The True Way: Spirit Encounters in Dreams -3

In my second hour sophomore high school class, age 14, I had US history.  My teacher was Gene Van Dongen and he always knew that twenty minutes into the day's lesson I was daydreaming.  I sat expressionless as my eyes closed or had a blank stare and it was then he asked me a question.  He replied, "Earth to Richard, earth calling Richard, the answer to my question please?"  He baited me to respond with "Duh," and groggily I uttered an answer far removed to the topic of discussion.  My classmates broke out in laughter and ultimately I was sent to the principal's office as the class disruptor.  This was the same scene as if taken from a 1980's movie script called "Explorers."

I couldn't help the daydreaming.  My mind was traveling at the speed of light to escape the pain and confusion swirling in my head to escape harm.  I was troubled, but couldn't explain how I felt before the pain started.   My mind was so confused.  Gene, my teacher told my parents I needed professional help and doctors, internal medicine specialists and psychiatrists poked and prodded for clues to my unknown illness with no results.  Everybody thought I was faking the illness and the conclusion was I went daydreaming to escape studying.

I was daydreaming not by choice, but by survival - it was the way to escape my pain - severe headaches that got worse as the school day progressed.  I left the world behind and was an earlier explorer floating down the Grand River or dreaming about Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. Mark Twain steamboatin on the Missouri  and Ohio Rivers or rafting with Huckleberry Finn on the mighty Mississippi River) - anyplace was better than listening to Gene in excruciating physical pain.

The summer before school started while in a State Park Campground near Lake Superior I had on a full moon night to see the Norse Horsemen riding the Northern Lights  (Aurealis Borealis) in different colors and hues dance over Lake Superior.  The reds above closest, the blue, green and yellow wisps dipping and shifting aimlessly across the dark lake.  Add to this scene the double exposure on mirrored water surfaces - a rare occurrence for Lake Superior and both happened in one night complete with shooting stars.  Another breathtaking incidence occurred when seeing five wide rainbows over Whitefish Bay east of Paradise, MI.  Beautiful!

Suddenly an old man of 93 years was being lead to the shore by his grandchildren.  He had been a farmer in Michigan's upper peninsula his entire life and had never seen the Northern Lights - "so beautiful" he said.  Farmers go to bed at sundown - the eyelids drop and he enters the land of nods and dreams.  His grandchildren helped him sit down in the sand and left a few minutes and I explained several legends about the mystical nite lights of heaven as we watched them shimmer and dance across the sky.  With a chill in the air they returned and lifted him from the sand.  They took both of his arms and lead him up the 80 step staircase.  It was the highlight of my summer.  As Mark Twain would say with his vulgar talk "We've become damn good storytellers."  Twain's wife was a Christian woman who hated his swearing too much during lectures and that habit I don't do."....continued