I look up toward the night sky, visible through two high arches above my office windows.

Almost all the way to the top of the arches the clouds glow with Manhattan's light. At the pinnacle there is darkness, and it draws me. I'm not only scared and upset, frankly I'm also curious. I want to know what's going on out there. As I watch, the night sky grows a little darker.

People who face the visitors report fierce little figures with eyes that seem to stare into the deepest core of being. And those eyes are asking for something, perhaps even demanding it.

Whatever it is, it is more than simple information. The goal does not seem to be the sort of clear and open exchange that we might expect. Whatever may be surfacing, it wants far more than that. It seems to me that it seeks the very depth of the soul; it seeks communion.

ONE

When I had journeyed half of our life's way,

I found myself within a shadowed forest,

for I had lost the path that does not stray.

Ah, it is hard to speak of what it was,

that savage forest, dense and difficult,

which even in recall renews my fear;

so bitter — death is hardly more severe!

But to retell the good discovered there,

I'll also tell of other things I saw.

—DANTE, Inferno, Canto I

THE INVISIBLE FOREST

First Memories

December 26, 1985

My wife and I own a log cabin in a secluded corner of upstate New York. It is in this cabin that our primary experiences have taken place. I will deal first with what I remember of December 26, 1985, and then with what was subsequently jogged into memory concerning October 4, 1985. Until I sought help, I remembered only that there was a strange disturbance on October 4. An interviewer asked if I could recall any other unusual experiences in my past. The night of October 4 had also been one of turmoil, but it took discussions with the other people who had been in the cabin at the time to help me reconstruct it.

This part of my narrative, covering December 26, is derived from journal material I had written before undergoing any hypnosis or even discussing my situation with anybody.

When I was alone, this is what it was like.

Our cabin is very hidden and quiet, part of a small group of cabins scattered across an area served by a private dirt road, which itself branches off a little-used country road that leads to an old town that isn't even mentioned on many maps. We spend more than half of our time at the cabin, because I do most of my work there. We also have an apartment in New York City.