Michelle Belanger - Psychic Dreamwalking: Explorations at the Edge of Self

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE AUTHOR WOULD LIKE TO C3RATEFULLY THANK DAN, DAWN, AND THE CIRCLE Of THE SACRED FLAME FOR THEIR HELPFUL INPUT ON THIS BOOK; JOSH, KWEI, AND MY OTHER DREAMINCj PARTNERS; AND ALSO CHARLIE AND CONNIE FOR PROVIDINCj A QUIET PLACE TO WRITE DURINC3 THE VIDEO SHOOT.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO NEIL CjAIMAN, THE MAN WHO (jAVE A FACE TO DREAM.

I commit myself to you, Lord Morpheus! Open wide the Gates of Dream. Grant me safe passage in your realm So I may return with tales to tell.

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE CONCEPT OF DREAMWALKING in the fourth grade. It was 1982. Ronald Reagan had been in office for only a year. When one of my math problems came out to 444, all I could think about were the sixty-six hostages who had been held in Iran for exactly that number of days. Troubles with Iran's neighbor, Iraq, were a dim cloud on a distant horizon.

If that seems like an early age to begin studying the occult, consider that this was also the era of such TV shows as That's Incredible!, In Search Of, and Ripley's Believe It or Not. I had practically been weaned on my family's tales of their psychic experiences and vivid encounters with ghosts, although such tales were never recounted in mixed company.

The weird and the occult seemed part of the very fabric of my early childhood. The sleepy Ohio town in which I grew up boasted its own haunted library, and I had personally met the main ghost, a winsome lady in a blue-patterned dress, before I was in kindergarten. Add to this the fact that I'd had at least two NDEs (near-death experiences) and two OBEs (out-of-body experiences) by the tender age of five, and it's no wonder that my life led me not only to study but also to write about occult topics.

Fourth grade was a significant year for several reasons. First, it was the year that I was placed in my school district's "gifted" program. Second, a direct consequence of the first, it was the year that I got switched from Hinckley Elementary to the Sharon school district, a thirty-minute bus ride away. It was also the year that I started seriously reading up on metaphysics and the occult, thanks in part to a more extensive library that included a much-thumbed tome with colorful articles on the human aura, ghosts, UFOs, and astral projection.

It was also the year I met Pearl Cantley.

Pearl is something of an enigma to me even now. I'm well aware of that old magickal adage, "When the student is ready, the teacher will come," but never in a million years would I have expected to find such an unlikely mentor. Pearl was, to say the least, a strange child. Undersized and sickly, she wore thick pop-bottle glasses that made her watery green eyes look insectoid, as if she was an alien participating in some weird school-exchange program. Adding to the sense that there was something not only different but perhaps wholly alien about Pearl was the fact that she was virtually an albino. There was a washed-out quality to the color of her skin, hair, and eyes that made this tiny, fey fourth-grader seem like a faded projection glimmering dimly in a world of full color.

Pearl was socially quirky, if not full-out eccentric, paying attention to people only when it suited her and more often than not wrapped entirely in her own internal world. That Pearl was probably a highfunctioning autistic seems likely from the vantage point of memory. All I knew at the time was that she was my polar opposite academically: where I got taken out of normal classes to design spaceships and contemplate the beginnings of algebra with the other gifted students, Pearl was in the "special" classes, often vexing her teachers with that stubborn refusal to even acknowledge their existence, happier to remain wandering the fields of her mind.

There are times when I have seriously wondered whether Pearl wasn't some being conjured up by my own imagination. For the sake of my own sanity, I've gone back through old school pictures and even called up the school district to make certain that Pearl did indeed exist. Some of my experiences with her, if they happened exactly as I recall, were unusual enough to give a little credence to the alien theory, although I believe that in modern magickal lingo, Pearl would more likely be termed "Otherkin." Other ideas that have presented themselves are that Pearl was a walk-in or perhaps a simple but very open individual who, unbeknownst to her, channeled some higher entity. And of course, I've never overlooked the possibility that Pearl could have simply been insane-albeit a lunatic whose delusions often had an observable impact on the outside world.

Whatever the reason for it, Pearl was different. And for some reason, she gravitated straight to me, the new kid who, admittedly, was just as introverted and socially awkward as herself. Pearl's first words to me were a foretaste of her usual blunt and yet mysterious manner of speaking:

"I've been sent to teach you."

To an inquisitive fourth-grader, this was an irresistible invitation to adventure. When you're that age, you want to believe that the world is far more mysterious than your parents and teachers allow it to be, and you're just naive enough to believe that you can take on all of its challenges without any difficulty. I didn't question what Pearl was supposed to teach me or even who could have possibly "sent" her to me. After all, it was just coincidence that we found ourselves in the same school, in the same class, and sitting next to one another ... right?

Her words implied that we were part of something bigger than ourselves, that there was a purpose and a plan for each of us in the universe. That sense of something bigger, along with the sheer mystery of the project, would keep me glued to her, even in those times when her words made no sense to me at all and I was gripped with the sneaking suspicion that she was not a visionary but simply insane.

Although I was intrigued by her, Pearl did not have a wholly willing student in me. I have never been the most trusting of people, and I have always had a mile-wide skeptical streak, especially when it comes to supposed "authorities." My great aunt was a social worker, and throughout my childhood, she taught me a great deal about psychology. I knew the term "schizophrenic" by the time I met Pearl, and while I did not have an advanced comprehension of that disorder, I understood enough to suspect that Pearl's beliefs might simply be symptoms of that disease.