"ONE" - Read the first chapter

ONE The first contact: Foretelling Dream and the First Encounter

It happened on the evening of a sunny day. My brother and I came home to rest after a long working day. My brother was sleeping in his room, and I was dozing off facing the wall my bed lay across. After a few moments, I shut my eyes and, for the first time in my life, found myself within a dream that was taking place outside my body, at that very room.

In my dream, I knew I was outside my body, which I sow sleeping in bed.

I didn’t have an actual body, perhaps something akin to a child’s small body, transparent, without any finite outlines.

I felt happy. I was close to the bed, hovering over it, then sitting at the nearby table, looking around, at peace, fully conscious and aware of what was going on, looking-watching smilingly, fondly, at my sleeping body.

In those moments, I knew I was outside my body. The sensation of the distance from my body felt pleasant, liberating, free, and light. I had a good feeling. I was seeing, sensing, smelling, and hearing everything that was going on around me without the familiar boundaries. I felt my brother sound asleep in the next room on the other side of the wall, breathing calmly.

And then, I saw them too. They were in the room as well, inhuman figures between the armchair and the couch, by the TV. One of them was standing by my sleeping body, watching it.

I looked at them amused, watched them wobble along in a funny, clumsy way across the room from one spot to another. They were casing the joint with such curiosity and wonder. One of them picked up a piece of paper very carefully, as though seeing it for the first time. He touched it and felt it, clasped his fingers around it, listened for the sound of crumpling paper, smelled it. They looked like inhuman children in a new playground. I felt I knew them like they were childhood friends of mine.

They were a little under four foot three tall. Their heads were slightly bigger than ours. I do not recall how many fingers they had. I think I saw five in each hand, longer than our own, gentle and supple. One of the guests was chubby, his belly protruding over scrawny legs. His walk was also clumsier than that of the others. Another was so skinny I could see the outline of his bones right under his skin…

I was watching all this calmly, blissfully. We were all rejoicing together. The chubby fella was going back and forth across the mat, wobbling like a duck, marveling and laughing like a child taking his very first steps. The more solemn among the guests was concentrating on my sleeping body over the bed, watching it closely, focusing on my head, which was resting on the pillow. I felt he was communicating with my body, perhaps trying to help with something...

I remember that at the end of the dream, when I knew I was about to return to my body, I was laughing along with them, prolonged, wholehearted laughter of understanding, acceptance, and love for one another. I also vaguely recall that this laughter we all shared had some reason to it, we had known something meaningful together, something loving and pleasant. Perhaps we were laughing at the human confusion and the fear this brings about.

I woke up lying in bed, still smiling, recalling the weird dream.

I wondered about this unfamiliar expanse my imagination had brought forth, complete with such a palpable dream, which was so strange and wild.

Suddenly, I heard these strange sounds coming from inside this room I was in, like bare feet making rapid steps across the mat. I rubbed my eyes. I was still in bed, facing the wall. I heard the rustle of things being moved about, crumpling paper, strange whispers. My smile was gone. I felt my heart pounding.

‘Thieves broke in? Are they trying to keep quiet so I don’t wake up?’

I remembered I had locked the door from the inside. ‘Impossible. No one could possibly have gotten in’.

I quickly turned around to face the room. An electric shock hit me hard and I began to tremble helplessly. Right across from me, less than two feet away, stood one of the visitors from the dream I just had. He was staring right at me.

Four or five others were standing right behind him.

His huge eyes looked deep into me. They were black and shiny, like pupils that had grown to a huge size. I felt small like he was observing me under a microscope.

I felt a terrible fear. It was strong and unfamiliar. I curled up and gasped. My breath stopped. I tried to digest the fact that I was looking at the same visitors I had just seen in a dream.

I did not understand what I was seeing. ‘Is this the dream going on or did I wake up?’ I shook my head, pinched my hand and the pain made me realize I was awake. ‘Am I out of my mind? What’s going on? What’s happening to me?’

The visitor’s gaze went right through me with such force, such an immense, paralyzing effect. Fear was rapidly surging within me. My muscles contracted so hard, I couldn’t move. ‘Something strange, out of this world, scary, is invading my insides now.’ It felt so scary to be someone else’s slave, another person who dominates me, has me act as he pleases. I felt this danger like I had only a few more moments before I’m taken up by something so much bigger than me. ‘He’s about to swallow me.’

‘They are out of this world.’ That much was obvious to me. Their curious bodies had these bright green and orange-rust patches. Their skin had grooves, and yet, it was gentle and soft, hairless… Their heads were big in relation to their small bodies. Their eyes were black, elliptical, no eyelids, so big they took up most of their face. They had two tiny slits for a nose, a very narrow groove right below, no lips, and a small chin. The sight of them before my very eyes seemed like my own end, like ceasing to be: like death.

The guest wasn’t speaking to me, but something inside me knew he was seeing and experiencing everything I was feeling and thinking, that I was like an open book to him. In my paralysis, I saw my own fear and helplessness reflected through his shiny eyes.

He was experiencing my pain as though it was his own, and I knew this experience was unfamiliar to him. I felt how, for the very first time, he experienced human fear. I felt him worrying, wanting me to keep calm, and at the same time, doing nothing, merely holding on, suffering my own fear of death screaming inside my own body, ‘enough already, run, RUN!’

The guest just kept standing there, right next to me. I was sitting there, frozen. It felt like the was pain drilling through my mind. ‘Why am I paralyzed with fear? Why are they taking control over me, penetrating my every thought? What do they want from me?’

I recalled that pleasant dream I just had before. ‘It’s them. They were there. So, what was it? It wasn’t really a dream? A short while ago I knew them and it was all fine, without this fear…’ For one brief moment, I was able to stop this trembling all over, this terrible fear for my life. In my very last once of strength, in my desperation, and perhaps because I had no other choice, I tried to look beyond my fear, to regard them as something else too. In some hopeful attitude, unrelated to my own body, still petrified and anxious, I was looking into his eyes, searching for that love I remembered from the dream.

The pain and the sound of that drilling I kept hearing, as though it was forcing its way right through me all this time, began slowing down. As it adjusted its pace, it began to sound different, clearer, more intelligible. ‘Are these their thoughts? Their emotions?’

The noise continued to slow down, and I began noticing more sensations, more thoughts. ‘Is this their communication that I’m hearing? Sensing?’

And it was at that precise moment, that I began experiencing them with my own consciousness. All at once, the full awareness of the being before me flowed at me, and through him, via him, that of all the others to. The sight of their faces did not change, but everything the guests were thinking or sensing passed on to me too, and was now inside me, expanding, as it were my own consciousness. Their thoughts did not consist of definite words. Rather, this was a wide expanse, a multifaceted, flowing space of consciousness that was experiencing an enormously huge experience. They were experiencing a simple peace I was not familiar with. It had no sense of superiority, as you would expect given their formidable power.

The guests’ consciousness was like an open book to me. I felt them completely: pleasant, still, lucid and clear. I noticed how their thoughts and emotions are harmonious, unified, unseparated.

I experienced their love and acceptance, toward me as well, and not thanks to anything about me. Likewise, they simply accepted themselves and each other unconditionally, endlessly. They are transparent, upfront and self-conscious, as well as toward one another, without any need to hide, playact, repress or be anything else other than what they were precisely at that moment. I felt they loved themselves and accepted themselves at face value, without any judgment, good or bad, and that was the same way they treated whatever was around them, their own kind, any human beings, or anything else whatsoever…

This feeling reminded me of something from my distant past, so distant, I even forgot I had missed it. It was innocence, pure, childlike innocence…

The fear I was sensing abated somewhat, and I opened up to the guest before me a bit more. He felt this, and his openness toward me got so intense, his entire being was given unto me, to have as my own. I knew I was now experiencing his thoughts, sensing his own emotions, his self, his consciousness, spreading, unbound, limitless, beyond the confines of definitions. It was such a pleasant sensation I can barely describe it.

‘He is aware of any speck of matter inside this room and beyond, of any point in time and place, far above and beyond my comprehension.’

For the first time in my life, I sensed my own self via their consciousness, from a different perspective: I saw me, the expanses of my own consciousness, through them. Together with them and via their perception, my own consciousness too was experiencing and spreading in any direction in time, to the past and the future wide and full of possibilities. I knew clearly that this capacity of expanding consciousness that I was experiencing now is something any person can have.

We experienced each other in a completely different way than the way we humans experience one another and reality in general. There were no boundaries, no form of separation between us. I saw what each and every one of them saw, just as I was seeing it for myself. We share consciousness: each of the visitors was experiencing the whole of us, and at the same time, each and every one of us had a consciousness of his own, personal, clear, distinct and unique unto itself. In some wondrous way, we also experienced a sense of belonging to the whole. The physical distance between us had become symbolic and distinguishing, but not a separation.

I experienced infinite contents through the connection we built. I wanted to know more about them. I had questions. I asked, "are you from another planet?" My question made them laugh, but their laughter was not a sound.

Then, all at once, I received a reply right into me, like a surprising understanding with no beginning and end. They answered me without the words that make up human thought. It was far from the way we humans think or speak. It was as if through one injection into me, I received a whole content that, were I to translate it to my own words, would run as follows:

"Well, ‘another planet’ is the logical place according to your reasoning. For you, this is the most suitable translation for what you are experiencing – that we came from a different place, far away ... in your language, you might say that we came from another dimension."

I allowed myself to open up to them, without thought, without fear and without being disturbed by their presence within me, the space they occupied in me. At that moment, I felt the attention of everyone in the room turned to me in full. Joy and immense love broke forth and flowed from them to every cell in my body.

I felt them more and more as some part of me. They now knew me as they experienced a dormant part of them that has awakened, awakened unto to itself and thus to the reality around it, expanding as light spreads, touches and illuminates some other place. I was now connected to a vast, radiant essence.

Vibrations of acceptance and love were now reverberating between us. My complete merger with them, starting with my own familiar self, was now spreading far beyond, to experience another presence now. It was the presence of some tremendous love that goes far beyond the guests themselves. Its source was different, incomprehensible to me. It was a love that illuminated something within me, evoking something I had forgotten. I felt this torrent of bliss flowing through me like water.

Now, I was becoming aware of a place in my own body that had always contained something akin to infinite light, some sort of immense power and love whose origin was beyond my comprehension, as well as beyond the grasp of the visitors.

I tried to track the source of this light, that I was experiencing in every cell and fiber of my body and mind. I realized this was the foundation of my being and my consciousness, of everything I was aware of, that in fact, it held, sustained and realized my very existence. It was clear to me that this was also the very source of life itself, and that it had actually contained within it the whole of existence and of reality, and that this it is the very "light" everything and anything consists of. I knew that for the visitors, their constant awareness of it was the reason for their sense of security, peace, and happiness, and in those moments, mine too.

Within a split second, I saw images of my life’s memories and thoughts from that moment back in time – all the way to my early childhood. This light has always been there. It was the very source and the very force that enabled my life - and reality as a whole.

The pain, the hardship, the suffering and the evil, that I had witnessed and experienced throughout me until then also stemmed from the same light that sustains and loves.

I saw that love has always been the existential basis for everything that has happened. A sense of calm and comfort overwhelmed me as I realized that in fact everything that had happened or would ever happen in the future was and is an act of that same tremendous light and love, whether I realize this or not.

I knew that the visitors were aware of this with their entire being, that they had always been grateful, sensing the love for that one light that encompasses and sustains everything. They were happy to have received the right to experience the interaction with this light simply and continuously, happy to be connected to it and to have dedicated themselves to it. In some natural, simple way, they are aware that it sustains them, that it is not separate from them and that nevertheless, it also exceeds them. They are aware of their place within it and wish what it wishes.

Passionate at the prospect of experiencing this light, I wanted to see and understand more and more. I asked them without words, “What is this light? Is this God? Is this the source of our reality? So, what is it? I wish to understand more, what lays beyond it? What supersedes it and contains it?”