The Knowing: Awake in the Dark Read Online Free PDF

met him.
    “My god,” she breathed, “you are only a child. How can you know this stuff?”
    Angie then asked me questions. The answers channeled through me, in the form of the voice, accompanied with the
knowing
. She fixed me with her hazel eyes and said, “No one will believe me. I can’t tell anyone what you say. They’ll think I’m crazy.” She reached over and squeezed my hand. In that moment I felt so worthy and loved.
    I didn’t know how I knew what I did, but I wanted her to like me and be my friend. I felt special providing her with what seemed like valuable information. It was the first time I felt important. That was how it started and when I visited, that was what we did, we played dominoes and Angie talked to the voice.
    It was simple really, I heard a voice in my mind and when I repeated what I heard, the listener found remarkable insight into issues or events I couldn’t possibly know. The information I received was well beyond my understanding and I had no clear recall of what I said even moments after I spoke the words. That fact is still true today.
    After about a month went by, when I arrived home one afternoon my mother asked, “What are you doing at that woman’s house every day?”
    “She’s my friend” I replied. “We play dominoes and drink iced tea and stuff. She’s my friend” I repeated defensively.
    My mother stared at me, her eyes fleecing me, searching for the truth.
    “It is not normal for a grown woman to make friends with an eight’year’old,” she said.
    But why not?
  I thought. “She likes me,” I said, “and we’re friends.”
    “She must be terribly lonely,” my mother commented.
    “No” I said, “We’re friends. I help her with Sam and we talk about stuff.”
    My mother’s energy shifted and she stiffened, “What stuff?” she asked.
    “I don’t know, just stuff,” I said as I shrugged. “Her husband is probably having an affair,” I blurted out, though we’d never talked about that and I didn’t understand where it came from or what it meant.
    “Did she tell you this?” my mother questioned.
    “No. I just know,” I responded and immediately I realized that I shouldn’t have said that because what came next was devastating for me.
    “You are not to go to that woman’s house again. I mean it, young lady. That relationship is inappropriate,” my mother said.
    Tears welled up and my throat felt like I swallowed a Popsicle. “But she’s my friend,” I croaked. “We play dominoes. Mom, pleeease.”
    But my pleading got me nowhere, and that was the end of it. No further discussion.  I ran down the hall and hurled myself on the bed and cried.
I hate you, I just hate you
, I screamed in my mind.
    A month later we moved across town to a small apartment complex and I never had the chance to say goodbye to my only friend.
    I couldn’t have known that my mother was trying to protect me from information she felt I shouldn’t have. Years later, she would tell me that she didn’t acknowledge how strong the Clairs were within me because my
knowing
and comments made her uncomfortable.
    Around this same time, I began to see
pictures
or visions behind my eyes—or at least that was the best way I knew how to describe them. Receiving pictures was like participating in and observing a 3-dimensional movie simultaneously. My
pictures
brought insight and ambiguity, puzzles and explanation and, ultimately, they molded who I would become.
    When the
pictures
came, I was held captive, like a genie in a bottle.
Pictures
happened spontaneously and could show anything.  Seconds before they began, everything stopped. Sight, sound, and senses were suspended in the present moment and a channel opened through which the images entered.  The experience was not like a seizure that paralyzes but rather it was a shift in attention. While observing the
pictures,
I experienced fully the feelings, thoughts, smells, sounds, and senses of the people I saw, creating an