Photo of Sehome Haggen's. Drive through is on the left side

 The kindly meter reader turned my universe upside down and on its head. And to make matters worse, no one but me believed the things that were happening to me. I now had some pretty irrefutable evidence that the world we see and sense is not real in the way we think of it as being real. My pig headed, rational brain had been humbled and began to grudgingly concede the existence a spiritual reality. After a lifetime as a material girl, I started to exert myself to listen and attend to my soul and spirit.

Now that I was settling into my new home in Bellingham, Washington State, I tried to reconcile all the various experiences of my life and hit the grief wall hard. If God really is there, he can go away, because I don't want any. I was emotionally exhausted and all I wanted after death was obliteration. I never wanted to think of my life or life on earth again. I wanted death to end everything, blackout, null, void, what a relief. I hated my memories. I hated what happened in my life. I didn’t want an afterlife. I barely wanted to stay alive now. I wished I'd never been born. So many people think belief in God is the result of fear of death. Hamlet was closer to being right in his famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy, where the only drawback he can conceive of in death is perchance to dream. If God doesn't exist, nothing matters, and life is easy. It's only if there really is a God that what you do here on earth matters.

As much as I wanted to ignore the spiritual world, it kept intruding itself into my life. The deeper reality showed up one day while I was shopping after living in Bellingham for several months. I was in the parking lot of my local supermarket. (The Bellingham Haggen’s if you’re interested.) As I packed my groceries into my trunk, I happened to glance up and noticed that from this parking spot the supermarket reminded me of something. Déjà vu? No, déjà vu is when you go somewhere you’ve never been and have the sense you’ve been there before. I’d been to this grocery store dozens of times and never had any particular feeling about it. Today, it just seemed that something about this set-up reminded me of someplace I’d seen before.

I kept looking around at the road and the store, trying to jog my memory. It looked so familiar. What did it remind me of? I noted the small hill behind the market, rising up to a modest height and covered with spear shaped fir trees. Um hum, check, yes that’s just like I remember. I also noticed the market's distinctive pinkish brick and the green trim; yes, check that’s right. From where I was parked, I could easily trace the way I had to turn right off the main road, and then left to get into the parking lot. Yes, that’s just like that other place. Where had I seen all this before?

Then something stirred in my memory. A recurring dream I'd had before we moved suddenly came back to me. Even though it was a very ordinary dream, it had stuck in my mind. The supermarket in the dream looked just like this, even with the hill behind covered in fir trees. As I replayed the dream in my mind, all the turns were correct. Back then, I had attributed the nagging dream to all the hours I'd spent on Google Earth researching places to move to. I told myself that the recurring dream was caused by a bad case of Google Earth fatigue, where Michigan and New Mexico had all started to look exactly the same.

 Yeah, I laughed to myself, as I closed my car trunk, isn't it funny how that dream is sort of just like this supermarket. And I remember that dream so well because… why? Oh, yes, that's right, the dream supermarket had a drive through arch on one side. How odd. Who ever heard of a supermarket with a drive through arch? Then, I glanced back at the supermarket again and noticed it… the drive through arch beside my supermarket, on the far side, just like in the dream. The drive through arch had been there all these months, staring me in the face, and I'd simply never noticed it.

 Hard to describe what I felt at that moment. It was a bit like time stopped or maybe my heart did, because now I knew that anything was possible. I had seen exactly this supermarket in my dream, way back in New Jersey. Somehow my mind had slipped the bounds of time and bounced into the future for a visit. If it weren't for that darned archway, I could have glossed over the whole thing. Turned out the archway was used to load groceries and catering without getting them wet in this rainy climate.

That whole experience completely unnerved me. I was like a kid who was afraid of the dark again. It wasn’t just the ginger haired meter reader who could look into the future. It had happened to me. Now there might really be ghosts, demons, spirits, the devil, God, Jesus, angels, heaven, an afterlife, chakras, auras, all sorts of strange and scary things that had never been part of my scientifically correct world before; and I wasn't sure I liked that one bit. For many months afterward, I had to fight the urge to crawl under my bed and hide. This whole world was even more out of control than I or anybody thought. No amount of quadratic equations, geologic formations, or DNA, could save me. There was something far more awesome afoot, and it was not way out there up in the sky, it was all around us.