I didn't wait for night in order to sleep. I waited for it because, for me, it was the moment to return to a place I had always felt was my home. Sleeping was my favorite time of day.
I was about four years old when the clearest memories began. First I would feel my body become completely still. It wasn't an unpleasant sensation; on the contrary, it was the sign that something wonderful was about to begin.
Then a very high-pitched ringing would fill my ears. It was intense, like a continuous sound announcing that the moment had arrived. My body would vibrate slightly and I knew exactly what it meant.
It was time.
Sometimes I would put my head out first, like someone leaning out of a window. Other times, I would simply open my eyes and I was already floating near the zinc roof of the house where I grew up. I would look down and see that little girl asleep in bed.
Then I would go to see my parents. They too were floating above their bodies while they slept. There was a cord joining them to their bodies and, with the simple logic of a child, I thought it was there so the wind wouldn't carry them away.
I tried not to make noise. I was convinced that, if they heard me, they would scold me for being awake at that hour.
Leaving the house was quite an adventure. The wooden walls were hard to pass through; I felt them hold me back, as if they offered resistance. The zinc roof, on the other hand, was much easier, so I almost always chose to go out through the top.
And then my real playtime began.
For many years I thought all children did the same thing. It never occurred to me that it could be different. My world began when the rest of the house was asleep.
Outside, everything was alive. It's not a metaphor. I could see it.
From the base of the trees a kind of green fire was born that slowly rose up their trunks to about the middle of the tree. It was like watching life circulate right in front of me. The trees played with me.
There were also small beings who worked close to the earth. They were tiny, with the appearance of children and adult faces. They were always busy, moving the soil, caring for it. Some nights they would give me flowers or stones that, to them, seemed to hold a special meaning.
The ground wasn't like we see it when we're awake, either. Everything was connected by golden veins that ran through the earth like roots of light. Sometimes those veins would join and form a river of liquid light: golden, bright, alive.
It stretched out before me like a path and carried me exactly where my heart wished to go. I didn't have to steer it with my mind. It was enough to feel.
The wind also seemed to be alive. It wasn't simply air. It was a presence that held me and carried me from one place to another with an ease impossible to explain.
There were small luminous beings, like fireflies with wings, who sometimes accompanied me when I went too fast and helped me return to the great eucalyptus trees that grew near my house.
I was never afraid. I never felt alone.
One night I asked a question of the Being who was always with me. I didn't know who it was. I only knew that it always appeared.
"Who are you to me?" I asked.
The answer didn't come like a voice I heard with my ears. It was a direct communication, heart to heart, so complete that a single sentence seemed to contain far more than words could express.
"You are me when you live from the heart. That is where I also exist."
Later it added something I would only fully understand many years afterward:
"And when you feel from the heart, I also live through you."
Throughout my whole life, every time I have drifted away from that place, that presence has found a way to remind me who I am.
When I was about six years old, I decided to prove to my mom that these were not dreams. She always told me not to worry, that one day it would pass. But I knew I wasn't dreaming.
One afternoon I lay down while she was talking with one of my aunts in another room. It was much harder for me to rest during the day, because the sunlight kept my body awake, but that time I managed it.
I left my body. I went to the room where they were talking. I heard the whole conversation.
Then I came back, re-entered my body, walked to the kitchen, and repeated word for word what they had said.
My mom looked at me, surprised. "That's impossible," she said. "I saw you asleep. Your brother was in the living room. You couldn't have heard anything."
So I answered with a child's natural ease: "See, Mom? They weren't dreams."
She smiled, hugged me, and tried to reassure me: "You'll grow out of it when you get older."
I didn't grow out of it.
Over the years I learned to train it, to understand it, and to live it in a different way. But that is another story.
Much later, when I was fourteen, I met a friend who put a name to what I had lived since childhood.
"That's called astral travel."
It was the first time I had heard those words. Until then, it had simply been my natural way of experiencing life.
From all those nights I was left with a certainty that life would go on confirming many times over.
"Death does not exist. What we call death is a change of frequency."
That doesn't mean grief doesn't exist. Absence hurts. We miss a hug, a voice, a gaze, a shared story. All of that deserves to be mourned.
But, for me, consciousness never ceased to exist. Perhaps that's why I could never see death as an ending. Only as a transformation.
Today I don't share this story to convince anyone to believe the same as I do. I share it because it was my experience. And because, over the years, I understood that the most important thing was not the journeys, nor the beings, nor the places I came to know. What truly mattered was what they had been trying to teach me from the very beginning.
Consciousness is not something you reach. It is something you remember.
A childhood memory, written just as I lived it. April 2014.