I was sitting in the living room of our house, sitting on the floor just in front of the really red imitation-velvet feeling couch.
My parents were on both sides of me.
I was probably 5 or 6.
In front of us was a circa 1980’s Fisher Price Magic Trick Box.
You know the type. Sliding doors, mirrors and a lot of chintzy props.
Including the cheapo, super-thin red silk.
I would put it into one of the doors of the box. I knew there was a slider in the back that could move the silk from one door to another. For either a transposition or vanish.
I closed my eyes, said Abracadabra.
When I opened my eyes, I reached out to the door that was hiding the silk. I flipped it open. It was gone.
I flipped the other two doors open.
Nothing.
I flipped the box upside down and searched it.
The silk was gone.
I checked my parent’s hands. They didn’t have it either.
I was kind of dumb and thought by just exclaiming a word, I could make an object de-materialize.
It reminds me of an early memory I have, of waking up early and going into my parent’s room and they were still sleeping. I was bored, so I figured I would pray to make a dollar appear in a cabinet in the kitchen.
I prayed really, really hard. I could feel in my bones that it had happened.
The voice of God was telling me to go check it out.
Nothing.
No dollar, not even a penny.
I did it several more times, and nada.
I mean, not even a penny? Come on.
Oh well, here I was now fully in charge of the supernatural behavior of the red silk.
And I was able to make it disappear completely from the universe with just one magic word.
Quite extraordinary.
An event squarely in the realm of OctoberWorld. Probably one of my first glimipses.
I would probably be another 4 or 5 years before I fully realized that one of my parents (probably my Dad) was likely sitting on the red silk.
It wasn’t magic powers. It was my parents hoaxing me. What else would you call it?
I have to thank them and also forgive them for that. In a lot of ways, it wired me for believing that if you just believed enough in something you could make it happen.
Even if it was completely impossible.
I probably got distracted too much by some things that were truly impossible. But it left my head stretched out so that some things that seemed impossible turned out to not be so impossible.
Either I refused to believe or I was still a little dumb. Maybe both? Maybe that’s OK.
All this to say, sometimes what you believe can help you even when it’s not true. Sometimes a belief just has to be effective.
I’m not saying that you should believe in flying and start flapping your wings. Too many times, people take an idea and cordone off the rest of reality.
No, you still have to respect reality.
But part of the beauty of OctoberWorld is, it can stretch out your mind, so you can come back to reality with a little more sense of what could be possible. A stretching of the imagination. A breaking out of normal daily box of life.
To start your journey, sign-up for your 2 free stories below. You’ll get The Seance immediately after you confirm (check your emails and/or spam right after signing up for the confirmation link). Then a day later I’ll send you Here Comes The Rain, the newest OctoberWorld story in years.