My Ra

I wrote this initially for Morbid Curiosity Magazine - a magazine about true things of a macabre nature-but I never sent it. I was afraid of being laughed at or that people wouldn't take me seriously. As I mentioned, I tend to keep these things to myself-as not many people would understand them. (Or me, for that matter;-)

I'll admit my family is a bit odd. Not in the "odd" sense of odd-but in the sense of odd that southern families tend to accept when it comes to abnormal coincidence that can't exactly be passed off as entirely abnormal or entirely coincidence. Southern families are strange in the sense that, while they are very ready to condemn anything that doesn't make sense to them-they are extremely accepting of things like superstition and the macabre.

As in every southern home there is a goblin that invariably lives under the stairs, and everyone knows it; they just don't talk about it in good company... Except in the kitchen, to their grandchildren, while baking cookies. Or in the garden, digging potatoes. This was how I learned my family history.

All the women in my family on my mother's side, through the generations, have had a connection to unexplained phenomenon. My great grandmother, Vada Graves could see into people, and not altogether read minds-but she claimed she could read souls (or hearts, I suppose). My grandmother, Opal, reads "signs." She stands by them firmly. My aunt Cathy, her daughter, has seen ghosts off an on, since she was a small child. My mother never talks about her "thing" at all. If she has a "thing" she doesn't admit it. With me, it has always been a weird thing with dreams.

My earliest memory is a recurring nightmare that began when I was two. The memories I have of being two are extremely vivid, even to this day, though I can remember nothing prior. My grandmother practically raised me when I was a small child, and my mother often left me with her while she worked her ass off at the Gas Company in Virginia, with my Grandfather. She'd drop me off at 5:30 in the morning, pick up my Grandfather, and head off to the plant. I'd spend my days with my grandmother.

Everyday she'd put me down for a nap in one particular room-which was pink-right about midday, when the sun was its highest. I would sleep... I dreamt, every single time, of sitting up in bed and watching the ceiling. The sun would come in through the windows, and I could feel the warmth of it on my face. I was waiting for something to happen, and I was afraid-not down right scared-but fearful with a sense of foreboding. Only I always knew what was coming.

Slowly, very slowly, a strange sort of iridescent, luminescent, transparent OOZE would begin to seep through the cracks where the ceiling met the walls. It was not a tangible, touchable thing. It was like-pure light energy. It would go very slowly, oozing down the wall, and I would watch it very carefully. To this day, I'm not even certain if this was part of the dream, or if I imagined it with my eyes open.

I knew that if I let it get past a certain point-it would eventually engulf me, and I would be taken away to a place where everyone I loved-my mother and my grandparents-would never see me again. Most of all, I would never see THEM again. That was the kicker. The thing terrified me-though in itself it was not menacing. It was intelligent. Almost calmly soothing. It loved me, I would say, though I felt independent of it. It was peaceful, this light. It sought to envelope me, hold me, take me somewhere far, far away. I just didn't want to leave. So I would scream, when the ooze threatened to get too far down the walls, "Ra is coming to get me! Ra is coming to get me!!"

My grandmother would come in just as I shut my eyes to the descending terror of being ripped from the only world I knew, however briefly in my child-life, and like clockwork she would comfort me into opening my eyes again, tell me there was nothing to fear. It would take her a full hour to calm me down, and one to two teaspoonfuls of sugar. A spoonful of sugar was her cure for any ailment she couldn't readily explain or identify. Hiccups too.

While I was too young to see the significance in a two year old screeching about a thing called "Ra" that was a benevolent light source coming to engulf me and take me away to some other place-no matter how nice-I didn't want to be, I have ever since been fascinated and obsessed with all things Egypt.

When I got older and first discovered the significance of the word "Ra" in grade school, it again, terrified me. It dawned on me, as a fifth grader, that this was not an ordinary thing to dream, and that though the recurring dreams somewhere in my 3rd year of life subsided, that I would remember them forever-and now-had a more mystical explanation of the thing that was coming to get me and rip me from my home. I didn't tell anyone other than my mother and my grandmother. My mother doesn't choose to talk about it. Sometimes my grandmother does, in that quizzical way of wondering just what it was that I saw that she passed off as a mere 'bad dream'.

I cannot say that it was indeed, the Sun God in some manifestation. People describe alien abductions in a similar sense, though they often happen at night, not in broad daylight. Many LSD users attribute walls melting and iridescent "trails" to such an illusion, or delusion... And there are, of course, all those lovely Freudian things. Then again, I was only two. How does a two year old attach the name "Ra" to such a thing? Why does my memory of this life begin there? Perhaps it was the trauma of being separated from my mother.

I have remained open to a lot of different explanations, and even thought about regressing by hypnosis to that delicate time in my life-but something in me keeps me from following through. Something in me tells me that if I do, "Ra" might come back for me, where he has left me as long forgotten, a lost cause, or perhaps...a better two year old girl was found for his purpose. My grandmother tells me it's best not to tempt fate, when you've succeeded in convincing her, you've chosen a better road for yourself than she did. Then again...getting eaten by ooze might be kind of fun...perhaps, even peaceful.