I reflected that the abduction to a round room had a long, long tradition in our culture: There were many such cases in the fairy lore. The story called "Connla and the Fairy Maiden," as collected in Joseph Jacobs's Celtic Fairy Tales (Bodley Head, 1894, 1985). could with some changes be a modern tale of the visitors.

As suggestive as this was of the possibly historical roots of the experience, it was no more definitive of that origin than the whole texture was of the notion of recent visitors.

Maybe the fairy was a real species, for example. Perhaps they now floated around in unidentified flying objects and wielded insight-producing wands because they have enjoyed their own technological revolution.

Every time one decides either that this is psychological or real, one soon finds a theory that forcefully reopens the case in favor of the opposite notion.

The most difficult part of my hypnotic material was the sudden regression to 1957. How could I explain that, even in terms of visitors? To do so, I had to revise my whole understanding of what my life had been. At the beginning of this chapter I described myself as being deeply upset by that unexpected regression. Well, that was true.

But it was no more than a mild state of unease compared to how I felt after I had made a careful inventory of my past.

FOUR

A child said What is the grass?

fetching it to me, with full hands;

How could I answer the child?

I do not know what it is

any more than he

—WALT WHITMAN. "Song of Myself",
from Leaves of Grass

THE SKY BENEATH MY FEET

A Journey Through My Past

The Journey Back

SUMMER, 1957

The more I thought about it, the less able I was to accept the idea that this had been happening to me most of my life. When Budd Hopkins asked me if I remembered anything in the past, I did mention a few odd incidents. The memory of being taken from the train was not among them.

If I accepted that this happened and that it was buried even more completely than the events of October 4, then what else must I accept? Inevitably, that my conscious life was nothing more than a disguise for another reality. It is easy to speculate about such a thing on an idle evening, but when one considered the terrific intensity of the experience I had remembered, thinking that this might have happened again and again had the potential to shatter me.

Still, I could not simply reject the notion. Why should I? Because it seemed improbable?

All of this seemed improbable. As an experiment I decided to return to my past and see just what I could come-up with. As best I was able I reviewed the years for hints of this material.

I wondered, though, how I could ever tell if the seeking and the finding were the same act.