The closed doors

Long ago, when I was probably around 12 years old, on a trip with my family in our car, I was thinking about how hard it was to think now. I felt that it should be easy, all these things I was having problems with, and I should know a lot more than I did. I was basically raging against it, mad that it should be that way.

Looking out the car window, I then looked upward, with my eyes but also in my mind, and saw the blue of the sky fade into a grainy darkness. I went into that darkness, and I saw a massive, dimly lit corridor, very high ceilinged, with many sharp zigzags along the left-side wall. The walls of the zigzags held massive doors, on the sides facing me. and the wall on the right also had doors. They were very tall, around twice my height, heavy boards reinforced with heavy metal straps, some of the doors even vault-like, metal with layered metal slabs. They were all either closed and locked or slammed shut as I approached them.

I walked slowly down the tall corridor, looking at the doors. After a short distance the corridor turned to the right, with straight walls and more doors, somewhat wider spaced. It went on a long distance in that direction, too far to really see the end. To the left, in the corner, was another massive door, metal and heavily reinforced. It was open, but each time I approached it it slammed shut, locked against me.

Though I tried a few times, going back into the darkness to them, I could never get through the doors, and I knew that I couldn't, not now and not for a long time, perhaps not until near the end of my life. They had been closed, either by me or someone else, to keep me away from the knowledge and abilities that I used to have.

I felt that it had been a decision made long ago, maybe before I was born, and that several people were involved. There had been discussions of it and the decision was made, and was being enforced by those who were left to do it, who kept watch on it, and made sure that it was done. They appeared in my mind as giant figures, as a very small child might see an adult. They were wearing simple, rural clothes, and were in a small room of a house, similar to what my grandmother's farm on the highway had looked like, though they would have been in one of the bedrooms instead of the living room. They were sitting on a small couch in front of a coffee table, and on other chairs around it, sometimes standing, too. It felt that I was also somehow one of them, or was with them in some way, and was taking part in the discussion, was even one of the people pushing the decision, was in fact the leader behind it.

After the discussion was finished, the others got up and turned and faded through the walls like ghosts, on their way to carry out and enforce the decision. The other me, though, I felt had withdrawn the other way some, and upward through the ceiling. He didn't seem to be an actual figure at this point, more like a mostly unseen presence. Perhaps he had always been that way, though it was a presence that could make itself known, and could carry on a discussion in some way, perhaps mentally. It felt, too, that somehow that presence was still out there somewhere, that it didn't all become me, that the greater part of it still watched and waited on the other side of life.

Although I felt there must have been some kind of reasoning behind it, something that was felt to be valid by my other, greater self, and by whoever else was keeping the doors closed, and though they obviously had greater knowledge about such things than I did, I wanted them open now, and was mad that I was restricted in this way.


This could be interpreted as a sense of a past life or lives when I was an adult and had more knowledge and abilities than a child would have. Perhaps a better interpretation, though, would be a memory of a time between lives, when I would presumably have greater knowledge and awareness, and was setting the goals and the path of my next, now current, life. Other interpretations are also possible.