EXTRACT FOR
Dreamscape
(Craig M. Sampson)

To this day, I am not quite sure why I am back in the real world...or at least the world I was born into and raised in, anyway...and my memory of what has happened to me over the last few days seems to be just fragments of what I can remember. It is like my brain only took in a few seconds here and there, but trying to link it all up into one single, coherent experience, now that I am back here is just out of my reach...very much like just trying to make sense of a dream you might have had which feels too abstract or surreal to have any logical basis or message. And perhaps since what I was experimenting with recently...the dreamworld...that is a very appropriate analogy.

Before I began on this journey, I was as grounded in logic and practical accounts of events that some of my colleagues love to explain with a supernatural explanation that I just never took seriously. I was, after all, a real scientist at heart, and not one of what I always viewed as fringe believers in a world we cannot see with our eyes or hear with our ears or even touch with our fingers. Granted, my training in parapsychology is viewed by a lot of the scientific community as a "soft science" at best and a joke at worst...but it is the field I chose once I began the long period of my life in colleges across the country finally culminating in a PhD. And to the best of my ability, I have toiled to try to make my research and the teaching I now do at Loyola University in Chicago to have the same validity and acceptance as any other of what my critics and detractors who engage in "real science" possess.

When I began the project I am about to disclose to you, I had no idea that I would be taken on a journey that would leave me with more questions than answers once I had finished the initial research. It began with a curiosity that I had held since I was very young and playing on my grandfather's farm down in the middle of nowhere in Laural, Mississippi. I can recall vividly the hot, humid summer evenings sitting on the porch with my grandparents and a smattering of other elderly relatives as stories of what most people have come to refer to as "old wives tales" were told as if they had as much validity and proof as any other factual history.