#gatekid

I remember being brought in for a hearing test, and it was a windowless room, with a desk that this box sat on, and a chair for the student to sit in off to the right. The chair faced the door we entered from. There was a headset that they'd have me put on, and they said they would check my hearing. After the beeps, I vaguely recall the voice came on and explained that I was to raise my hand each time I heard a beep in whichever ear the beep came from. Over time, they'd get progressively further apart and harder to hear.

Something happened one day, where I felt the urge to move and I raised my left hand. The attendant/assistant (not the person with the machine, but the other person), lifted up my headphone and tried talking to me. I remember them putting the headphone back on, and nothing else. The next time I got pulled in for a hearing test, the whole class went, and when I made a comment about the beeps/boops at the beginning of the file to my classmates they all looked at me confused. I was SO confident that it would be there, that I felt overwhelmed with confusion when the hearing test was completely different, no beeps, no male voice and was over in seconds.

That was 6th or 7th grade, which I now consider to be time I got removed from the program. Maybe the school I was in didn't participate? I don't know but I'm thankful. I was still in the GATE program, but the "additional testing" stopped.

I started the program in I think 2nd or 3rd grade, and continued this portion of the program for only a couple of years. So, I was young. VERY young. But do you know what I was doing in 6th grade? I was spending hours and hours alone, lucid dreaming, astral projecting, learning to self hypnotize. My family knew these as spectacles you hear about on TV for entertainment purposes.

Know what else? The dreams started around 3rd grade. Lucid, vivid dreams I could control. Sometimes they'd recur over, and over, and over, and over again. Sometimes I'd try to become self aware and change the dream. Sometimes I was successful; sometimes I wasn't.

I had vivid dreams, or at least, experiences of being abducted by what my child mind called aliens, and after they were done with their experiments, they would stick me in an oven to roast me, cube me up and serve the bites like hors d'oerves on a platter.

Sometimes it was worse too, but I was always strapped down to a table. Sometimes my legs would be forced apart and it felt like something was entering my physical body, but I knew it wasn't. Some kind of sample, they'd say. Humans are so interesting after all.

They'd do that all before serving me though; odd. Sometimes, they didn't serve me either. I preferred it to the alternative.

Sometimes they gilded me while I was on the table. A liquid silver metal would be poured down my throat. I could feel it going down to my stomach, spreading through my veins, filling my lungs, until everything stopped moving. The worst part of it was that my awareness was still there, despite knowing that my physical body was trapped.

Sometimes that was enough to wake me up.... other times... I don't remember what else would happen after that.

I have one dream of being gilded, this time in gold. Turned me into a doll, and stuck me on a shelf. "To see," they said. I think this one was influenced by toy story because I was tied up in a doll box, on the shelf in a store with dozens of others. They all seemed so excited to get purchased, but I wasn't. This man came up and picked up my package, and making some comment about having fun. I didn't trust this man, didn't like the look on his face.

... what happens next isn't fit for this space, but I remember feeling it all, despite being completely asleep. I remember the sound of the rain coming from the window that I could see behind him, along with flashes of lightning that would fill in the space for a moment before the darkness returned.

Sometime after all these dreams (and more), I started having real OBE's, learned to meet friends in the astral realm, and got caught being in control of my dreamscape in what I think is now called mall world. How was someone from 8-11yo is able to fathom these complex situations? Is there actually a connection between the GATE program and these wild astral experiences or are we merely enjoying coincidences?

Now, fast forward to adulthood... I have had a very strong interest in meditation and hypnosis, and can easily spend entire days in a trance state without breaking.