As soon as I relaxed, it was as if I had opened a hatch into another world. They swarmed at me, climbing up out of my unconscious, grasping at me. This was not memory, it only worked trough the medium of memory. It was meeting me on even level, caressing me as well as capturing me. This emergence was like a kind of internal birth, but what was being born was no bubbling infant. What came out into my conscious mind was a living, aware force. And I had a relationship with it-not a fluttering new one, but something rich and mature that ranged across the whole scale of emotions and included all of my time. I had to face it: Whatever this was, it had been involved with me for years I really squirmed.

What might be hidden in the dark part of my mind? I thought then that I was dancing on the thinnest edge of my soul. Below me were vast spaces. totally unknown. Not psychiatry, not religion, not biology could penetrate that depth. None of them had any real idea of what lives within. They only knew what little it had chosen to reveal of itself.

Were human beings what we seemed to be? Or did we have another purpose in another world? Perhaps our life here on earth was a mere drift of shadow, incidental to our real truth.

Maybe this was quite literally a stage, and we were blind actors.

To gain some semblance of control over myself, I decided to make an inventory of possibilities I sat down at my desk and began to write.

Even if the visitors were real, there was no reason to believe that they were simply creatures from another planet.

I speculated. It could be that the 'visitors' were really from here. Certainly the long tradition of lore suggested that something had been with us for far more than the forty or fifty years since the phenomenon took on its present appearance. The only trouble with this theory was that what has been happening since the mid-forties seemed more than just a little different from the fairy lore. Now there were brain probes and flying disks involved, abductions and gray creatures with staring eyes. Surely no change had taken place in the human psyche extreme enough to account for such a radical change in the appearance of the fairy. And yet, there was undoubtedly something here …. I thought perhaps the visitors were somehow trying to hide themselves in our folklore.

Another thought was that the visitors might really be our own dead. Maybe we were a larval form, and the adults of our species were as incomprehensible to us, as totally unimaginable, as the butterfly must be to the caterpillar. Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne.