, and this was what eventually made me realize they were something other than natural dreams.
That’s when I started reading up on the phenomenon and discovered it was more common that I had first thought. I learned that certain curious and dedicated people had achieved by research and perseverance what came naturally to me. Even so, nothing I read compared exactly to my own experiences. Others, apparently, had not attained such clearness of vision or logical continuity; their OBEs were more dreamlike and lacked control, and generally were broken up by blank periods of unconsciousness so that their flow was interrupted, to be remembered later only in vague episodes. However, I did pick up some useful techniques for putting myself into a receptive state, not quite a trance-like mode, but a kind of open responsiveness that encouraged the phenomenon to occur. Things like alert relaxation, where the body is in repose, but the mind is acutely aware if itself rather than the physical body; or the method of loosening the body completely, resting it limb by limb, piece by piece from head to toe; or the perception of outside from within, as if my eyes were merely portals through which I could observe the outer world; or shrinking inside myself, so that my skin and flesh were like an ill-fitting suit, loose enough to escape from. Then there was the mirror image method, whereby a person thinks of themselves floating about their own body, just a foot or two away; the image is clear, and exact replica of himself or herself wearing the same clothes, sporting the same five-o’clock shadow or make-up; the person then imagines he or she is now looking down at their own body from above, that now it’s the physical self that is being viewed. It’s supposed to make the transition easier, but it never worked for me.
In fact, all I had to do was make myself as relaxed as possible, relieve my mind of extraneous thoughts, and will myself to leave my body, sometimes looking at some particular spot on the ceiling or far corner of the room so that my “spirit” had a destination. Then I’d wait for it to happen.
Which it didn’t, more often than not. But sometimes I was successful and the more I was, the more I started to control my “flight”. Initially, I never left the room I occupied, but gradually I began to venture further to other rooms in the flat, cautiously graduating to outside locations, so that ultimately I was able to fly above rooftops, explore places I’d never physically visited—Buckingham Palace was dull, while the homes of some complete strangers could be interesting, even scary. It seemed I was limited only by my own boldness (I have to admit that in those early days I was somewhat timid; the fear of being unable to find my way back to my body was too strong. I was also afraid that the further afield I travelled, the easier it would be to break the psychic link to my physical self).
I slowly learned though that I only had to think of myself back inside my flesh and blood from for it to be so. It would happen in a rush, a dizzying race through space that took no longer than a second or so, and always I’d arrived back safely, with no hitches whatsoever.
I can’t say that I explored this thrilling new state to the full. For one, it didn’t work every time, and for two, after the original excitement, I began to lose interest. I don’t know why, it was just the way it was. Maybe deep down I was really afraid of the capability, some part of my subconscious feeling it was an unnatural state to be in, and that sooner or later something would go wrong, and I’d be punished.
In a way, I was right.
6
Did I ever tell anyone of these OBEs? And if I didn’t, then why not?
Simple answer is, no, I didn’t tell a soul. The reason why is not quite that simple, but you’ve a right to know.
I’ve always been a private person, never one for sharing all my deep-seated angst or emotions. Something I learned from Mother, I guess.
She brought me up to hide my feelings, to put on a face in front of others, particularly strangers. It was all to do with her pride and her shame at being deserted by her husband. Our reduced circumstances embarrassed her and when we moved into our little flat on the rougher side of London, she cut off all contact with friends and acquaintances. You know, I never knew if I had any other living relatives when I was growing up and eventually it didn’t matter to me anyway; Mother and me, we kept to ourselves. I was content enough. I spent most of my time drawing, sometimes painting (when I had the paints, which were usually Christmas or birthday gifts), writing little stories, and reading—God, I’d read anything that came my way, from comics to books to the back of cornflake packets. I loved movies too, and Mother and I went at least twice a week, sometimes twice in one day. For me it was all escapism, I suppose, all these things taking me out of both my environment and my circumstances; it must have been the same for Mother as far as the movies and TV soaps were concerned.
I think that in her mind she lived in some kind of dream world, a place the ugly realities of life could not touch. She was fooling herself, of course, life itself isn’t that easy to shut out.
Now you might imagine that all this would have turned me into a mother’s boy, but nothing could have been further from the truth. I was always independent as a kid, self-contained you might say; I loved my mother, but I could never understand her, couldn’t be the doting son she so much wanted. Just as she disappeared into her film world where everything had a tendency to turn out okay in the end (there were romantic magazines and novels also to keep her dreams occupied), so I retreated into my own small planet, which was a whole deal more exciting that the real one. Although I could never bring them home because of Mother’s strict rule that outsiders were never welcome, never allowed to be “insiders”, I had many good friends at school and later at art college, and as soon as I realized I was capable of taking care of myself I was rarely at home, despite Mother’s accusatory pleas to stay with her. I was no rebel, but I was aware that there was something more, and something better, going on out there and I wanted some of it for myself. Guilt always dogged me though—I did truly love my mother—but I soon learned to accommodate it. Besides, I’d discovered football, which I became pretty good at, and not too long after that, I discovered girls.
But still, the growing-up years are always influenced by your parents and home background, so Mother’s insistence on privacy where all things personal were concerned stuck with me. By the time I was twelve, I couldn’t even tell her things; I’d learned from her to keep my thoughts and emotions to myself and I think, ultimately, she was kind of pleased about that herself—other people’s emotions (yes, even her son’s) could be a “rotten nuisance”. She was complex: she wanted me to love her and be her “best friend in all the wide world”, but she’d been too badly hurt by my father’s desertion to trust any other man, perhaps even any other person; she didn’t really want to hear my troubles or concerns, because that always brought her back to the real world, and the real world had let her down badly. I can admit it now, and I half-knew it then: Mother was a little screwy. If I did upset her by, say, coming home late, or deliberately disobeying her wishes (I can’t say orders, because she was never strong enough to give orders as such—they were always suggestions and sometimes pleadings, rather than dictates), she would regale me with the sins of my father, how he’d left us, been untrue to both of us, run off with some floozy, didn’t care if we starved to death, or were put out on the streets. Eventually, I closed my mind to all this, but even so, the guilt somehow transferred itself to me.
There I go getting off the point. The thing of it is, I’d learned from an early age to keep personal matters to myself, initially because that was the way Mother wanted it, and ultimately, perhaps inevitably, I became embarrassed about life with Mother. In some ways it worked well for me when I reached my older teens, because the girls seem to like that slight air of mystery that hung on me like a dark cloak, made me seem deeper that probably I was. It was something I used to my advantage anyway.
So, enough of all that. I’ve still uncomfortable about our mother-son relationship, but it just might help explain why I kept quiet about the OBEs. I’d learned to keep such things to myself.
Another reason was that I was scared of being laughed at. Or misunderstood, thought to be out of my skull. The pragmatic side of my nature also figured: easier for me to put the experiences down to lurid dreaming, no matter how real they seemed to be. By talking about them, I was admitting their fundamental reality to myself and, frankly, they were a distraction I didn’t need in my life. Besides, the OBEs were infrequent enough not to be a problem.
One more reason, and I think this was as important as the others in its way. Say you were a friend of mine
