I was eleven or twelve.

I think I must have had a fever at the time. But all I remember is that I felt very tired and fell asleep. When I awoke, I was on the ceiling looking down at myself.

“This must be a dream,” I thought. Had it been a dream, I would have been aware of it.

But at that moment, at the realization—false though it was—that I was dreaming, I came back down into my own body and was looking up at the ceiling again. Life had returned to normal, or so it seemed.

This was a life-changing experience for me, an introduction to a reality in which what was supposed to be was not. I was not bound by the limitations of gravity, because I was on the ceiling looking down. I was not bound by the physical limitations of my own body because I was outside of it, looking at it. I was not even bound by the limitations of time because I seemed to be outside of it, as well.

It was only when I was aware that I was looking down that I floated back into my body. Maybe those old Road Runner cartoons had it right when Wile E. Coyote runs over the cliff, stays poised in mid-air, then looks down and plummets to earth. Much the same thing happened to me when I found myself on the ceiling.

I was no stranger to the possibilities of the paranormal, even though I’d never had an actual out-of-body experience before. My aunt, Shafica Karagulla, M.D., who’d written the now-famous book, Breakthrough to Creativity about higher sense perception and each person’s ability to break through to a “superconscious” state, was to become a particularly important figure in my life after I realized there was another plane of reality.

Shafica Karagulla, MD

Conversations I had with her as I became older helped me pursue my own investigation into the nature of the out-of-body experience I’d had when I was a teenager and put me on the path to exploring paranormal phenomena on the air.

Aunt Shafica was one of the researchers in Los Angeles who became well known in paranormal circles. Her work on the various levels of conscious experience was derived from the writings of forward thinkers like Madame Blavatsky, the nineteenth century celebrity whose work became folded into much of the Theosophical Society thinking that was popular on the West Coast in the 1950s.

Although she wasn’t particularly a UFO researcher, much of the theory of different levels of consciousness became intermixed with a belief in UFOs and possible encounters with extradimensional beings or extraterrestrials who could communicate with human beings telepathically. And as interviews with various remote viewers reveal, theories of superconsciousness also evolved into the underlying theory supporting the science of remote viewing and retrieving information from a matrix of all existence.

A psychiatrist who had worked under the famous Dr. Wilder Penfield in Canada, my aunt Shafica learned about Penfield’s experiments in which he stimulated specific areas on the cerebral cortices of patients who were fully awake during surgical operations on the brain and, in so doing, induced certain memories and even auditory hallucinations.

It was as if she had discovered that the opening narrative of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past—in which the narrator bites into a pastry and has an immediate memory of events in his distant childhood—had an absolute physical correlative in the world of neurosurgery. Working with patients at Penfield’s Montreal Neurological Institute, she had discovered an entirely different aspect of human consciousness physically located within the cerebral cortex.

It was with this background that she read a book about Edgar Cayce given to her by a friend. It was another revelation. She writes, “Edgar Cayce could lie down on a couch, put himself in a peculiar type of ‘sleep state,’ and observe and report on an individual or patient hundreds of miles distant.” He could travel hundreds of miles in this state of consciousness and report the physical description of a room, the nature of the individual he was observing, and the disease a patient might be suffering from. For her, this was a revelation and it inspired her to commence her own journey into a higher sensory realm.

Shafica Karagulla became a very notable figure in Los Angeles after she began writing about her own experiences in out-of-body projection, and was often quoted by others who saw a relationship between out-of-body events and encounters with extraterrestrials.

We spoke more than a few times about the paranormal as I, inspired by what I had experienced, began my own journey. It is fitting, therefore, that I am now able to bring the circle fully closed and explore the work pioneered by my Aunt Shafica, who will figure prominently in my own forthcoming book, A Worker in the Light.

As I like to remind myself (and my listeners): There are no coincidences!