That night I dreamed I could fly, which was better than being chased in slow motion by indescribable monster…I visited strange underground bases and kingdoms, only described in legends. I flew in strange craft which like Dr Who's Tardis, were bigger on the inside than the outside.

The following day simulacra, that is, things which look like other things, made me jump out of my skin; trees that looked like figures, rocks that looked like faces. I thought I was going crazy or was high on something, then I heard a voice in my head. Ah, there you are!' It was him again. A man started walking in our general direction, but he just wiggled his finger in a circle and like one of those toys that hits an obstacle and bounces off in a different direction, the man did likewise.

'You humans have such little willpower, it is easy to manipulate you. We treat you like mindless puppets, silence you with a snap of our fingers.' I felt like I was in an episode of Bewitched or the film starring Nicole Kidman.

'We need privacy. I will take you out of this time loop.'An eerie silence and stillness followed. Nothing moved, nothing spoke of its existence to me anymore. It was the Oz Factor personified.

'You need to understand that life as you know it, is nothing more than a hologram, a projection. Birth is falling down the rabbit hole – a confusing, traumatic event. This is your second birth into another confusing reality, where nothing makes sense, leaving you again feeling like a helpless child. You see your body on the bed as you look down upon it and are baffled but as we've told you, things seem real because you are moving along with them. Once you disengage, you can see them for what they are, even if you don't want to believe it. Bilocation doesn't mean seeing one place but being physically somewhere else is fantasy; there is more to you and reality than you think. You've been here before and will be here again – that's reincarnation for you. As children you remember this but turning into adults you soon forget.

Even some ghosts have sentience. They are living beings whose presence is so large that they live in the eternal now, unresticted by time, just like Dr Who. The other types of ghost are really just holographic recordings. They lack awareness and continually replay over the centuries, until they just eventually fade away.

You may wonder why some flying saucers crash or are shot down and alien bodies recovered? Put simply, not all races in our alliance are as advanced as others, some retain corporality. It is like your own planet, some socieities are technically advanced, others are not. Our craft come through window areas or use technology you cannot understand yet, to reach here. They can take your people from Earth back to where they came from. They do this for the same reason your upper classes bred with the lower classes – to keep their breeding stock healthy. In the same way sterility and deformity from inbreeding are kept at bay, in animals reared by humans. Think of mongrel dogs and thoroughbreds. Of course some races do it because of intellectual stagnation in their societies, needing fresh insight and new ways of looking at reality. Others still, use human beings for rather gruesome experiments or as unwilling organ donors. I am sure you have read about cattle mutilations, but the human ones are well hidden by your authorities for obvious reasons. It is distasteful but it would be hypocritical of humans to complain when they carry out equally grotesque dissections on living animals. Still at some point you will evolve out of the need for this, eventually.'

Suddenly everything returned to normal and everything moved on. My senses were suddenly flooded by sights, sounds and smells, in an overwhelming cascade of experiences.

'Now you know where you get your migraines from.'

'Good morning, Mrs Morgan!'

'Do you know her?'

'No, but I shapeshifted into someone she knew or thought she did. The mind can play tricks when you want it to and sometimes when you don't. Well, I must be going. Like in Dickens' Christmas Carol, we'll meet again.'

And with that he vanished. For some reason I couldn't help reciting that poem in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (or was it Through The Looking Glass?).

Yesterday upon the stair


I saw a man who wasn't there…²

Paigetheoracle

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