This is Home, Part 30 - Lamps, the Black Forest clock

This is part 30 of my mother's book about her life, written in 2004.



Lamps

Mom had a lot of beautiful lamps. One was pale pink, with embossed roses. It was glass, tall and graceful with a tall, slender chimney. She had one with brass, antique-looking feet and painted roses, and another that had gold trim and an old-fashioned picture on the side. That one was red. There was also a similar one that was pale blue. There were three plain glass ones with glass chimneys. One with a red base and a black Scotty. I loved that one. She brought them with her when she came out here.

The interesting one was the Aladdin lamp. It was metal. It gave out a white light. However, the inventor wasn't really thinking what he was doing. The flame had a small wire above it with a top and two sides. Stretched over the wire was gauze. It kept catching on fire and Uncle Doc kept rushing out and throwing it in the snow. We kept using it because it put out a lot more light than the other lamps. We could see to do lessons better. An ordinary lamp put out more light than a candle, but not a lot.

The Black Forest clock

Mom bought a Black Forest clock about the time I started high school. It had a door near the top in front. Instead of a talking bird, the children -- a boy and a girl -- came out if it was going to be a nice day. The old witch came out if we were going to have bad weather.

It really worked. I guess the extra dampness in the air made the witch come out. I remember looking at it before I left for high school. It was hanging on the wall in the kitchen, by the front door.

I remember stopping to look at the clock as I was leaving for school in the springtime when the air felt alive, heavy with moisture, and movable.

It felt wonderful and interesting, not just hot and dry like it does out here in Arizona, It made me feel alive.

Dream - Collapsible cars and my mother the pirate

Around November 17, 2007, I had a dream about school, work, devices that could collapse cars to a small size and then restore them, and my mother dressed like a pirate.

In the dream, I was in a school, and had missed most of the second year, with only a few days left. It was a very big, square, low building and I apparently also lived in it. The instructor was going to let me pass anyway by doing a quick catch-up of the work. He was wanting me to do something with a camera, perhaps construct one, but I think I also needed to take some pictures with it. He also wanted me to later make a movie camera, but first he wanted me to thread film into a projector. "You do know how to thread a projector, don't you?" I didn't say anything, though of course I didn't know.

Later, I was driving back and forth to Nevada. I had earlier bought a device, which was apparently shipped to me from the car manufacturer, that could collapse my car to a collection of tiny circuit boards about the size of a small camera, that could be kept in a bag that came with it. The car could later be reconstituted by adding water. It would recreate itself perfectly, to factory specifications, fixing anything that needed fixing, but still have anything extra that I had been keeping in the car. I had been driving the dark blue 1987 Oldsmobile, but I also bought a similar device for the 1970 Cadillac. I also later bought, for the Oldsmobile, improved versions of the device, one that was only about a quarter inch thick and one that was absolutely flat, the thickness of a playing card. Initially, I think the cost was 900,000 and something dollars, perhaps 980,000 or 960,000 or 920,000. Later, I bought the improved device (the quarter inch thick one) for 780,000 dollars.

At some point I was going uphill in the dark in the Oldsmobile, up a narrow street with cars parked on one side. Eventually it became too narrow to drive past the parked cars, and I collapsed my car and carried it in the bag. I think I was using the quarter inch thick version of the device at the time. I got to the sidewalk and turned left to go to the entrance of a building. I was very late and had been expected hours before. It was some type of eating place. My father had been waiting in a circular sunken outdoor room to the left of the entrance. He had evidently been sleeping a lot of the time. I joked with the hostess and also with my mother, who had also showed up, perhaps after me. I said that my father would have to give back all his naps and the food he ate when he left. The hostess laughed. I had also a little earlier joked about it with my mother.

Then, I was driving to work in the Nevada desert. My mother was with me and also my grandmother, who had died over twenty years ago. Somehow, then, someone else was driving and I was hugging my grandmother and kissing her, saying how happy I was to see her. I reminded her of the times, long age, when I sometimes stayed at her house. I said that I was going to do it again, but as I was saying it I suddenly felt unsure if I would be able to. She was smiling, but she never said anything. Her gray hair was undone and fell in a long, narrow band most of the way down her back.

We turned onto the entrance road to the place I worked and stopped off the road not far from the gate. Somehow we now had two cars, at least one of which was a rental. I'm not sure any of them had the necessary ID sticker to get past the gate. My mother was carrying something in a bag, perhaps a gun, and also had a very small knife strapped to her leg just above the knee. She had to leave both of them behind before we went to the gate, because weapons weren't allowed. She was now much younger, perhaps around fifty or even in her forties, and was dressed in black leather with leather shorts. She looked almost like a pirate, perhaps even including an eye patch. She unstrapped the tiny knife and I guess put it and the gun in one of the cars.

I was going to let them stay in a low, square building that was an eating place that was a little ways past the gate, to the left. It had large ham sandwiches that I thought they would enjoy. I would be spending most of my time in a long building to the right, working. Originally, the eating place had been a much smaller affair. In real life, no such eating place existed.

Later, we were in the 1973 Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser station wagon, a car that we sold long ago. My father was driving. We were going back to Arizona. I looked at the hilly, mountainous way we were on and wondered if we were in Arizona already. It seemed to me, though, that we had not left Nevada yet, and I finally decided that we were still there and thought that I might know approximately where we were. My father told me to look at the moon. The sky was very cloudy with light shining through the clouds. I looked in what I thought was the direction he was referring to, where a bright light was shining behind the clouds, behind me and to one side. I said that it was the sun, not the moon, and looked around to try and find where the moon might be. I saw a lesser light to the front, at the left, and decided it must be the moon, and said so.

The blue flame

It was very early Sunday, October 12, 2008, around 4:00-7:00 AM. I was sleeping in bed. It was a cool night. I had a cover pulled over me, and was laying on my side facing out into the room. I opened my eyes and saw in front of me a long, large, blue transparent flame, like a gas flame, going horizontally across the room, a couple of feet from the bed and maybe four feet or so above the floor. It went just across above things that were stored by the bed, and apparently coming from the hallway, though I just saw what was in front of me as I looked out toward the room. In the last few feet the flames expanded upward at a small slant and then turned into actual flames licking upward, still bluish and transparent. The whole thing was very thin, almost two dimensional, getting slightly thicker at the edges and where the flames were. It was like it was being shot in there from the doorway, from a small source somewhere out in the hall area.

I closed my eyes briefly a few times, thinking it might possibly be a dream or the after effects of one and that maybe I was not fully awake. Looking out again when I opened them, though, the flames were still in front of me. Each time I opened them, the flames were still there.

I worried about the house catching fire, and wondered if it already had. Nothing in the bedroom itself seemed to be burning yet. I thought I was going to have to get up and check the rest of the house. I was very tired, but it looked like it would have to be done. I wondered if the end of the hall was already in flames, picturing it that way in my mind.

I looked out at the hall, at the narrow section of wall that enclosed the furnace, and saw a curved band of energy on the wall there, coming from the hallway direction at the top and going sharply downward, looking like a strange rainbow. The bands were dark blue and dark red, dark smoky colors, fuzzy and ragged and transparent, like curved bands of graphed noise. The flames themselves were gone now, there was just the rainbow. I felt like I was already awake and kept taking my head away from the sight and shaking it and looking again, over and over, and finally the sight was gone and I felt more awake.

I considered whether to get up and check the hallway and the rooms at the front of the house, but realized that it couldn't be a gas fire caused by the furnace. The furnace was off and the gas to it was shut off. I thought that it might have been some kind of weird energy I was seeing instead of a fire, particularly in the hallway. The part in the bedroom could have been energy also, sent out in a beam, and just misinterpreted by my mind. I wondered if I had been visited by some strange presence or energy form. Nothing more seemed to happening now, though, and things seemed to have settled back to normal, so I went back to sleep.

A few days later, looking at that area of the hallway more closely, I saw that a door for some shelves was left open there, covering that area of the wall. It might have been open on the night I saw the dark smoky rainbow, but there was no way to tell now. The wall was a pale yellow, though, much lighter than the brown of the door, and seemed to more closely match my memory of that night. In the end, I'm not sure what difference it would have made. Whether on the wall or the inside surface of a door, the rainbow had been there for a while that night and had then gone, so nothing on the door or wall could have caused its appearance.

Another, possibly related, thing was that I had just watched "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" on TV the evening before the blue flame appeared, and it had a scene with a flamethrower. However, the long triangular beam of blue flame that I saw was very stable and calm and did not resemble something sent out from a flamethrower.

So, what actually did happen? Was it real? Sometimes people who have or have had a close encounter UFO experience have also reported blue beams of light in the house. I had no memory of such encounters, except in dreams, but it's possible something related might have occurred that night. Another interesting match is that sometimes people have awakened to find bizarre and even terrifying things going on, even strange entities in their rooms or outside their windows, and then just gone back to sleep, the way I did. These matches with other people's experiences might be some indication that something was really happening that night, but I'll probably never know.

Dream - The brilliant light

I had a dream, probably in the summer or fall of 2004, about a large ball of light. The overhead light was on when I was sleeping, as it occasionally is, so that may have had an effect. However, the ball of light was not in the physical location of the overhead light, but was lower, perhaps centered at about five or six feet in the air and more toward the doorway.

In the dream, I was sleeping in my bed, as I was in real life, and the light hung there in the air, huge, blindingly brilliant but without hurting my eyes. The light was white, with perhaps a tinge of blue, and with rays like long needles stretching out everywhere. I felt the light going completely through me, and felt peace and love radiating from it.