The first scenes were panoramic. They were pastoral, peaceful, even boring at times. Only later was there action, along with strange people coming on and going off camera, often in many different scenes. Oddly there was no main character, no main focus to bring these strange people together. Only when they began triggering emotional responses consistent with the visual, auditory, and tactile sensations I saw, did it start to make sense to me. All the scenes were set around a central character, an unseen actor that starred from behind the camera in every scene. After sentience came thoughts, reasoning, and finally identity. He was the focus, everyone interacted with him, everything happened to him and vicariously to me because of this strange first-person point of view.

In time, with practice, I was able to summon these 'movies' at will, experiencing them over and over in an attempt to form a timeline. I found, after a while, the more often I viewed a particular clip the more intimate I became with it and the more confidence I had to emulate the actions I was empathically experiencing in my head.

This unseen actor was a farmer, an organ player in an Eastern Orthodox Church, a soldier, and a prisoner. Eventually, I became adept at all these things, but the music came first.

At night I would go to my room, turn out the lights, sit on the floor in darkened silence and fill my head with the haunting sounds of his Eastern Orthodox organ music. Again and again, I would watch his calloused, dirty finger-nailed hands run gracefully over the rows of keys and levers as I mimicked his playing with my own hands. I memorized one song after another, night after night, until I had enough material and confidence to try it at a real organ.

Our family drove the twenty miles to the nearest Lutheran church only twice each year, Christmas and Easter, so I wasn't surprised that the minister didn't remember me when I showed up on a Thursday in mid-June wearing my best Sunday clothes. I had been concentrating so hard on this new and wonderful skill I seemed to be picking up that I hadn't thought about how I was going to ask if I could have access to a semi-sacred, very expensive piece of equipment. When he opened the door I just blurted it out. "I want to play the organ."

His first reaction was less than enthusiastic but when I thought up a story and told him that the holy spirit had entered me and given me the gift to play the organ shortly after his Easter mass he had no choice but to agree, under his supervision of course.