There is a dark place that I go to at times when the challenges of life begin to feel like they might overwhelm me. I want to try to describe it, as there is often a connotation that goes with ideas of “darkness” or “dark places” that implies something disturbing, wrong or evil. Those are not the experiences I speak of.

Where I go is just black, completely and utterly. Not a speck of light or any sensation of any kind. Void. Nothing. No-thing. When I sink to it, it swallows me and I know I can’t come out until it releases me – not for anything, not to answer a call or a necessity of any kind. My body shuts down, so physical urgencies or interruptions are not an issue. I don’t generally know how long the experience will last, nor do I have any control over it. But psyche knows – She just does. It seems to be like the spell that Sleeping Beauty goes into – the whole kingdom is asleep while she sleeps. An intelligence seems to be in charge of everything in the area.

There are diagnoses in the field of psychology that go along with this, and have some information to offer about it, but for the most part I think of these experiences as mechanisms that the soul offers the personality, a way to incubate and gestate while big processes assimilate, like the miracle of a baby forming in the womb. Though I have only had these particular experiences after some very painful things happened to me psychologically, so that they might be seen as symptoms of a problem to be solved or a dis-ease to be cured, I also want to state that I am grateful for them. An extraordinary and valuable education is involved in this that I’m not sure I could achieve in any other way and I feel it adds to everything I see and understand about the world.

Too bad they don’t give certificates for this kind of education. I don’t think I can put it on my resumé. But I believe these events offer more to the background and experience that I have to offer than many of the things that do belong on the resumé. “Doctor of Darkness”?? – probably not. The angels know, though.