As soon as we returned. I realized how precious our cabin had become to me. One would think that the discovery of something like this in one's life would create absolute panic, and special fear concerning the place where it had happened. At first the thought of the cabin filled me with dread, but by the time we went back I felt more reconciled to my situation. It was as if ignoring what had been happening to me required a very substantial effort. Screen memories and amnesia have to be maintained, and there is an emotional cost.

If mine was not an uncommon experience, it might be that we live in a society that bears a secret bruise from it. But as more of us allow ourselves to see what we have fought so hard to ignore, maybe the bruise will begin to heal.

Standing in our living room, I recalled my own distressed state in, really, the past year or so. How many times I had gone through that house or my apartment in the midnight, opening closets and looking under beds. I was always perplexed at myself, because I did not understated my urgency to investigate — especially the corners and crannies. I always looked down low in the closets, seeking something small. Under hypnosis I remembered that I felt as if something very strange was about to put its hand on me and take me away. It was a most curious feeling, not unlike the mood created by the sound of wind in night trees, or the cast of moonlight upon an uneasy stream.

On the surface I was quite normal, but there was this persistent undertone of fear. I felt watched. even though I knew that I was not actually being observed. I bought my dun. I had the burglar alarm installed. I got the motion-sensitive lights.

What was all this supposed to be for in that peaceful, crime-free corner of the world?

Even at the time I'd had trouble rationalizing my fears. Now it was clear that they referred not to conventional burglars and such, but to this furtive presence in my life. And this presence was coming to seem. to me to be quite real.

The moment I walked into the bedroom I was struck by what I can only describe as a sense of the true. Being in the place where the events had happened made it essentially impossible for me to separate them from other reality. The whole experience of the twenty-sixth, especially the first few moments, rested in the part of my mind that recalled reality, and was as completely distinguished from dream as any other real memory. Those first moments, when the person wearing the shieldlike cards entered the room, were a memory. I was not in any sort of trance when that happened. I was not asleep. I had been conscious and m a state that seemed m every way to be normal.