Chapter One: A Metaphysical History

I was the fourth child, and second son to a not so simple housewife and an Engineering Surveyor who worked for a government department called Main Roads, managing and planning the roads they built in the region of Western Australia known as the Wheatbelt – a vast stretch of farmland which wraps around the Central City Region as it takes up a good portion of the lands to the north and south of it.

It was on the border of this Region, in a town called Wooroloo, a stone’s throw from one of the main arteries that keeps West Australian commerce alive, through both agricultural and mining means  – the Great Eastern Highway –  that  our house was situated; a modest few acres that  were insulated from the highway over a few short kilometers by a minimum security prison, a cemetery, an abbatoirs,  an old tuberculosis clinic come hospital, and, during the later stages of my life there, a maximum security prison known as Acacia.

This property had belonged to my grandmother who gifted a small portion of it to my father on his 21st birthday, which meant she and my aunty lived essentially on the same property as us; all it took was a very short walk down a hill and over a small creek to get to either my grandmother’s house or the flat my Aunty lived in. My grandmother on my mother’s side also lived on the same road as the local post office in town, so family was always, physically very close on both sides.

Every Friday we would go to this grandmother’s place for curry lunches, which is where table talk would manifest between my mother and my grandmother of certain psychic incidents that had happened in the family; my great uncle – who was always present at the lunches – almost drowning in a water tank when he was little and his mother, away on business on the other side of the world having a vision about it, or the time my mother went into labor and my grandmother, on a plane at the time getting excruciating pains in her stomach at the exact same moment.

We were treated to old polaroid photos of ghosts my great grandmother had taken before she wound up in a retirement home courtesy of dementia, and other strange things the credibility of which went out the window the minute computer generated images started to flourish. Even my grandmother on my father’s side had a story to tell in which she was woken by her dead husband – the grandfather I never knew – sitting at the end of her bed.

So one could say I was immersed in the world of the paranormal from the beginning of my life.

Our road came to an abrupt end at a fence line, the other side of which was part of the farm of the minimum security prison where my grandfather worked as a prison guard; this fence line myself and my siblings used to – probably quite illegally – hop over and go mushroom hunting when the season called for it, and it ran back towards my parents house before terminating at the cemetery, which one only had to pass through a very thin line of bush to get to.

On the weekends when I had nothing better to do I could go out my driveway and complete the grand tour of the prison farm, the cemetery, the abbatoirs – where both my Aunty and my sister’s boyfriend would end up working – and the tuberculosis sanitorium – where I would watch my grandfather in his final moments of life after a battle with lung cancer at the age of 9 – on my push bike before the hour hand could even move from one number to the next. This is something I did on occasion when I was particularly bored, but not for any other reason than these places held a hidden history that I always wondered about; lining the rows of the cemetery were dirt graves that bore nothing but a number, or in some unique cases, the rising sun emblem of the Australian Diggers; the name of the soldiers our schools taught us had fought in WW1.

Often times I would walk along these rows and give silent thoughts the unnamed soldiers and try and imagine who they were, determined not to let their memory fade away with the going years like other people had done. Why were there so many of these solider’s graves here and why were so many of them unmarked?

The school at the intersection which was the other end of our road was always too busy managing the 100 children it spread out through various grades to bother teaching us why – perhaps it was because they didn’t really know either. It would be a long time before I learnt that the neighboring town of Chidlow – from which I currently write these words – was once a training camp for these soldiers that went to fight in the war; where there is now a small war memorial lining the edge of an empty patch of well kept grass in the center of town, with a playground in the middle. 

A sea of tents once stood erect next to a train station that would cart the Diggers off to the ships that would ultimately take them to the battlefronts of the war. Scattered around the bush one can still find the ruins of old cement blocks where other camps once stood, the only physical remains to suggest this town had any significant history to it.

The train station, alas, has met a similar fate – nothing but a concrete block and a single piece of the track supporting a small metal model of a train to serve as a reminder of the railway that once lined the trail that runs through the bush in parallel to the road, connecting many of the old towns on the eastern side of the hills that cast a shadow over the flat lands of the cities built upon the western shoreline.

On the other side of Wooroloo is a town called Wundowie, whose claim to historical fame was a steel works foundry right at the entry into town. It is these three towns, and some of those surrounding them, that would become the center stage of many strange stories of paranormal activity over the years I would gather here and there from multiple different sources - who were often times skeptics of the highest degree - that would always keep my imagination active; stories of ghosts, big cats, demons and even UFOs were things that you could find in these places if you knew where to look and how to pry them from the locals.

It was not far from the abattoirs in Wooroloo that I would come to have a strange, somewhat concerning experience myself regarding what appeared to be a cow being slaughtered in the middle of a paddock, in pitch darkness during the middle of the night, with some strange mechanical apparatus. Out of no where the sound of dangling chains, followed by a conveyor belt starting and the cow shrieking in its last moments before a large gushing of liquid carried the night back into perfect silence. What made the occurrence odd was that it couldn’t have been the abbatoirs going for a nightly kill as it was several hundred metres in the opposite direction I was heading, and had several houses between it and me, including the one that belonged to my friend whose party I was just coming from.

So not only had I just got out of earshot of the loudness of the party, there was still another two hundred or so metres of distance on the opposite side of that house before you got into abattoir territory; what in the hell was something doing out in a paddock killing cows by very elaborate means in total darkness at 1 in the morning? Needless to say, it was enough to make my 16 year old arse move like it never had before and get the hell out of there. The only problem was I still had a cemetery to get through until I got back to my parents' house.

On the other side of town, unbeknownst to me, a girl several years older than me staying in a haunted house would hear this same sound coming from the nearby gravel oval that became the go to place for anyone with a dirt bike or bush basher to thrash, which was no where near any abattoirs or farm paddocks holding cows. A series of dancing UFOs would eventually be seen coming out of the ground at this same gravel oval by the owner of the house – the girl’s boyfriend’s father – who was one of the aforementioned biggest skeptics in the world – until he saw these dancing lights.

It wouldn’t be for another 5 years I would eventually marry that girl, and the paranormal activity would really start engulfing our lives, and we’d find our combined experiences in lucid dreaming and astral projection would trump that particular episode by a thousand fold.

The first time I experienced sleep paralysis was around about the age of 8. I would go to bed, and upon “falling asleep” would find myself pinned down unable to move anything but my eyes, which felt as though they themselves had heavy weights attached to them; there was a level of resistance that one had to “push” them through before they would change direction, and after overcoming this threshold it was like they glided to the point of view too quickly. It was always a game of trying to just get past the threshold but not pushing them too much so they would go past whatever it was I was trying to look at; which was usually a being or something that appeared to be standing at the bed.

Despite my best efforts of trying to scream as loudly as I could, my voice box could never seem to manage anything more than a muffled squeak. I was at the mercy of the paralysis, and whatever seemingly chthonic substance it brought with it.

This started happening more and more frequently as the weeks went on; sometimes I would be able to break free of the paralysis and wake up, in which case I would run to the living room calling out to my father, who, more often than not, was still awake watching TV on the couch. I’d try and tell him about the paralysis and the beings, but the answer was always the same: “It was just bad dream. You’ll be ok. You need to try and sleep.”

He’d offer me brief comfort, then take me back to bed and tuck me in.  More often than not, I’d fall back into sleep paralysis that very same night; I soon learnt not to bother my father with my apparent “nightmares”.

It got to the point where I was having these sleep paralysis experiences every 3 or 4 days for months on end. I knew there was something else to them rather than them being just “bad dreams” like my father claimed, but I was at a loss as, being that age, I had next to no way of investigating them, apart from a few books on “magic” that had been left to rot in an old derelict shell of a house on my grandmother’s property – the place we went every Friday for lunch.

This abandoned house was situated down the back of the block close to the local shop; the only way to gain access to it was via a broken chimney of the main rooms' open fireplace, as the doors were broken and usually overgrown with long grass we dared not venture into in case of snakes. Over the years the bricks had crumbled away from the topmost part of the flu, meaning that - even as a small kid - you could hoist yourself up into it and tumble your way inside. Once inside, you were treated to exposed roof beams in which holes poked through some of tiles in certain places, walls that had not much of their lining left with electrical wire draped from every surface - no longer connected to the mains.

The concrete slab that had once been a floor had began turning back into the dust it once was before it was poured and provided an extremely hazardous maze of pit holes one had to navigate around. In the middle of the foyer, greeting you as you tumbled through the fireplace was a a couple of shelves full of old books that had simply been forgotten about and left to withstand the forces of the elements for some 30 – 40 years, and this was my treasure, and the sole reason I entered such a dangerous domain; many of the books had become welded together from the moisture of rain that had been allowed to beat upon them for over 3 decades rendering them unreadable, but there were a fair few of them that had got some shielding from the wind and rain because of their placement on the shelves.

There were also boxes on the floor next to the fireplace that, despite the bottoms being turned to mulch, had a few copies still in readable condition. Although majority of these works were typical fiction and non fiction works one would expect to find on a library shelf in the 60s or 70s, every now and again I would come across a gem; Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain, Atlantis, Predictions of Nostradamus; there was even an edition of Aliester Crowley’s Moonchild that, apart from a withered cover, was still in a fairly good condition considering it had been sitting here for so long unsheltered; still completely readable.

What I had before me was every kid’s dream, as far as I was concerned; a real magical library that one could only access after passing the grueling tribulation of “entering the threshold via the fire {place}”. So when I came across a complete series of books outlining the concepts of “magic” spread out through various indigenous cultures,  I had what I believed to be the greatest treasure a kid at that age – somewhere around 10 – could ever have; this was something straight out of a Disney movie.

Although these books themselves provided nothing on sleep paralysis, they hinted at a “hidden world” that was “off limits” to those who followed the constructs fed to them through a predominantly religious society. I understood, even at that age, that if I chose to follow such a path, then the mystery of my sleep paralysis would never be solved. I did not know it then, but these books, along with my mother’s and grandmother’s table talk of psychic happenings was to become my “initiation” into the world of “hidden knowledge”, ie the occult.

By the time I reached the age of 10, my sleep paralysis had happened so frequently, that I became bored of it; I no longer felt the terror and feeling of impending doom that came with each episode, given that, after 2 years, I was still alive, and instead started relaxing through them, figuring it would bring about their “finishing” a lot quicker.

What I discovered from being able to relax through the chthonic environment brought about by the paralysis was something truly amazing: I could remain conscious during the transition from the waking world going to that of the sleeping one; I understood in complete totality the change consciousness undergoes during this transition, when the mind detaches itself from the body, before I had even hit puberty.

Unbeknownst to me, I had discovered the secret to lucid dreaming, though I did not come to call it by this label for many years to come; I had discovered how to access a literal hidden world that is quite definitely off access to even those who do not subscribe to the idea of religious dogma.

So, now that I had access to this world, the vivid imagination one would come to expect from a child of that age, and the idea of telepathy being reinforced every Friday during lunch at my grandmother’s place, and my secret library, I began experimenting with consciousness in the realm of lucidity. I found that I could create my own dream scenarios, and got so good at it that I could imagine up a whole world from the seemingly nothingness that one falls into once their mind separates from it’s external, physical stimulus; I could invent and explore a world of my own devising in the span of a night’s sleep like one could create a video game and control a character within it using a controller, all the while understanding that my body was asleep in its bed back on earth.

I could remember everything I had done that day right down to what I had eaten for breakfast; there was simply no vagueness to them unlike with conventional dreams which are seemingly random and where the consciousness experiencing it has no recollection of the body it inhabits.

Of course, when one is off on expeditions of this caliber more than one night in every week, it is safe to say the subjects indoctrinated through schooling soon become boring and mundane beyond all reason.

Was I ever going to abandon the wealth of knowledge found in my treasure trove of books, or the knowledge of consciousness I already had for the mundane promises school was telling me was important? Hell No! The moment I first tumbled through that fireplace into that decrepit building, the moment I first witnessed the change consciousness undergoes as it passes to the dream world, I became “The Magician”; nothing would ever bend my imagination into believing the meaning of life was to work oneself into exhaustion. Absolutely nothing! Mainstream school and everything it had to teach me held secondary value to the occult world I’d just stepped into; yes it provided me with the understanding of how to read and do mathematics, but everything else it offered was pure tripe.

I was intelligent enough to keep my secrets in lucidity to myself, as nothing in the curriculum being force fed to me under the guise of “important for my wellbeing” mentioned anything to do with them, so I went along with the game, making sure I got good grades so no one would ever start questioning the obvious difference I had when it came to a child’s views on the world. Somewhere around this 10 – 11 year old age bracket I started getting the impression I was “not from this world” and would stare at a patch of the sky I sincerely felt was my home; this ended up fading away as the over active imagination of a child one comes to expect. The automatic writing of strange glyphs, however, would keep up for a few more years, at which point I would come exceedingly frustrated at my cousin for trying to copy them; something about his glyphs, that looked exactly like mine, felt wrong to me – they simply were not sincere in the energy that had gone into them, and his wanting to copy them seemed somewhat rude and disrespectful.

I would do other little strange things like leave my past self messages to avoid mistakes I had recently made as if there was a very real possibility my past self would get the message and change a decision that would lead to my present self being in a better position, and I would talk to a future version of myself that wore a hooded robe as if it was as normal as talking to the neighbor; I was that weird kid everyone else at school would have bullied for being different, but I played the game of life so well that I was in with the popular crowd from the get go, though I absolutely sucked at getting a girlfriend; whereas my friends playbook suggested to play the bad arse tough guy that would rake in the “babes”, my modus operandi was to send little love poems to my crushes which often resulted in half the class finding out and everyone having a good laugh at me. 

Rejection for me wasn’t just a kind dismissal from these popular girls; it was a full on attempt to sabotage my social identity, and it psychologically destroyed me on the inside. I guess that it is entirely my fault for knocking heads with the popular crowd, when I really should have been hanging out with the “wierdos”.

The internet in the 90s was still fairly primitive insofar as aesthetics is concerned, but it still was a decent resource to gain information into areas regarding the paranormal, though it was beyond maddening to have to wait for even the most basic of webpages to load. By the time I reached high school the speed had improved quite a bit, and I found myself studying subjects that would be regarded as conspiracies in this day and age in parallel to the curriculum that was supposed to prepare me for the eat, sleep, work mentality that I was bewildered no one seemed to question. These subjects ranged from aliens, to secret societies, to remote viewing, astral projection, lucid dreaming and an abundance of Hermetic literature, and I found myself chewing through hours allocated to study for science tests in the school library looking up these things instead; looking for anything I could incorporate into my ongoing experiments into lucid dreaming.

Despite the lack of transparency between the information being factual or conspiracy in those days, I still tried to study them from an objective perspective. My lucid dreaming abilities, at this stage, had evolved to the point where I was able to enter the lucid realm not only through sleep paralysis, but also simply by becoming conscious in standard dreams. I would go to the “void” or “vibrationals”, as I called them, (the stage after sleep paralysis), and just “lie” there, falling into what seemed like an infinite hole, purely for my own relaxation.

It was around this time I started utilizing a “spherical portal” to enter other “worlds”, which I can only describe as alien to what we have come to know exists on this planet; I was told several years later by someone on a lucid dreaming group, that my descriptions of these portals were exactly the same as those given by Yaqui Shaman Don Juan’s, apprentice Carlos Castaneda in his works on lucid dreaming, but I am still to this day yet to read any of these works.

A lot of these places I was visiting, such as “The Island”, became staple environments I had access to, and have been confirmed by other lucid dreamers; I have been to them, many, many times over the 2 decades I have been lucid dreaming. There were a number of environments I used to frequent on a regular basis utilizing these portals, which I would summon about a foot in front of my head; they acted like spherical TV screens that contained whatever world I wanted to travel to within them.

One of my breakthroughs in my experiments with consciousness occurred around the same time I started using these portals, probably at about the age of 14, when I was able to successfully project into the body of what appeared to be an Extra Terrestrial living on a planet in a completely different star system; I was completely lucid, in that I knew my body was asleep in its bed back on earth, and had the usual definition of memory in that I could recall what I had eaten for breakfast. I suddenly found my consciousness floating next to what appeared like a tribal Elder sitting on some dirt, meditating.

Suddenly he opened his eyes, and it was as if he knew of my presence. There was a sort of telepathic understanding between us, as he read me, and after he realized I wasn’t a threat, he beckoned me to “possess” his body so that I may observe through his eyes. As I did, there was this strange feeling of association with him, in that I had a sudden rush of his own memories from that body as if they were my own. I also understood that he could “feel” my memories in the same way, or that he could force me from his body if he really saw the need to.

It was evident that he was much more advanced than me, and I could not help but the get the feeling that his energy was similar to a Native American. As he opened his eyes, I realized he was looking at his tribe of humanoid like people. Two consciousness’s inhabiting one body; it was a rather cool experience.

He told them “they had a visitor”, but a lot of the other “people” looked around confused at his statement, as they could not see me. Someone asked from where, to which he looked towards the stars (even though it was day time you could still see them), and pointed to one in a distant galaxy.

“From there” he said, and his people gasped in bewilderment. He allowed them to ask questions, but at no time was I expected to say anything; my access to him had been purely for my own observation purposes; he had acknowledged I was a curious consciousness still in my stages of learning of which he took the opportunity to “teach me” by allowing me habitation in his body.

Eventually the projection ended and my consciousness was propelled back through space into my body, where I awoke, and then got ready for school, as was the ultimate ending of most of my lucid expeditions.

Several months after this remote viewing session, I had my second breakthrough in regards to my experiments with consciousness.

I had been trying to astral project for a year or possibly even more, after seeing a story about it on a show about paranormal experiences called “the Extraordinary”.  Although I had been unsuccessful in my attempts, they had afforded me the ability to train my meditative practices to the point where I was able to sit or lay in a single position for hours at a time without moving in the slightest.

My father built a 2 story tree house for myself and my brother on the property, which I commandeered for my meditations, as it was a good few hundred metres from the house and afforded me the uninterrupted silence I needed to be able to achieve this level of stillness.

For months on end, I would come home after school and sit in this tree house on a piece of soft foam we were using for a couch/ sleeping mattress whenever we’d have sleepovers, and I would try to “walk out of my body”. After an hour or so of stillness, I’d just randomly stand up, convinced I was “ready” to detach, but never quite doing it.

One night, I had been practicing this same stillness from a lying down pose in my bed, as I could not sleep. I had been in this one position going somewhere between 1 and half to 2 hours, without so much  as a twitch (I had mastered being able to remain still even through every annoying nerve twitch and itch conceivable).

Because of my many failures, I had been researching the Monroe Institute’s technique to achieve projection, which consisted of imagining spheres with numbers on them appearing above my head, watching them fall, then sending vibrations of energy up and down my body. I had achieved the level 3 relaxation they had mentioned, and suddenly the high pitched squealing noise (what is commonly referred to as tinnitus) started getting louder.

I had reached this stage several times before, but ruined the projection due to me getting too excited and focusing too much on my body. This particular time I was able to dismiss all thoughts pertaining to my body by intensely focusing on the noise, and after awhile I heard a loud “SNAP”, as my etheric body floated outside of my physical one.

True to the explanations of what I had read, the magnetism of my physical body trying to pull my etheric one back, provided a sort of distortion and resistance that I knew I had to overcome, lest it succeeded. I made the effort to float myself over towards the door that was directly behind my feet, then turned around to see my body lying motionless on the bed. I tried opening my bedroom door, but my hand just slipped right through it, my body sort of “tumbling” through after it like I was a drunken ghost, due to the magnetic distortions of my physical body making me somewhat disorientated.

I don’t know if the door acted as an insulator to these distortions or if I was just too far away from my body not to feel them, but I was then able to regain my composure and glide my way through the hall way and out the front door. I was so bewildered by the whole experience, even after all my experiments in lucid dreaming – of which this was clearly a different affair –  that I ended up just sitting on a couch we had outside the door and contemplating my existence, and what exactly consciousness was.

I made the mental note to tell myself how real this was, as I somehow knew that when I woke up it was going to feel like a dream; this was definitely real, there was no question in my mind about it. After about 5 or so minutes my thoughts started turning towards that of my body, and suddenly I found myself waking up, and sure enough it felt like it had just been a dream, despite my insistence to myself that that was not the case.