sensitive girl inaugurates a new era of unexpected sensual tenderness in my life. Along with this new sexual dispensation comes electric sensation. I lie in bed and stream with energy. The cataleptic episodes come more often, with torrential force. Energies ascend my spine like mercury zooming up a thermometer on a summer day. Im completely ignorant of writings about kundalini, auras, and the like, though not completely in the dark about trance states, due to reading an early biography of Edgar Cayce, entitled There Is a River . Each day after school for four days, I cloister myself in my room, determined to move through the now-familiar, paralyzing fear and to break through to whatever state beckons from beyond it. I drop the blinds, and listen to St. Matthew Passion while supine. For the first three of these days, I ride the rapturous voices into that charged hypnagogic state of half-sleep-and-half-awakeness where my energy surges, but wont fully release and flow. I end up in catalepsy, sensing a great potential for as yet undiscovered depths. How to proceed? On the fourth afternoon, toward early evening, I listen for awhile, plunge into that electrified medium yet again, but this time to my startled delight, I rise from the bed, feeling amazingly weightless, and walk toward the door, all a-sparkle with energy. Upon reaching the door, I simply walk right through it. I stand by the stairway in wonder, feeling my body, ignited at all its infinitesimal points, and realize (logic prevails here) that Ive just walked through a solid door and that therefore Im in another body! This recognition jolts me back into my bedroom, where I instantly re-enter my resting form. I come back most enlivened, having at last passed beyond the cataleptic barrier, the previously impassable portal to greater depth and new freedom of movement in a subtle, imaginal dimension. So begins a period of what one might call training: I learn to navigate in a plane of energetic counterparts to physical reality, through fluid, changing landscapes; some identical to the street and tree scenes around our home, some very foreign to me. I visit green meadows where flowers bloom in colors never seen by physical eyes. There are sudden flights into cloudy, tumbling skyscapes, or plummets into deep sea waters. These experiences are alternately and sometimes simultaneously terrifying and ecstatic.