In trying to select the most enlightening periods of my life to write about, I found myself continually returning to two experiences in my past that I found enlightening yet did not seem representative of an Exceptional Human Experience. Neither experience contained the "awe, surprise, wonder or delight" generally associated with an EHE, nor were they mystical or psychic in origin. Eventually I dismissed them, intent on not using them as examples. But by dismissing them, I seemed to encourage them, both experiences playing themselves back in my mind until the footage began to resemble a bad "B" rated film. What was I missing? I wondered.

In reliving both experiences on paper, I found that they did contain elements of an EHE. Both contained catalysts enabling growth as well as feelings suggestive of a "more" to my existence. In addition, I discovered that one experience had recently "expired" while the other remained alive and active, serving as a reference for similar experiences some twenty years later.

This recognition caused me to backtrack and look at the word "exceptional" and what it meant to me. Were only psychic experiences exceptional? Fear and pain experiences? Death experiences?

By defining "exceptional," my EHE’s quickly fell into place.

The Gum Tree

My hopeful expectations of a better world were fulfilled at the age of six.

I had just come home from school when my father met me in the living room.

"The gum tree has sprouted," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"The gum tree, out front. It’s sprouted."

I blinked. "We have a gum tree?"

"Sure," dad said. "Come on, I’ll show you." We went out the front door and to the corner of the house. There, on a tree, a tree I had always ignored as simply a tree, sticks of Wrigley’s gum dotted every branch.

My first question was not surprising. "Can I pick it?!!!"

"Sure," dad said. Together we harvested the crop which amounted to several packs of gum, a sizable bounty to a six year old.

My mind whirled. What would my friends say when they found out? I had never heard of a gum tree. Had they? Everyone would want to see it. I would become terribly important to children everywhere, people would come from far and wide to see my tree. I would win the free ice cream at Show-n-Tell.

"When will it sprout again?" I asked excitedly, trailing my fathers heels as we went back indoors. "When?"

"Oh, that’s the only harvest, dear. Just sprouts once in its lifetime and then it’s all over."

And that was it.

I remembered this experience initially because it was a fulfillment of a child’s dream. The fact that it had been crushed by a single harvest meant little; in fact, it made that single harvest all the more special. I took the gum to school and showed my friends. Everyone was suitably impressed. I felt as though I had been an intimate witness to something special; something they had not seen.

Upon closer examination this experience took on a new light. At the time this event occurred, my childish world of fantasy was beginning to fall under adult influence. Through school, home and interaction with friends, my childhood was being gently stripped away as I was introduced to terms such as "responsibility," "time," and "money." That the gum tree began to emerge in drawings and paintings (even today, sometimes) was not surprising; it represented a world I was clinging to despite a forced merger with a new, more "realistic" world. I recognize my tree now as something that made that transition easier.

The Flying Box

Sometime after this, I was playing with a friend on her front lawn. I looked down the street in front of us and saw something floating in the air. It was a bright red box, about a foot wide and a foot tall. It was suspended in the air, about five feet off the ground and moving in a straight line. It was moving towards us.

I pointed out the box to my friend and we both stood, watching it come in our direction. It did not move from side to side or up and down, it simply came straight ahead at a consistent speed.

When it drew close, I ran under it. I was afraid to touch it so just studied it quickly as it sailed past. I saw something silver attached to the corner of the box. My friend and I watched as it went in between the houses and trees and disappeared. We were both impressed that the pretty box had managed to avoid colliding with the houses and trees.

"A box kite," my father said later, upon hearing my description. I didn’t know what a box kite was so he had to explain it. When he finished, I shook my head.

"That would have a string, right?" This box had no string, had no kid running under it and did not float in air but moved straight ahead. It was not a box kite.

What made this experience exceptional was the frustration I felt in trying to describe the box, being told that it was a box kite when I knew it was not and being left at a loss as to what it really was when I had no identity on which to base it. (Fifteen years later I would recognize this type of frustration in NDE-er’s, trying to put into words an experience for which no vocabulary seemed to exist.) This was the first memory I have of recognizing that I was detached from my parents, that I had the ability to judge a situation on my own and that their answer was wrong because I knew it.

The Psychic

In 1976, my grandmother passed away. I loved and missed her but had grown accustomed to only seeing her twice a year because she lived so far away. Thus, in 1985, when I went to a psychic for a reading, I was initially baffled when the psychic said that there was an older woman standing behind me. I wasn’t making the connection with my grandmother. When I finally realized it must be her, I said so. The psychic said a few things that would be applicable to my grandmother and also said that my grandmother kept pointing at her ring. I had no idea what the latter meant and did not consider it important.

Later I visited my parents and told my mother about the reading. Mom was standing with her back to me at the kitchen sink, I was seated at the kitchen table. I told her several things that the psychic had said about her mother and mom nodded, saying, "yes, that’s true. That’s correct."

I was about to go on to another aspect of the reading when I remembered the ring. "Oh, and the psychic said that grandmother kept pointing at her ring," I added.

My mother nearly dropped what she was holding and turned to look at me abruptly. "You’re kidding," she said.

Puzzled, I repeated myself. That’s when I found out the story of the ring. Or, stories, actually. Gram wore a ring which was her treasured possession. One day she went out to weed her garden. She returned to the house after weeding to find that her ring was missing. She didn’t search the garden; it was too large and she had weeded far too many rows to locate such a small object. She was heartbroken. Later that summer, my uncle went to pull some vegetables for her and returned to the house with a dozen potatoes and one ring. Gram slipped the ring back on, intent on not losing it again. But she did. Once more the ring disappeared. It was located later that year in her sewing box. Then, after Gram died, the ring disappeared one last time. When my grandmother was lying in her coffin at the viewing, my mother and her sister noticed that her ring was missing,. Since the ring was my grandmothers prized possession , they became frantic. Where was the ring??? A search ensued. The ring was eventually located in the coffin itself. It had slid off my grandmothers finger and hidden itself in a fold of satin.

Having no knowledge of these incidents, this experience was exceptional to me in that it served to validate the psychic while affirming the presence of my grandmother who appeared through me to get a "message" to her daughter.

Aura’s and OBE’s

could not. An examination of the human eye showed that the ability to see aura’s resided

in the internal structure of the eye itself (either round or oval) and was due to light refraction.]

An exceptional experience that I believe dealt with a human aura was not an aura that I observed but one which appeared to be observed by a police K-9 dog named "Jolly." I was a police officer at the time and had responded to a housing project for a missing baby complaint. If the baby had been snatched, and thus carried away above ground level, we would need a good dog to track the suspect via the baby’s scent.

Jolly was one of the officers responding to the scene to help with an area search. He was a beautiful long haired German Shepherd, a terrorizing attacker and an excellent tracker. Unfortunately, excellent wasn’t good enough. We needed a more sensitive nose, that of a blood hound. We found out via radio that the closest blood hound was two hours away. A chopper was ordered up to have the dog flown in. This reduced our wait to forty minutes.

While waiting for the chopper, I was trading information with the K-9 officer who was sitting in his police car. Jolly was in the back seat in his cage. At one point, Jolly looked past me and growled. I turned to look behind me but no one was approaching. In the distance I saw a group of children milling around the police perimeter, a man walking out the door of one of the apartment complexes and several known addicts pacing back and forth, both nervous and annoyed by our presence. Jolly didn’t like any of them.

The conversation continued and Jolly growled again. Once more I checked my back but no one was approaching. The same scene played out in the distance only this time the man that I had previously seen walking out of the apartment building was now walking back in.

I tried to trace the dogs focal point. What was the dog looking at? Was he watching the man or the group of children? I couldn’t tell. I looked at the police officer to see if he noticed anything unusual about his dog’s behavior. Obviously he didn’t. Immune to a back seat occupant who growled, snapped and barked continuously, he was absorbed in a report that I had handed him to review.

Was I being overly suspicious or was Jolly picking up on something that we couldn’t see? Curious, I leaned back against the cruiser and stared in the direction of the children and waited. A few minutes later the man I had observed walk into the building came back outside. Jolly reacted immediately, turning a circle in the back seat which, due

to lack of room, constituted his pacing maneuver. He gave a low growl.

"Something’s not right here," I said and told the K-9 officer I’d be back. I went to another officer who worked that area and pointed the man out. Did he know who he was?

Six minutes later the officer reappeared with the man. He was obviously under

arrest as he was handcuffed behind his back. Directly behind him came the other officer. Carrying a baby. The baby as it turned out.

I had the presence of mind to turn and look at Jolly. He made no sound but was studying the scene with acute interest. He stood , staring, his tail almost at a point.

I cannot prove, of course, that Jolly was looking at an aura. For all I know, the boyfriend of the mother of the missing baby-- who had hidden the child in his apartment--may have been continuously peeking out the window. Jolly may have seen him, sensed something wrong and simply responded naturally. While this experience was thought provoking, it did not become exceptional until another experience seemed to reinforce it.

This experience involved an OBE. While welcoming the prospect of OBE’s, my credits in this department are few. I’ve had three conscious OBE’s in my life, all of which occurred safely in my house. I flew around, studied things and that was about it. It was during the third OBE that something different occurred. I was flying around my room when I stopped and hovered above the foot of the bed. I looked down and there was my cat, Topol. She looked lazily up at me, nothing unusual. I, however, was ecstatic with the realization that my cat could see me. I remember thinking this, completely flabbergasted. "My cat can see me!! She can see me!" I suddenly realized that when my animals were studying something that I couldn’t see that they were seeing things like "me," astro-projected forms. I moved around the room and watched as Topol followed my movement. She looked completely bored and unimpressed. The way she always looks.

In retrospect, this experience made me feel a little "slow." Having had animals all my life , I always credited myself with being able to "read" them. I thought I was "open" and "sensitive" to them. Upon closer examination, I was anything but. In the past, whenever one of my cats would turn abruptly and study empty space, I would immediately wonder what he "heard." I would turn down the television and listen along with him. If one growled for no reason and charged from the room, I would glance around for my other cat, thinking he had playfully sprung on his cohort and angered him. Whatever, I would automatically dismiss any action which did not have an apparent basis.

I regard this EHE as "in progress," one that will be followed by future EHE’s that eliminate the static and fine-tune my understanding. The passage of time since my OBE enables me to view this EHE as a fine example of how slowly EHE’s can present themselves, offering no more information that I’m capable of handling at any given time.

Cayce said that in order to experience something in the material world, we must first build the idea in the dream world. Only then can it manifest outwardly. This casts an

interesting light on my EHE’s, stating that in order to experience an EHE, I must first create an EHE. I see this as true, envisioning my inner self creating an experience that will enlighten my outer self and contribute to growth for "us." I also see that the reverse is true, my outer self questioning an exterior event which my inner self then tries to answer. Recognizing that this constant give-and-take process exists is mystifying, offering endless possibilities for growth, awareness and expansion.