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were romantic magazines and novels also to keep her dreams occupied), so I retreated into my own small planet, which was a whole deal more exciting that the real one. Although I could never bring them home because of Mother’s strict rule that outsiders were never welcome, never allowed to be “insiders”, I had many good friends at school and later at art college, and as soon as I realized I was capable of taking care of myself I was rarely at home, despite Mother’s accusatory pleas to stay with her. I was no rebel, but I was aware that there was something more, and something better, going on out there and I wanted some of it for myself. Guilt always dogged me though—I did truly love my mother—but I soon learned to accommodate it. Besides, I’d discovered football, which I became pretty good at, and not too long after that, I discovered girls.
    But still, the growing-up years are always influenced by your parents and home background, so Mother’s insistence on privacy where all things personal were concerned stuck with me. By the time I was twelve, I couldn’t even tell her things; I’d learned from her to keep my thoughts and emotions to myself and I think, ultimately, she was kind of pleased about that herself—other people’s emotions (yes, even her son’s) could be a “rotten nuisance”. She was complex: she wanted me to love her and be her “best friend in all the wide world”, but she’d been too badly hurt by my father’s desertion to trust any other man, perhaps even any other person; she didn’t really want to hear my troubles or concerns, because that always brought her back to the real world, and the real world had let her down badly. I can admit it now, and I half-knew it then: Mother was a little screwy. If I did upset her by, say, coming home late, or deliberately disobeying her wishes (I can’t say orders, because she was never strong enough to give orders as such—they were always suggestions and sometimes pleadings, rather than dictates), she would regale me with the sins of my father, how he’d left us, been untrue to both of us, run off with some floozy, didn’t care if we starved to death, or were put out on the streets. Eventually, I closed my mind to all this, but even so, the guilt somehow transferred itself to me.
    There I go getting off the point. The thing of it is, I’d learned from an early age to keep personal matters to myself, initially because that was the way Mother wanted it, and ultimately, perhaps inevitably, I became embarrassed about life with Mother. In some ways it worked well for me when I reached my older teens, because the girls seem to like that slight air of mystery that hung on me like a dark cloak, made me seem deeper that probably I was. It was something I used to my advantage anyway.
    So, enough of all that. I’ve still uncomfortable about our mother-son relationship, but it just might help explain why I kept quiet about the OBEs. I’d learned to keep such things to myself.
    Another reason was that I was scared of being laughed at. Or misunderstood, thought to be out of my skull. The pragmatic side of my nature also figured: easier for me to put the experiences down to lurid dreaming, no matter how real they seemed to be. By talking about them, I was admitting their fundamental reality to myself and, frankly, they were a distraction I didn’t need in my life. Besides, the OBEs were infrequent enough not to be a problem.
    One more reason, and I think this was as important as the others in its way. Say you were a friend of mine—or, maybe even more significantly, a girlfriend of mine—and I told you I could travel invisibly sometimes, mostly at night when my body was totally relaxed, that my mind could leave my body to go on excursions. Say I told you that and you didn’t think I was totally crazy, you half-believed me. How would you feel about me being able to spy on you at any time, that I could be watching you in your most private moments? You