THE NIGHT VISITORS

WEDNESDAY, Oct 18/06

Last night, just as I was ready to sleep, two night visitors came. I had come home from my class and relaxed awhile watching the news and funny John Stewart's Daily Show, treated myself to a couple of cups of hot chocolate laced with some brandy. In this relaxed state of mind I went to bed, tired from my busy day and evening of instructing a novel writing class.

Just as I dozed off (I don't think I was really asleep, but on the brink), something - was it a presence? - startled me and I opened my eyes. I clearly saw two women standing by my bed. It scared me for a minute and I cried out, then blinked my eyes a few times but of course the vision disappeared. I couldn't get back to sleep. I felt scared at first, then settled a little when I thought of who those two women might be. I'd been thinking a lot about my Mom lately, and also on the weekend my friend Paula and I had been talking about her Mom who was one of my best friends who passed away several years ago. I wondered, seriously, if the two women who had visited me in the night might have been them. I know I'd been thinking how my Mom would have loved this apartment and been so pleased to see me living here. Mom and Doreen were friends too, so perhaps they came together, their spirits, to check in on me. I'd like to think so. And after I had that thought firmly in my head I was able to sleep again, in fact I slept soundly enough that I didn't wake up til late this morning!

When I was a teenager I had a similar experience one night, except the night visitors were two men: One was thin and tall, wearing an overcoat and fedora hat, the other smaller and Chinese. The stood by my bed and just smiled at me. I was scared stiff and never forgot the incident. A number of years later, when I was living with some other people in a house after I'd split with my husband, a girl came to stay with us who later became one of my best friends, Susan. One night we were talking about strange dreams and other psychic phenomena and she related a story of her night visitors. It was almost exactly the same two men who had appeared at my bedside. Who where they? Guardian angels? We've often discussed this and wondered. It was so real it seemed for sure they were there, those night spirits. But why had they come?

This weekend when my friend Cor was visiting with her little doggie Napoleon, the dog kept frisking about yapping at something unseen. She teased that there was a ghost around in the apartment and that her dog could sense it. I wonder...At first we considered it may have been the spirit of the deceased man who used to live here. Now I wonder if it was really the spirit of my Mom!