It took only a moment for me to see that the image had not gone away. On the contrary, it had be come far more clear. It wasn't anything like any other imagistic material I had ever had in my mind. I could not calm myself. I was frantic. For the first few hours it was static, simply staring back at me with those large, glistening eyes.

I have never had eidetic, or photographic, memory, so this image was something very new for me. An eidetic image is very much like a photograph inside the mind. This one, though, was far more than a photograph. It had the urgency of life about it.

Despite my attempts to explain it to Budd Hopkins and Don Klein, I could not succeed in communicating to others just how special it seemed to me to be. Nor did I really know this myself until a few days later, when some of the remarkable properties of the image were revealed.

I think that the image was somehow triggered by hypnosis. Maybe the intense state of concentration evoked it from my unconscious... or maybe I attracted the visitors' attention and they responded.

After the image appeared I did research into eidetic memory and found that it is very rare in adults, almost to the point of being nonexistent in Western cultures. What's more, the descriptions I found of eidetic images did not even begin to correspond to what I was experiencing. People did not report that their eidetic images had a life of their own.

This one seemed ready to reach out and touch me. I felt a strong sense of relationship.

Looking at it was more like looking at a person behind soundproof glass than looking at a picture.

I found that the image not only moved about of its own accord, it would move on command. It showed me its hands, its face, every detail of its body. Anne asked me to describe its feet and it leaned forward against something that I could not see and raised a foot, which appeared almost like a very simple version of a human foot. Instead of toes there was a solid structure split in only one place. Like all the joints, the ankle appeared simple in structure.

While I might indeed have been viewing the result of some extraordinary connection between myself and a real, conscious being, it may also be that this was an act of the imagination — the act of a mind calling upon itself to provide another argument in favor of this being an experience with an external component.

If what I was really dealing with amounted to some sort of deep and instinctive attempt to create a new deity for myself, to remain agnostic was to put the conscious me in the interesting position of opposing my own unconscious aim.