Your daughter has a lot of imagination, she said.

And I responded: "Yeah, I used to as well. It will be all gone by the time she hits twenty four!" Which may be false. So far she's managed to avoid trauma that by her age had bifurcated my own mind. Though I'd always wondered whether said trauma was the cause behind my own so called rampant imagination. I did always have worlds brewing in my head, even when the negativity filled me up with so much rage reality starts folding up like origami.

Around the times of great psychological upsets, I would go to sleep and wake up with scratches, all over my body. And sometimes, dream...entities would follow me out of a dream. Not like a monstrosity from the deep recesses of my mind, a rat! I was awake for a full five seconds before I felt the heavy rodent scurrying across my back towards my underwear. In the dream I had woken from I was lying on the ground covered by a sea of large rodents and I was unable to free myself, which is why I must have torn myself from sleep. I searched my bedroom for an actual rodent because there was weight and pressure across my back. I felt its claw dig into my skin. I've had recurring gruesome dreams over the years. Same dream, over and over. My mother lost a few siblings and each time she got the news I happened to be wearing all white, down to my underwear. Images superimposed on reality, but not in a logical manner. I've seen horrible things. I've been stabbed, woken up and heard growls come out of non-corporeal throats, have had your typical chest paralysis, have seen and spoken to shadows, sometimes while awake. Invisible hands caress me. Once, it happened on request.

All these experiences could be reduced to psychosis to anyone who wants to blanket diagnose me and I would have been inclined to agree with them, until I got my cat and gave birth to a child.

That's when things started falling off shelves by themselves, doors opening and closing on their own and my baby giggling and chatting with a quiet room (Lilo was a clingy baby, not of the norm) , temperatures dropping radically. The cat would go crazy then and stare at random spots in the wall and one time we were staring at the same damn thing! That, deepened my interest in the occult. Now that I think about it, with the number of priests in my family, the occult was never too far from discussion so I grew up around it. I remember a catholic priest once using a pendulum to my mother discover her missing brother's fate. As my parents grew more religious I studied the bible repeatedly and had memorized a few psalms before I was ten and had a huge interest in angelic hierarchies.

The veil between the waking and dream world has captivated my attention since I was a very young child, unable to comprehend the experiences I was having, confused by the reaction of the adults I was divulging them to. Some smiled and called me a witch. Others asked my parents to take me to a psychologist. I've had a few exorcisms conducted on me. I can proudly attest to years of psychotherapy (never discussed the paranormal with any of them, I was well aware of the game).

These experiences are part of a paradigm that is alien to the one I find myself currently trapped in. Oh you have some bleed overs with the New age misappropriations and it's always a thin line between channeling lunatics, fantastic hypothesizing and people who are able to maintain an objective view while having these experiences, but there's a clear line of evidence that proves that this is not a phenomenon that is unknown to us as a race.

And there's a clear line I've demarcated in my mind to keep those experiences at bay, I'm not sure how. I've done it before and it takes a sort of cataclysm to bring them back. After one last dream I had had enough, the one where I'd just been murdered by an eight year old child soldier...and came back to life, slowly crawling to my feet to loom over a group of deranged children while feeling the warm blood drip out of the holes in my body like jelly through a sieve... I had had enough of being dragged to hell and beyond in the dreamworld. That and the writing on the wood stove (not mine!) was the straw, that broke this flirtation with the unknown. I remember being incapacitated and sobbing for hours after that last dream because every second of terror was real and I experienced death, or at least what it would have been felt like, by gun.

I don't know how, but I've, yet again, closed the door, I'm just afraid I've trapped my imagination with it. I will open it again, but I'm going to need more occult knowledge and back up. Also, the sicker I physically get, the thinner the veil hangs, so my control is probably illusionary. I have a feeling most of my life will be based around this obsession. It's the only thing that has ever given me purpose. When I came to the Koots I willingly opened myself and the crazy truly came out of the box! So I tentatively believe there is a mechanism involved with these extra sensory perceptions and I am capable of learning how to yield them confidently. Whenever I would sit down and think of what I wanted out of life as a teenager, the only thing that ever came to mind was needing answers, about this set of experiences. The rest of the stuff, marriage, money and social achievement was just downright bullshit to me from the get go, but I had an unfortunate predilection for falling for the fantasy cloaking male female interactions. I had hoped to marry the ginger prince, but last time I checked, he was off the market and thank goodness I changed my mind: the descendant of fucking cousins isn't likely to give me a healthy lineage.

I just need to find a way to meet my material needs while leaving room for the important stuff. Ironically, marrying royalty might do the trick.