Occult Experiments in the Home

There was some lucidity earlier in the week, but it didn’t feel quite right.

It was early evening and the city was damp. I realised I could fly and raised myself to the top of a telegraph pole. I felt exhilarated as I shouted out: ‘Who’s in charge?’ I was certain some powerful and interesting being would appear and talk to me. But no one did. The city was deserted. It felt like a rebuke – as if I had not approached this exercise in the right manner.

Then, last night, there were lots of lucid incidents joined in a chain.

In one, the moon was rising above the rooftops. Again I could fly, so I rose up, curious to look directly into the moon’s full light. It was very bright, but the bulk of its face was hidden behind a chimney. Yet each time I changed position so that I would see, the world revised its perspective; the moon and the earth shifted so that again I couldn’t see.

I attempted this a few times, amused, but with the same result. It was some kind of rule: that the world I was in didn’t want me to look at any light above a certain threshold.

Then Alan and I were at different ends of a long street. I yelled to him that I was lucid and that he should interpret the object I was about to throw as a direct message from the spirit Tempe. I threw a tennis ball, and watched as it transfigured along its arc, becoming a plastic bottle, a cricket ball, and landed at Alan’s feet too far away for me to see. When he threw it back it struck the concrete as a golf-ball, yet smacked into my palm as an apple, shiny green and red. So this was the message from Tempe: an apple.

Then I was in a pub and the quality of the lucidity felt quite solid so I determined it was time to press on with the project. I asked the woman behind the bar: ‘Who’s in charge?’

She couldn’t speak, but pointed me toward the restaurant area. Something about her expression made me ask: ‘Is it worth me finding out?’ She gave me an exasperated look.

The dining area was small but quite crowded. I looked around, and it didn’t take me long to identify the man the barmaid meant. He was skinny and tall, dressed in a yellow shirt and trousers with thick black horizontal stripes. As I approached he stood up on his chair and fumbled for something above him in what appeared a skylight or an attic hatchway.

I recognised him at once: ‘You’re Raphael!’ I said.

He nodded and smiled, and said something like: ‘You are the man to say that.’ (Once again, I had the sense that the speech of angels is difficult to reduce to human terms.) He had a pointed, roguish face. There was an earring in one ear and a short ponytail in his greying hair.

It occurred to me I’d been too hasty. I’d presumed he was the archangel Raphael, but any old spirit would probably be only too happy to take on this projection.

‘Are you Raphael?’ I said. To which he answered: ‘Yes.’ So now I knew it was true.

From the skylight or hatchway he handed down to me a small twist of paper with something inside. It looked like drugs, or maybe it was just one of those little explosive wraps of powder that children like to throw around.

The dream ended abruptly before I could take it in my hand. But I’ve started to come around to the idea that there’s never any failure with these visions. I’m pretty confident I saw and heard everything I was supposed to.