Deborah's Visions

As a result of much positive feedback from last month’s newsletter about her dream, Deborah Clarke author of ‘Songs From The Secret Place – The Meeting of the Spirits’ has agreed to give us more of her own personal recollections.
One of the comments we had came from Jayne Hall, the winner of our latest short story competiton ‘Human Nature Versus The Spirit Guide’. Jayne whose story is posted on our web-site www.buttonbridgebooks.co.uk was recently featured in the ‘Shuttle & Times’ and had this to say about Deborah’s Dream:

‘I found Deborah’s dream and story very moving and inspirational. We all appear to have our time in the wilderness (even if it sometimes lasts longer than 40 days and 40 nights!) but hopefully find different keys to help us to emerge into the light and are left stronger for having had the experience. Whilst we are in these phases we are disconnected from others, ourselves and our purpose. Deborah’s Dream appears to me a very powerful metaphor for reconnecting to source and remembering that we are all one, all doing our best in the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in, all a glorious mixture of past life, genetic and environmental factors. In her book “Songs From The Secret Place, Deborah begins to explain this process – personally I can’t wait for Book 2 when I hope she goes further. We cannot underestimate the effect we have on other people through our words, actions and life story. ‘

If you missed ‘The Dream’, it can be found at www.buttonbridgebooks.co.uk, or on this blog


VISIONS

As a result of feedback she has had from the dream, Anne has asked me to write about what happened next. Before I start I want to make it clear that this is purely an account of what I experienced, as I experienced it. I offer no interpretation or analysis because where I am now I know that what you, the reader, make of these events, will depend entirely upon your own belief system, your own internal map of ‘reality’. However what I will say is this: it has taken me the twenty years since these events occurred to fully integrate what happened. Only now, as I approach my fiftieth birthday, am I at last completely unconcerned about anyone else’s interpretation. I offer this purely in the hope that by sharing it I may inspire others like me to come out and speak what they know.
In late September 1984 I moved to the little market town of Tenbury Wells to take up a job working in an old style institution run by what was then called The Spastics Society (now known as SCOPE). I was employed to do arts based activities with people who had multiple disabilities, most of whom were wheelchair bound and also had various degrees of learning difficulties and behavioural problems ranging from mild to as bad as it gets. The institution itself was a grand old mansion called Kyre Park, set in gardens landscaped by Capability Brown. It was located in the countryside, six miles from my flat in the town and I used to cycle to and from work everyday. However, having come from living in a city, I was unaccustomed to how dark the nights were in the countryside, there was no street lighting at all on the little country roads and out there, all alone on my bicycle, it was actually quite scary. Several times I ended up in the ditch because the feeble lights on my bike simply weren’t up to the task! However one such night, when I was cursing and wrestling my bike back onto the road, I suddenly became aware of the heavens above me. It was a pitch black, crystal clear, moonless night and the glorious panorama of the star filled sky suddenly grabbed my attention. As I stood there, gazing up in awe, every fibre of my being started to vibrate like a tuning fork. I got goose bumps all over, my hair stood on end, my heart started pounding and, as I stood there utterly transfixed, I knew with absolute certainty that the sky was trying to tell me something. It was the most extraordinary experience but it was not the first time it had happened. As a child I’d had the same experience but, because this and many other out of the ordinary experiences had been dismissed as ‘imagination’, ‘making up stories’ and even ‘telling lies’, I had grown up to dismiss them myself. There was no dismissing this though and, when it happened several more times over those next two months, the only question I had was ‘Why? Why is this happening again?’ Then on New Year’s Eve 84/85, something even more intriguing happened. I was out with my new friend who, to protect his privacy, I will call Steve, though ‘new’ is a purely relative term, he was one of those people who you just know you’ve known for lifetimes and you’re simply picking up where you left off. Anyway, it was another of those amazing crystal clear, moonless nights so we decided to drive up to the highest point in the area, Clee Hill, so we could gaze at the stars as the New Year rolled in. At this point I should mention that Steve had had a new car battery installed that very morning so as we sat there, looking at the heavens, the last thing we were worried about was whether the car would start again. We sat there in silence, taking it all in, and once again I began to get this overwhelming feeling that the sky was trying to tell me something. I bought every ounce of my attention to bear, desperately trying to grasp the tantalising echoes and whisperings . . . but then something else started to happen. As I gazed at the stars a sphere of blue and white light appeared, sparkling with scintillating geometric patterns. At first I felt myself pulled by it, as if my whole being was rushing towards it, then suddenly my perception flipped inside out and I thought. “Bloody hell! I’m not rushing towards it, it’s heading straight for me!” And even if I’d wanted to get out of the way I could not have moved fast enough for, even as I realised what was happening, it hit me right between the eyes and passed straight through me as if I was completely transparent! What happened next is a bit vague and fuzzy. I recall being consumed with a strange outpouring of grief and joy in the midst of which I became aware that Steve was experiencing exactly the same thing. When we finally recovered we sat there in silence for quite some time, neither of us knowing what to say, but finally Steve said, “What the hell was that?”
I said, “I’ve got no idea.”
We sat there in stunned silence for a bit longer then Steve turned the ignition with every intention of driving us home but, yes you’ve guessed it, the car wouldn’t start! Brand new battery – dead as a dodo! Again we sat there in silence, not knowing what on earth to think, but eventually we got ourselves together and, with the help of a bunch of very worse for wear New Year revellers giving us a push back onto the road, we freewheeled down the hill and got the car going again. We hoped that was that, the car was going, the battery would recharge, end of story. Next morning however, the car was still dead as a dodo. Now highly perplexed, Steve took the battery back to the garage where they too were totally baffled. It simply would not recharge. They made several attempts throughout the day but all to no avail until, determined to figure it out, they took it to bits and discovered that all the metal components were completely buckled and distorted, rendering it quite useless. We wondered about it for a couple of days then decided to just put it down to experience, but things did not go back to normal for long. A few weeks later, shortly before my twenty-eighth birthday, I was listening to some music one night when something phenomenal started to happen. Now as I’ve already said, I’d had a certain level of psychic experience all my life but I had never experienced anything like this! It felt as if the top had been lifted right off my head and I had been plugged into the very heart of the universe. I cannot describe the intensity of the light or even begin to convey the sheer power of the pure, unbounded love that started pouring through me. It was ecstasy! It rendered me helpless with bliss. It bought me to my knees! And with it streams of information downloaded into me, the very workings of the universe revealed before my very eyes, images and concepts coming so fast that I simply couldn’t keep up. Had it only happened this once I might have been tempted to dismiss it but, over the next two years, it happened again and again and I found myself reading voraciously to try and find a language with which to capture these concepts, I sucked up quantum physics, eastern philosophy, the western mystical tradition, Jungian psychology and more. However, as much as I felt I had been waiting my whole life for this to happen, I was also in total conflict with it, for what this experience revealed to me about myself was radical, it challenged everything I had ever been led to believe about myself and for that reason I was quite convinced that I simply could not be getting the messages right. As a result, I quite frequently found myself jumping up and down in the middle of the room shouting, “No, no, no! This cannot be right! I am Deborah Clarke! I am nobody! This cannot be right!” – or words to that effect. In the end the conflict reached stalemate and I realised that whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to get help, not least because it was starting to make me physically ill. So, to cut a long story short, one day I found myself talking to one of the founders of the College of Healing at Runnings Park in Malvern. In fairness I have to point out that I was always very, very, guarded about what I said at that time, indeed it is only now that I feel comfortable about disclosing the whole truth to anybody. However, I said enough for her to come to the conclusion that I was clearly very psychic but needed to get it under control. This seemed like a reasonable analysis to me, so when she suggested that I consider doing the College of Healing training to learn how to do that very thing, it seemed like a good idea. Needless to say, nothing could have prepared me for what happened during that first week of training. It was on the final night of my stay there that it happened, although things had gradually been building towards it throughout the whole week. I’d had a lot of healing by then but far from closing me down it was opening me up even more. I did not sleep for the entire week so great was the energy shift that was building. But I was still fighting, still refusing to give in and then, on that final night, a very lovely man who I will call Benedict offered to give me a massage. I thought, ‘What the hell. I need something’ and so I agreed. All went well for about half an hour, it was exquisite, such utter and blessed relief, but Benedict became very perplexed by the amount of tension in my lumbar/sacral area. Apparently my buttocks were like rock and he began uttering more and more earnest injunctions to ‘let go’ until in the end I thought ‘Ah, what the hell, I surrender’. With that I let go and the most extraordinary thing began to happen. Phenomenal heat exploded in my coccyx and started rising up my spine. I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, this is kundalini, I’ve read about this!’ And, set in motion, there was no stopping it, not that I had any desire whatsoever to stop it. I tell you sisters; it rocked! Talk about orgasm! Imagine the most gut busting orgasm you’ve ever had and multiply it by infinity! But it’s not exploding outwards, it’s exploding up, up through your entire being, blasting every bit of resistance right out of the way and blowing your head right off! And that’s just for starters! Now I had no head there were no limits and I was flying, flying out of the room, soaring way above Malvern, winging my may through the stratosphere, and as I went I grew and grew and grew, now I was the whole world and every person that had ever lived, a million, billion lives rolling all the way back to the beginnings of civilization, then further back I was every plant species and animal there had ever been, then further back and I was the very mineral formations of this world, then the swirling gasses and the stuff of stars, the energetic matrices of galaxies, the blueprint of the very universe itself, until finally, all forms disappeared and there was nothing, nothing but pure, undifferentiated awareness, pure Presence, a velvet black, glittering Vast in which all of creation rose and fell, everything and nothing all at once.
(And people wonder why Brad Pitt leaves me cold!)
However, how I experienced this is one thing, how those around me perceived it is quite another. They were extremely concerned, they hadn’t got a clue what had happened and I was giving them no response whatsoever, principally because, at that point, there simply was no sense of ‘I’ to bring to the party. All of the hushed whisperings, the mad dashing about and the increasingly urgent calls of ‘Deborah! Deborah say something!” were of no concern, simply forms rising and falling on the face of the Deep. Then there was the awareness of being bodily manhandled and carried to the private house of one of the College tutors where another voice began demanding, ‘Who are you?’ At this point a sense of ‘I’ began to reassert itself though only in as far as to register that the question itself was completely absurd. Nevertheless, I was also becoming aware that if I did not come up with some kind of response I could be in trouble. They were scared, they clearly had no idea what had happened otherwise they would have just let me be. There was nothing wrong, absolutely nothing at all, but that was not how they were seeing it, their minds were creating quite a different story and I realised that my safety depended on finding some way to interface with their script. So with this aim in mind I plucked some words out of the sea of possibilities that I hoped might do the trick. “I am the guardian of the light,” I said, “I am the keeper of the secret knowledge.”
There was a weighty silence then the voice demanded. “Where do you come from?”
Again, this struck me as a totally absurd question but in an effort to oblige I plucked another response out of the ether and said, “Atlantis.”
There followed much earnest whispering and then the voice demanded, “Who are you now?”
Well now I was really starting to get a headache. I felt like a genie being forced back into a tiny little bottle. There was obviously a right answer to this question but I had no idea what it was and the effort of trying to figure it out was extremely painful.
Finally the voice said, “Who are you now, Deborah?”
‘O.K.,’ I thought, ‘so now I know the answer they’re looking for, but who is this Deborah?’ At that point I honestly did not know. However, the interrogation continued, I opened my eyes as requested and finally, with a supreme effort of will, I managed to locate this ‘Deborah’. They were happy then, for now I was giving them the answers they wanted to hear, but even as I delivered those answers I knew that ‘Deborah’ was nothing but a façade, an act, a part that I had been given to play, a role I inhabited in order to conform with how everyone else thought things should be. Now I had always had a sense that this was so but had assumed this to mean that there was something ‘wrong’ with me. Now I knew that there was nothing ‘wrong’ about it at all. It was right. Yes, my feeling had been right all along . . .
The full implications of this understanding did not dawn right then. Not until I went back to work the very next day did it finally hit me. To say it was weird going back to work after what I had been through is an understatement but let’s leave it at that because it’s not the important thing. The important thing is this: I walked back into Kyre Park a fundamentally changed person, my whole perception of myself had been turned inside out and I’ll admit it, I was nervous. What would they make of this new me, how would they react, how would they respond? I’ll tell you. They did not notice a blind, sodding bit of difference! My initial conversations went something like this.
“Hello Deb. Have a nice week off?”
“Amazing! Mind blowing! Absolutely the most . . . .”
“Oh that’s nice. Could you take Alan to the toilet for me?”
“???????????????????????????”
“Hello Deb. Have a good week?”
“It was the most amazing experience of my entire life!”
“Oh lovely, Jean’s waiting for you in the activities centre.”
“????????????????????????????”
You get the general idea. Not a glimmer, not a spark, not even a dim glow on the horizon . . . not, that is, until a little chap called Chris Belsten came wheeling himself down the corridor. Now, of all the residents of Kyre Park at that time, Chris was my number one fan, he adored me, he followed me everywhere, declared undying love every day and frequently proposed marriage. If anyone was going to be thrilled to see me it was Chris, however on that day he took one look at me, turned tail and bolted, just as fast as his wheelchair would carry him. Something about me had obviously frightened him to death. Everyone simply wrote it off as one of his funny turns but I was concerned. I went and found him and once again he tried to run away. He was so scared he couldn’t even look at me. It took me most of the afternoon to gradually win him back, but finally I got through to him and we had a little chat. I waited until I was able to establish eye contact and then I said, “Chris, what’s the problem? Why are you so scared?”
And he said, “It’s your eyes Debs, there’s too much light coming out of them.”
Now that’s when it hit me!
Here was this profoundly disabled man, physical impairment, learning difficulties, behavioural problems, the full works, a man whose opinions about anything were at best received with kind indulgence by the ‘able’ world, and he was the only person who could see that something had changed. He was the only one who noticed.
It was a shock, but my journey into the labyrinth was only just beginning. Over the next weeks and months I discovered that there was no way I could talk about what I had experienced without sounding like a raving lunatic. No words I used were adequate and the more I tried, the barmier it all sounded. In the end the Deborah character’s doubts, fears, conflicts and neuroses started to run the show again but what she didn’t know was that she was fighting a losing battle. Try as she might to fit everything back into nice neat boxes it was never going to happen. I smile now at some of the truly desperate measures I resorted to but once the knowing was there, there was no going back. Slowly but surely it began to work it’s magic, unravelling the web of illusion strand by strand, subversively dismantling every structure I had ever erected from this secret place within, unconscious patterns, ancestral patterns, collective patterns, archetypal patterns – a twenty year journey right into the heart of darkness . . . but that’s another story.

© Deborah Clarke

Deborah's Dream

Deborah Clarke author of 'Songs From The Secret Place - The Meeting of the Spirits' very kindly gave us the details of a dream she had which began the whole process of getting her debut novel written; which we are very proud to have published. Her dream is fascinating reading:

DREAM


When I was twenty-six I had a dream. It came at what was undoubtedly the darkest time of my life. In the previous months I had taken two drug overdoses in an attempt to end a life that I experienced as utterly unbearable. In fact it is only now, twenty-four years later, that I can fully appreciate just what kind of hell I was living in then. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was trying to live a life in complete denial of who I really am. So successfully had I been brainwashed and terrorised into submission by parents, teachers, doctors, preachers and every other servant of the machine, that I had absolutely no idea what else to do but withdraw from the world completely, disappear into a secret place where none of them could find me and pray that someone or something would come to show me the way out of my misery. Perhaps the most terrifying part of it all was knowing that no one had done this to me deliberately, none of the people who had caused me to retreat from the world had consciously and with malice of forethought, set out to make my life hell. In fact they were more frightened of the state I was in than I was and that’s why I knew it was utterly pointless to keep expecting them to know how to help me. My psychiatrist said, and I quote, “You are a classic Marilyn Monroe personality and you will always need a bottle of pills close by you.” This was the best they could offer me, these ‘experts’ these people who ‘knew’ and I realised that if I kept on listening to them it would be the death of me.
So it was that I withdrew and, for an entire year, I barely emerged from the rented rooms I lived in. I had no job, no money, no friends and no idea what I needed, but something deep down inside told me to start paying attention to my dreams. I have always been a vivid and lucid dreamer, both sleeping and waking. I frequently got told off for ‘day dreaming’ at school and so I trained myself to enter my inner world whilst giving all the outward impression of being completely present and attentive. Even so this was a hollow victory, all it did was prove what I already suspected, that no one could see me, no one at all. So long as I provided an acceptable façade that was all that mattered, this other me, this other world that I experienced communion with and the ‘me’ who lived there, all of this was completely invisible to them. This I knew by the age of seven, no wonder then that grew into a deeply troubled adult. Now I know that many of you reading this will be saying, ‘Yes, yes! That’s me, that’s how I felt too!’ But back then I didn’t know there were many others like me, back then I thought I was completely on my own.
But back to the dreams, I started writing them down everyday and very soon it was taking up most of my time. It seemed that now I was really paying attention there was this great sense of urgency, something desperately trying to get through. I became very excited by what I was doing but also scared, for there was this sense of pressure and limited time, this voice inside me saying, ‘You know you can’t sit on your backside doing this for ever, my girl. Sooner or later you’re going to have to go back out there and get a job.’ I didn’t realise it then but that was the voice of my grandmother, one of the many interfering ancestors I have subsequently had to kick into touch and put straight about a few things. They all sat there like a big black cloud over my head, telling me I was just plain idle, that I didn’t know I’d been born, that what I needed was something to really worry about but, while they did their best to try to guilt and shame me back into submission, I held my ground, I had given myself a year and so the race was on. Would I find what I was looking for or would time run out before I got there?
About six months in, the breakthrough happened. I knew it even as I was dreaming it. Even as I write these words I can still feel the power of it, the overwhelming relief and gratitude for the salvation that had finally come. So here it is, this is the dream that changed everything . . .
I was way, way up high, so high up I was above the clouds, clear blue sky above me, sea of clouds rolling away to the horizon below me and a long way off in the distance, rising out of the clouds, a tall golden spire. This spire was my destination, I didn’t know why, I just knew it was where I was going, and as my eyes rested upon it I gently swayed from side to side, rocked by the motion of all those beneath me, for I was right at the top of this pillar of people, each person sitting upon the other’s shoulders as we progressed, with painstaking slowness, towards this distant spire. As I sat there, I knew that this journey had been going on for a long, long, time, so long that I had no memory of anything else, but I was happy, I was serene. Up there, right at the top, I was in my element, nothing to disturb me, nothing to distract me from doing what I did best, my eyes fixed firmly on this vision that only I could see, so that I could relay directions down through the others to the world below.
And then one day the order of things changed. One day a message came up from below, passed up through this long, long chain of people, and in my mind a voice said, “The Walker wishes to meet you.”
I was surprised. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I thought about it for a moment then sent a message back. “What is this? I am the Dreamer. Tell the Walker I cannot go down there.”
For a while everything continued as it always had, desperately slowly, but one step at a time none the less. The vision was in sight, the day would come and that was all that concerned me.
But then it happened again; another message came up from below, the same as before. “The Walker wishes to meet you.”
Now I was disconcerted. Why was this happening again? I sent another message back. “Why this again? I am the Dreamer. I cannot be distracted from the vision. My role is here. This is where I must stay. Tell the Walker I cannot go down there.”
Again everything continued as it always had, but then, yet again, this same message came up from below, “The Walker wishes to meet you.”
Well now I was angry and upset, my equilibrium disturbed. Why was the Walker persisting with this? Why was he doing this to me? I had given him my answer. Why did he refuse to accept it? So I said, “Does the Walker not know who I am? I am the Dreamer and he can’t go anywhere without me. Tell him to stop this, I must not be disturbed.”
The message went down but very quickly the reply came back. “The Walker says he knows who you are and he knows that he can’t go anywhere without you, but he also points out, with the greatest respect, that you can go nowhere without him. He asks you think about this for he will not take one more step until he meets you.”
With that, the whole pillar of people stopped moving and I sat there, overwhelmed with despair. What the Walker said was right, I knew it, but why would he hold me to ransom like this? He knew who I was. He knew that I could not live in the world down below so why did he want to force me to go there? Why did he want to put me through this? I didn’t know, but I did know that it wasn’t just me I had to think about, there were all these others with me and I had to think of them too. If I did not find some way to get us moving again we would never get to our destination and that was unthinkable. They were depending on me and I could not let them down. So it was that with great reluctance I made my decision. “Tell the Walker I am coming to meet him,” I said, and with that, I began my descent. Curling over into a foetal position I handed myself into the arms of the person beneath me and very gently, one by one they began passing me down the column towards the world below. But even before I reached the clouds I was hurting, my body crying out against the increasing dissonance and disturbance growing all around me with each pair of hands I passed through. By the time I’d passed through the clouds I was in terrible pain, the vibration generated by the world below drilling into my very bones, but now I could see a great jungle below me, hot, steaming, seething with riotous colours and sounds, a primordial chaos of jarring discords and screaming feedback. I was in agony and I hadn’t even reached the ground yet, but as I passed through the canopy and got my first glimpse of the jungle floor I could see all these wild, tribal people dancing about the bottom of the column, shrieking and whooping, drums pounding, horns blaring, pipes wailing, so nerve shatteringly loud it made my teeth ache. And then there was the sickening stench, an atmosphere so dense and thick I felt like I was drowning. As I cried out with the pain and gasped for breath my vision was now only a distant dream, all of my resources refocused into fight to breathe, every ounce of my strength redirected into the sheer battle for survival.
At last I was passed onto the jungle floor and as I lay there, utterly helpless, the great column of people came down off each other’s shoulders to join me, focusing their minds to create an aura of calm about me to afford me as much protection from the chaos as they could. I was still in pain, but now I could stand up and look around and I thought, ‘Right, I am here. Where is he?’
In response to my thought, the heaving mass of humanity parted and a great big man emerged, big boned, heavily muscled, head and shoulders taller that the rest of us, guided into the clearing by two tribal people. Well I knew he was the Walker but I was horrified. He was ragged, filthy; his hair matted and caked with mud, his body and face covered in old scars and fresh, bleeding wounds. I could barely make out his features for the filth. He looked more like some abused animal than a man . . . and then he opened his eyes.
To say that I was surprised would be an understatement. I was blown away; completely disarmed. His eyes were blue, sky blue; the exact same colour of the sky that I lived in above the clouds. And they were filled with light, clear, boundless, pristine light . . . I stepped towards him and said, “I am the Dreamer. I am here.”
He reached out towards the sound of my voice, eyes vacantly searching . . . and that’s when I realised he was blind.
The revelation tore at my heart. He was blind . . .!
I collapsed to my knees in tears, overwhelmed with emotion. Now I knew, now I understood why he wanted to meet me. I was his eyes! What I could see clearly he had to take purely on faith and trust yet still, day after day he laboured to carry us, this great big man, right at the bottom of the pillar, the whole burden resting upon his shoulders as he fought his way, step by step, through this brutal, unrelenting chaos. I was shattered, shattered, my whole universe turned inside out. Only now did I realise just how much he loved me. Yes, he loved me! And he wanted to touch me. He could never see what I could see but he wanted to touch my living presence, to know that I was real, to know that the battle he fought every day was not in vain and that I was there for him the same way that he was there for me. How could I have even thought of refusing him this, how could I?
When I looked up again he was gone, but now the others were erecting a beautiful tent all around me, a private, sacred space to make my visit here more bearable. I was deeply touched. I knew they were creating something for me that they had never had themselves. It was cool and fragrant in there and insulated from the noise outside. I waited, knowing now what would happen. Come nightfall they would bring the Walker back to me and we would make love, this was what he wanted, this was what had to happen.
Sure enough, as the moon replaced the sun, the entrance to my tent parted and he stepped inside, but now he had been bathed and massaged with healing oils, the rags and filth were gone and he wore a simple white kilt. His battle scarred skin shone like gold over muscles and sinews honed by the relentless ordeal of carrying us all upon his great, broad shoulders, his long blond hair hung in a braid down his back and, as his light filled, sky blue eyes gazed upon me I knew that he could see me now, but only my outward appearance. He still could not see what I could see and nor would he ever be able to, but that didn’t matter. He knew who I was, I was the Dreamer and he had absolute faith and trust in me and because of that I loved him; I loved him with all my heart and soul.
I smiled and beckoned him to me. He came and lay down beside me and we made love, but there was no lust, no passion, no earth shaking orgasms; just a quiet, gentle merging together into complete and utter bliss. One body, one heart, one mind, one soul – total union.
We stayed like this all night then when the morning came we separated out again but now everything was different. Now there was a new energy, a new life, a renewed sense of purpose and every one was excited to get on with the journey. So it was that the great column reassembled, the Walker with his feet planted firmly on the ground and, one by one, the members of our company climbing back up on his shoulders, each taking their position in the column until, finally, it was my turn and they passed me all they way back up to the top to my place above the clouds. We started to move again, but now we could go so much faster than before, now I had a telepathic rapport with the Walker below and my directions passed to him in an instant, rather than laboriously going through everyone in between. The golden spire still gleamed in the distance but now it was getting closer and closer and, as we stormed along, we began to sing a happy triumphant song. “We’re going home, we’re going home! Yes, yes, yes, we’re going home!” And now I could see that the spire sat atop a great golden dome and, as we got closer still, we broke through the cloud to see a massive pyramid, as tall as a mountain, rising up from the jungle floor, a single, straight stairway sweeping right from its base, all the way up to the dizzying heights of the dome at its apex. A roar of triumphant cheering came up from below. We were nearly there, nearly there! And now we seemed to be flying, speeding effortlessly towards our goal and as we arrived we all tumbled down to ground level again and began racing up the steps to the dome. No matter that the stairway was a mile high; that was nothing to us after the eternity it had taken us to get there. We were up that pyramid in no time at all, streaming through the entrance of the dome and racing out across the floor, the roof of the dome above us, polished black stone beneath our feet, its surface inlaid with a silver circle, and within that circle, a jewelled map of the stars. We all knew our positions, where we should be in this scheme of things, and we arranged ourselves accordingly around the whole circumference of the circle. Finally everyone was ready and now an expectant hush descended, I looked across to the Walker who sat directly opposite me on the other side, all light filled, shining and golden. His scars were gone and he was smiling and as our eyes locked, something started to happen. Energy started to pulse around the circle, a perfectly synchronised clockwise and counter clockwise motion, slowly and gently at first, then gathering in speed and power until it became a persistent pounding throb. The floor of the chamber began to quake and now I realised that this vast building was a vessel, a ship, and the tremors we could feel were it’s moorings unlocking in the earth below . . . and now the pounding, throbbing energy was driving us up, lifting the whole edifice up off the ground below, speed gathering, momentum building, the mounting force driving through us, singing now, the rhythmic pulsing fused into single sound, the sound thrusting us heavenwards, lifting us up, singing us high until, suddenly, we exploded away from the atmosphere and out into the stars beyond. And now the whole edifice fell away, the pyramid, the dome, the circular floor all disappearing into the firmament to leave us hanging there, free, pure beings of light. But we were not alone, oh no, the firmament was buzzing with similar beings all whizzing here and there in dinky little vehicles, brightly coloured little cars and motorbikes with smiley faces, just like children’s toys. I laughed and laughed, I couldn’t believe it. They were travelling so lightly, having so much fun! No wrathful, judgemental, terrorist of a God lived out here. And without exception they were all thrilled to see us there. They didn’t care where we’d come from they were just really glad we’d finally made it. “Welcome to the Universe!” they cried, as they speeded by. “Come on in! Welcome home!”

I woke from this dream in tears, tears of joy at what I had touched, and tears of sadness that I couldn’t stay there. When I wrote it down I was all over the place, I didn’t know what the hell had hit me, but I knew it was what I’d been waiting for. Of course those of you who have read ‘Songs from the Secret Place – Book One’ will recognise some threads of that story here, but at that time I could never have imagined that one day I would write a book. By the age of seven I had experienced enough crushing disapproval, humiliation and, on occasion, severe punishment for ‘telling lies’ and ‘making up stories’ to convince me that I must never, ever voice what I knew to the outside world, and though I wrote that dream down, not long after I destroyed the papers for fear that someone else might read it. However the memory stayed with me and even though I didn’t understand it in any rational way, I knew it was a call for things to change and that if I was ever going to figure out what was ‘wrong’ with me than I had to start going about things in a completely different way. Two years later I had gone a long way towards turning things around, I’d ditched the psychiatrist and his pills, got a new job in a new town, made new friends and got my own flat. I was settled in, sorted and thinking, “Right, what happens now?” That’s when the visions started, but that’s another story . . .

Deborah Clarke – September 2006