Communion: A True Story
wasn't hard to identify the specific night, because it was the last time Jacques and Annie had come to the country and the thickness of the fog was unusual.
    I was disturbed that Anne at once remembered being awakened by the bang. She did not see the glow, but my initial warning about the fire apparently didn't penetrate her sleep, because all she did recall was my saying that there was no fire.
    I asked my son, "Do you remember the last time Jacques and Annie went to the country with us?"
    "Yeah. The night of the bang." So he had also heard it. "A bunch of people told me it was OK; you just threw your shoe at a fly."
    "What people?"
    "Just a bunch of people. People who were around."
    This answer, I must admit, shocked me badly. I left off questioning him and called Budd Hopkins, who suggested that I ask my son not about memories but about dreams.
    Taking this advice, I next asked my son if he remembered any unusual dreams. This is his reply, spontaneous and immediate:
    "I dreamed that a bunch of little doctors took me out on the porch and put me on a cot. I got scared and they started saying 'We won't hurt you' over and over in my head. That is my strangest dream, because it was just like it was real. It happened in the middle of another dream, when I was dreaming that me and Ezra [a friend of his] were in a boat." He could not say if he had had the dream on the night of October 4. He knew only that it had happened at the cabin.
    His words swept away all my hopes of solving this problem in anything remotely resembling a conventional manner. What had happened to my little boy? His innocent report was very upsetting. In the context of my own experiences, his dream suggested either that the two of us have some sort of weird psychological link, or that at some point he has had an experience similar to my own.
    Next I spoke to Jacques Sandulescu on the phone. This is a transcript of that conversation.
    Me: "Do you remember anything about the last time you and Annie came to the country?"
    Jacques: "The light! I was sleeping, all of a sudden something woke me up. I saw the room was full of light. Bright, like daylight. Not like the moon. I thought we overslept. I look at my watch, it says four-thirty. Then I hear you through the door, saying it's OK. The light is gone, so I go back to sleep."
    Me: "What kind of light was it?"
    Jacques: "Light, it was light. I could see the bushes outside. I could see the tree trunks. I thought it was about ten in the morning."
    I have done every conceivable thing to try to duplicate light like that. Our guest room has one small window overlooking a seven-feet-deep covered porch. Beyond that the land slopes up gradually, so that not even car lights from the road can enter that room, much less moonlight or sunlight. With the leaves gone during the winter, we determined that the lights from the neighbor's house are also invisible from that window. The movement-sensitive light doesn't shine directly in, but down the porch. Had it somehow turned on — even absent bulbs
    — Jacques would have seen not the trees and shrubs but the outline of the porch interior with the yard beyond in darkness. The reason for this is that the fight shines past the window and down the length of .the porch. Had the regular porch light been switched on, the same effect would have resulted.
    Even with the neighbor's lights on, the porch light on, and a car in the front yard, we could not duplicate the effect. Nothing I can conceive of can account for the major light phenomena on that night. It may be possible to explain the blue glow I originally saw on the ceiling, but not that massive burst of light from above. I visualized the whole roof being ablaze. Jacques thought it was midmorning. Because of the fog, a helicopter, or indeed any sort of airplane, was out of the question. A pilot told me simply, "Forget aircraft."
    At four-thirty the moon was still in the sky, but well below the line of the forest. Could the fog have

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