When I wrote the narrative that follows I had not yet been hypnotized and did not know what, if anything, lay unseen in my mind. I wrote it over a two day period after first seeing Hopkins and sometime before I met Dr. Donald Klein, who would become my hypnotist when we began to discover empty places to my memory.

On October 4. 1985, my wife, son, and I drove up to our cabin in the company of two close friends, Jacques Sandulescu and Annie Gottlieb.

We have known Jacques and Annie for about five years. The thing about them most immediately apparent is that he is as enormous as she is tiny. He weighs nearly 300 pounds, is a black belt in karate, d does a hundred push-ups at a session. She is also a black belt, but weighs perhaps 120 pounds. She is intellectual, he is physical. Both are writers. He came to the United States as a refugee from slave labor in the Soviet Union in the late forties. A Rumanian national, he had been forcibly transferred to the Donbas region to be worked to death in the mines there. His book, Donbas, tells of his long Journey of escape, and paints an accurate picture of him as a profoundly physical man. He would make a good witness, I thought, because of his steadfast sense of reality.

Annie Gottlieb is more an intellectual, the author of the recent Do You Believe fn Magic: The Second Coming of the Sixties Generation (Times Books, 1987).

The night of October 4 was foggy in Ulster County. We had dinner at a local restaurant and arrived at the cabin at about nine in the evening. I turned on the pool heater so that the pool would be comfortable for use the next day (Saturday). Then I lit a fire in the wood stove: We were all sleepy, so sleepy that we went off to bed almost immediately.

Anne and I retired to our upstairs bedroom, Jacques and Annie went to the guest room and closed the door, and our son went to his corner bedroom beside theirs. He left his door open. From my bed, with the bedroom doors open, I could see out across the cathedral ceiling of the living room to a hexagonal window set in the peak of the roof.

Over the next hour, the fog grew thicker and thicker. When I turned out my reading fight I was enveloped in absolute blackness and total silence. The harvest moon had been full on September 29, and was now at about half. It rose at approximately ten-thirty, but was entirely invisible because of the cloud cover.

I do not remember what I had been reading that night, but it wasn't frightening, nor was dinner the sort of meal that would give rise to later unrest. We had not drunk more than one glass of wine and a drink each at the restaurant.