About a year and a half ago, my son Jay, nine years old, started having what I think are spontaneous out-of-body experiences. The first one happened when he was camping with his father and his father's girlfriend (we have been separated since Jay was one year old). Jay told me later that he was drifting off to sleep in the tent about twenty metres from where his father was sitting at the campfire. All of a sudden, he had a burst of energy and thought he had woken up as he was now sitting right in front of the campfire listening to his father talk to his girlfriend. After some time he turned around to head back to the tent, which is when he saw his body still lying in the tent, apparently asleep. When he told his father what had happened, he was scolded and told that it wasn't true, and that if it was true it was the devil trying to enter his body, so he had better stop it.

I assumed this was a dream until a few months later when he came to me one morning and asked, "Why do you take your socks off to go to sleep, Mum?" I asked him how he knew this as he is always asleep before I go to bed. He replied, "Because I was standing in front of your bed watching you take off your socks and glasses, have a drink of water and turn the light off before you went to sleep. "But I had the door shut and I don't remember seeing you," I told him. He explained that he had come into my room while his body was still in his bed asleep.

I was in hospital when he had his next OBE. He said it was late at night and he saw a nurse with black hair and a gold broach in the form of a cat on her uniform above her nametag. She was talking to me and I was crying. All of this was true: I was crying because I felt bad at not being able to be home with him on the school holidays.

Two weeks later he came to me again - he told me about things I was talking about on the phone when I was at home in bed, about what book I was reading and how I had changed my winter pajamas for summer ones before I went to sleep. Again I asked him how he knew all this and he replied in a matter-of-fact tone, "Because I was in your room again last night while my body was sleeping."

On another occasion, we were driving to see my sister's new house in western Australia for the first time. Half way there Jay said, "I can see a huge room with a piece of wood about a foot from the ceiling going all the way around the wall in this room, and the ceilings are twice as high as normal -- but I don't know where I have seen the room before." After we arrived, we had a tour of the house. When we got to my sister's room, Jay said, "Mum, this is the room I saw when we were driving to Aunty Leah's house."

An Australian Mother
Perth
hrdwrknperthie@hotmail.com

Posted Sept. 29, 2005