Read The Footprints of God for Free Online Page A

and described what I had seen so often.
    I'm sitting in a dark room. There's no light at all. No sound. I can feel my eyes with my fingers, my ears, too, but I see and hear nothing. I remember nothing. I have no past. And because I see and hear nothing, I have no present. I simply am. That's my reality. I AM. I feel like a stroke victim imprisoned within a body and brain that no longer function. I can think, but not of any specific images. I feel more than I think. And what I feel is this: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I alone? Was I always here? Will I always be here? These thoughts don't merely fill my mind. They are my mind. There's no time as we know it, only the questions changing from one to another. Eventually, the questions resolve into a single mantra: Where did I come from? Where did I come from? I'm a brain-damaged man sitting in a room for eternity, asking one question of the darkness.
    "Don't you see?" Rachel had said. "You haven't fully dealt with the deaths of your wife and daughter. Their loss cut you off from the world, and from yourself. You are damaged. You are wounded. The man walking around in the world of light is an act. The real David
    Tennant is sitting in that dark room, unable to think or feel. No one feels his grief or his pain."
     's not it," I told her. "I did a psychiatry rotation, for God's sake. This isn't unresolved grief."
     She sighed and shook her head. "Doctors always make the worst patients."
    A week later, I told her the dream had changed. “There's something in the room with me now."
    "What is it?"
    "I don't know. I can't see it." "But you know it's there?"
    "Yes."
    "Is it aperson?"
    "No. It's very small. A sphere, floating in space. A black golf ball floating in the dark." "How do you know it's there?"
    "It's like a deeper darkness at the center of the dark. And it pulls at me."
    "Pulls how?"
    "I don't know. Like gravity. Emotional gravity. But I know this. It knows the answer to my questions. It knows who I am and why I'm stuck in that dark room."
    And so it went, with slight variations, until the dream changed again. When it did, it changed profoundly. One night, while reading at home, I "went under" in the usual way. I found myself sitting in the familiar lightless room, asking my question of the black ball. Then, without warning, the ball exploded into retina-scorching light. After so much darkness, the striking of a match would have seemed an explosion, but this was no match. It blasted outward in all directions with the magnitude of a hydrogen bomb. Only this explosion did not suck back into itself and blossom into a mushroom cloud. It expanded with infinite power and speed, and I had the horrifying sense of being devoured by it, devoured but not destroyed. As the blinding light consumed the darkness, which was me, I somehow knew that this could go on for billions of years without destroying me altogether. Yet still I was afraid.
    Rachel didn't know what to make of this dream. Over the next three weeks, she listened as I described the births of stars and galaxies, their lives and deaths: black holes, supernovas, flashes of nebulae like powdered diamonds flung into the blackness, planets born and dying. I seemed to see from one end of the universe to the other, all objects at once as they expanded into me at the speed of light.
    "Have you seen images like these before?" she asked me. "In waking life?"
    "How could I?"
    "Have you seen photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope?"
    "Of course."
    "They're very much like what you're describing."
    Frustration crept into my voice. "You don't understand. I'm not just seeing this. I'm feeling it. The way I might feel watching children, or combat, or lovers together. It's not merely a visual display."
    "Go on."
    That was what she always said. I closed my eyes and submerged myself in my most recent dream.
    "I'm watching a planet. Hovering above it. There are clouds, but not as we know them. They're green like acid, and