Love at First Sight

Full disclosure: The first time I saw faeries, I was on Ambien.

Ambien is a popular prescription sleep aid, classified as a hypnotic. It’s not a traditional sedative, but works by chemically relaxing the barrier between your waking and dreaming brain state. Take it and lie down in a dark, quiet place, and you’ll be whisked away to peaceful slumber with minimal morning hangover. Take it and stay up, on the other hand… and you find yourself in Wonderland! I confess this because I no longer question whether my encounters with the faerie folk are drug-induced. I’ve saw them consistently for over a year, sober or otherwise. And after comparing notes with other Ambienauts (who routinely report seeing ghosts and all manner of otherworldly phenomena), I now believe that by enabling waking access to the dreaming mind, Big Pharma has inadvertently opened a sort of chemical portal to transdimensional states of awareness normally only experienced during sleep or deep meditation.

But I digress…

It was April 2015. I had just gotten back from a visit to sunny St. Augustine, Florida, where I’d spent a few blissful days relaxing/detoxing with an old friend. We drank spinach smoothies, meditated on the beach, communed with nature, played with oracle decks, and colored mandalas while listening to lectures by our favorite spiritual teacher. My spiritual faculties had only just come online earlier that year (in conjunction, notably, with me finally giving up antidepressants), in the wake of a year of cancer treatment and the aimless malaise that followed. I didn’t fully understand what I was experiencing at first, but my friend is better versed in spiritual matters and happily extended the invitation for a mini retreat. It worked wonders; just being in her presence always raises my vibration (as attested by what followed!)

During our visit, she confessed that she had recently “tuned into what was going on with me,” and along with an impressive array of accurate insights, she revealed a detailed vision of one of my past lives… as a male faerie! She further told me she could sometimes communicate with faeries while meditating, and had even seen a couple in her room one night. I didn’t know what to think. I keep a pretty open mind (more than one past boyfriend has demonstrated unusual abilities to me), and I’ve always loved faeries and other fantastical creatures. But at the time, I had only just begun to accept the notion of past lives—and as for having once been a faerie myself, might as well have told me that heaven is REAL… and full of UNICORNS!

I thanked her and filed it away for future consideration. Turns out I didn’t have long to wait!

Back home in North Carolina, where my boyfriend was away on business, I decided to capitalize on my gains and spend some long-overdue time in my meditation grove, a crude labor of love hacked out of the woodsy bramble in the corner of our half-acre yard, where two streams meet beneath a willow tree.

(The grove at sunset)

I took an Ambien for good measure before heading down into the verdant darkness. Cheating, maybe—but for a meditation novice like me, anything that can stuff a sock in my left brain’s overactive mouth for a couple hours is a godsend! This chemical investment quickly paid off in an unusually serene and profound sit, tuned into the gentle sounds and scents of a fresh spring night, just me and my cauldron, some candles and incense, and…

Holy shit—what the hell are those little colored lights?!

It was too early in the year for fireflies, and too distinct to be dismissed as mere Ambien glamor. Mesmerized, I drank in this sudden vision of golden-white, pinkish-purple, and greenish-blue glowing dots zipping through the trees encircling the tiny grove… and realized this was almost verbatim how my friend had described her fleeting encounter with the “faeries” in her bedroom! I watched in spellbound silence until the candles began to gutter out, then retreated to the back deck to watch some more.

Still (my left brain groggily asserted), what were the chances that I would spontaneously start seeing faeries, just days after hearing that I used to be one—and on a hypnotic drug, no less? A lovely story… Bedtime, sweetie.

But I was hooked! (Just one look, that’s all it took…) The next day, I decided to up the ante and venture into the forested hills behind our house, where I’d seen the mysterious lights congregating the night before.

(To be continued…)