With this, I sprang up from the couch. Two things happened at once. Before my startled eyes, the two intruders began to disappear as if space itself was eating away at their edges. Then a severe, shattering click came at the base of my neck. The next thing I knew, I was back on the couch, thrown there in some fashion that utterly escaped me. The room was just as it had been, but the men were gone. Moreover, there was nothing to prove that they’d ever been there. Something else: I remembered opening my eyes, though I don’t recall ever closing them. As soon as the men vanished, I ran to the French doors and threw them open. The geranium pot was in pieces on the patio floor.

As the days passed, I convinced myself that the whole affair had been some kind of dream-within-a-dream. Only one thing bothered me: my certainty that I had jumped up from the couch the moment the men’s images were vanishing, while the next minute I was back on the couch, with my eyes closed. If it were only a dream, why would I have thought my eyes opened or closed? I mean, usually in dreams you see what you see, and that’s the end of it, or so I thought at the time. The clicking at the back of my neck was also difficult to explain away, but I decided it was caused by some spasmodic jerking of my muscles.

I didn’t tell anyone about the experience. Indeed, I managed to put it out of my mind so well that I might have forgotten it entirely if it hadn’t been followed by an even more bizarre event. This next, more alarming, episode happened about a week later, and there was no way I could assign it to dream activity.

As far as I can recall, this was the sequence of events. I was at my desk, concentrating on a student’s paper. It was devoted to a discussion of some experiments we’d done on the frontal lobes of rats. Then, without transition, I was caught up in an experience of frightful intensity. First, my body felt as if it was expanding, yet growing lighter in weight. The process continued until I felt impossibly light. Miles of space seemed to exist between my ears.