Mystical Experiencer: Woman in her mid-fifties
Submission date: September 27, 2022
Current location: United States
Age at time of experience: 10
This happened when I was ten. I was raised agnostic by my parents but had a strong sense of the inherent aliveness and connectedness of all things, that I now understand was animist in nature, but did not have any frame of reference for at the time. I don’t remember what was happening before, I think I was outside just playing as kids do. I was alone. It was a kind of vision, as it was incredibly clear and vivid, in fact the reality of it was more real than the so-called reality waking life.
What I saw was myself as a younger version of me, in early summer or late spring, perhaps 4 or 5 years old. I was walking on the land near where my home existed in waking reality, except there were no indications of human habitation, nor any other human beings, at all: only myself and the landscape, which was rich and glorious, unspoiled, completely wild and natural. I knew it was the same land because I recognized many of the trees which grew near my home in waking reality, and I also recognized the way the sun was shining through those trees, too, the direction of sunlight coming from the East, slanting through the trees which made long early morning shadows on the grass. So familiar but not, greater somehow. Birds were singing their songs of the morning. This was familiar to me from waking life, I knew in the vision it was the same place as where I lived in waking life, but also something beyond this reality. A more *real* reality, the true reality as it was supposed to be – that it was all the time in fact – but that we could not see when “awake”.
The tall meadow grass at the foot of these trees was covered, every blade, with bright, shining dew. The trees were all along my left, their trunks long and tall, with great arching branches covered with leaves gently stirring although there was no wind. Their branches moved as if dancing, slowly together. I walked along a kind of deer path where the grass was shorter, located at the base of the trees along side of a narrow (perhaps 100 feet wide) sunlit grass and flower-covered meadow that was marked with the bars of the shadows of the tall, dancing trees. (In waking reality, this meadow had always been simply a corn field, much wider than the vision meadow, with the same trees (although smaller and duller) on one side and a paved road on the right side of the corn field, and it was as such well into my adulthood too – it had never been a meadow, never left to lie fallow, in my waking life, had always been either covered in cold and dreary exposed soil and corn stubble in winter through early spring, or lined regularly with rows of growing corn from summer into fall, with a large farmhouse at the far end).
In my vision, though, again no indication of a corn field or of other human beings, or their “stuff”- no houses, no cars, no road – just trees and meadow, grass and flowers and sky, sunlit, warm, all shades of springtime green and gold. And it was beautiful, all the world was new and breathtakingly present and alive. Each drop of dew on every leaf of every tree and on every blade of grass and every flower reflected the silver golden light of the morning sun refracted through water droplets, the sun which shone warm and benevolent over all of it, including me. The light of the sun and in the dewdrops was all of it, and it was me, too, and we were all One Thing. Alive. Connected, full, whole. Again, I was young, 4 or 5, smaller than my waking self (although waking self was still only 10!) and dressed in thin white cotton dress, long sleeved, that dragged to the ground; I could feel its wet hem against my ankles and feel the cool dew of the grass against my bare feet. I was neither warm nor cold, pleasantly comfortable, and I felt completely safe and secure, even though entirely alone on the planet as it seemed. The only human. I was ok with this aloneness, because I knew I wasn’t really alone. I was everything. I didn’t want it to end, and again I don’t know how long I was in this vision, as it was timeless. But when I came out of it, it was daytime, I was outside of my house, apparently, I had been running around in the backyard when it was triggered.
I went inside and found my mom and asked her, “Have I ever wandered outside alone when I was a little girl, when I was 4, and you couldn’t find me?” And she said, curiously, “No, never, we wouldn’t have let you get outside, the road is too dangerous!” (Our road was very dangerous in fact; a straight, open country road where cars liked to accelerate as they passed along the cornfield; we had several barn cats get killed by cars on it throughout my childhood).
I told her all these details of my vision, said it had been beautiful and I loved being in it, “but what did it mean, was it god?” And she told me, “it was only a dream”. But it was not a dream, it was more real than this life and her answer never satisfied me. But I held this vision very close all my life, a touchstone of love, beauty and wholeness. It is with me still and has been a source of great solace and healing all my life.