The walls of the room are painted black. It is a half sphere with a flat floor. For a moment you are reminded of a building like the London Planetarium that can show moving images on a hemisphere screen that totally surrounds you.

 

You’ve been confined to this room for three days, alone, in total darkness. Already you are subsumed in a world that makes no sense, has lost all semblance of reality, and you are desperately wondering, ‘what’s coming next?’

 

You know what’s coming next; they are trying to get you back to being a baby. No problem, just feeling the loneliness of it all; well I can take that, spend loads of time alone as a general rule anyway, quite enjoy it in fact. All this simulation of being a baby, huh, so much crap if you ask me. Presently, they are going to get you to call out for your mummy, but by Christ it’s taking an age.

 

‘C’mon you guys, let’s get into it.’

 

This waiting though, sure is beginning to get on my nerves. Wait! Wait! Wait! That’s all I ever do, wait for someone else to finish whatever it is they’re doing, but then I’m the strong man of the house aren’t I, the one who let’s everybody else lose their cool, get their own way; except me, I’m the one must stay in control, I’m the one who has to acknowledge that they’ve all had it worse than me, so they and they alone get entitlement to the sympathy vote.

 

‘Ah! Never noticed that before,’ as I look up above and begin to make out some pictures that are now puncturing the darkness; pictures of newborn babies covered in blood, and oh Lord, is that baby only half way out of its mother’s vagina.

 

Wow! That was quick. Total darkness once again. Eerie silence.

 

‘How are you feeling?’ asks a voice, after a new image gradually appears.

 

‘Very small, very tiny,’ I reply. A image has very definitely appeared, that of my mother’s eyes that are slowly and purposefully filling the entire field of vision, the magnification getting bigger and bigger until only her left eye is visible, which I now concentrate on, and beyond, into the seemingly impenetrable blackness of its pupil, for I am soon to be beholden unto a secret that lies its other side, and which is surely just the twinkling of an eyelid away. In my mind I draw an imaginary line between my mind and her mind, and ever so slowly, the image in my mind moves along the line until it touches the surface of her retina.

 

I am lying somewhere in what is now the vast expanse of her iris, and which for this moment in time is my whole universe, and is what my mind has come to rest on. I am looking for a door.

 

And it is true. Completely surrounding me is the moving image of a hugely magnified eye that has appeared and grown as if in perfect synchronicity with my verbal utterances, and which takes me right back to the time when I really was a tiny newborn completely helpless baby and where I am now totally immersed in the spiritual and psychic entangling and entwining miracle of the fusion and union of two souls – hers and mine.

 

How am I feeling? The therapist knows. It kinda creeps up on you, silently at first, but then the faintest of eerie sounds as if from afar. You are still firmly entrenched in the iris and the blackness of your mother’s eye, located as you are in this strange room, peering deep into, and totally saturated with, the world of your mother’s undying love and devotion. There is no world quite like this one. Perfect peace, perfect solitude, perfect union!

 

You feel a slight movement in the air. Was that a shudder creeping down your spine? The noise is still faint and far from clear, but now it is getting louder.

 

And louder!

 

And the image of your mother’s iris, it is receding. It is now two eyes, three eyes, a hundred eyes. The noise, louder and louder. The realisation.

 

The deception!

 

The giant Japanese hornet, two inches long and a wingspan up to three inches, this vicious predator has a quarter inch sting that can pump a dose of venom and an enzyme so strong it can dissolve human tissue.

 

All of a sudden the noise is deafening and you are in the middle of a nest of these creatures from Hell who are busy devouring European honey bees. And now their sights are fixed firmly on you.

 

And now you are screaming.

 

‘Call mummy,’ a voice commands……..

 

Do I?

 

D’I?

 

Do I Die?

 

In the beginning was the word. We call out for Mummy but which mummy precisely? In the face of terrifying death, to whom do we turn when there really is no alternative? I don’t recall ever getting stung by a bee or a wasp but if there’s one thing guaranteed to get my attention, it’s a stationary wasp hovering ominously six feet above the ground, as if its sole purpose in life is to remind us, and me in particular, of our primal fear, of our mortality, and no matter how civilised we think we might be, will easily throw us into a state of panic if it decides to head in our direction.

 

Not everyone is scared of wasps and hornets, but I’ll wager each and every one of us has an irrational fear of something, a creature such as a spider perhaps, or a snake or a mouse; or falling or drowning, or being eaten alive.

 

So, did I die when I came face to face with my innermost fears, especially when in the sanctuary and safety of the treatment room? I don’t think so. In situations such as these, when our primal fears are released in all their terrifying glory, who else but the Primal Mother to come to our rescue? She, who is the source of all life, the Original Idea. She is not going to let me go that easily.

 

Until we know death, we can only ever guess at life.

 

Somewhere along the line I figured that at least one of my ancestors most probably came close to death with insects of sorts. The ancestor would not actually have died. If he had, I would not be here to tell the tale (duh!). Mind you, during one of the hypnotherapy sessionsthat I experimented with, I did find myself in the body of an ant, but that, most definitely, was an unreal experience. There was no pain or feeling, just a surreal indication that my overly vivid imagination could take me any place I wanted to go, the more outrageous the better it seems.

 

It seems to me that our existence on earth is pretty much devoted to dealing with fear. In the whole of my life, I have never had reason to need to be unduly afraid apart from one or two instances where I did something really stupid like climb half way up that tower crane one evening while I was drunk, or the time I believed a wild animal was close by when I was hitchhiking late one night; or that time long, long ago when a friend and I, on our way home from junior school, ventured into a derelict house to see if there were any ghosts lurking in the darkness. There weren’t, but it didn’t stop us from feeling scared stiff.

 

So whatever has happened in our lives, and the lives of every single one of our ancestors, one thing is clear. They all survived long enough to conceive the next batch of offspring. Therefore none of us can do little more than guess what death is like. Had any of our ancestors died before their time would have compromised fatally the progeny that finally spawned us.