In addition to this I often felt that a higher consciousness was telling me, you must move out of that house now. At the time I had felt that there were two opposing forces. This may have been the multiplicity at work, that being, the different 'selves' or 'centres of awareness' in 'discussion' with each other within the psyche, while switching back and forth in rapid succession.
One day when I arrived home after shopping, I looked at the house and thought, I'm not moving. The dogs and I are going to stay here. I then went to open the lock on the gate, only to find it had jammed shut, so that I was prevented from entering the premises. I did not like this, since the dogs were in the house on their own, awaiting my return. But I was unable to budge the lock and I ended up having to call the Darwin City Fire Brigade from my mobile phone to remove it with a bolt cutter! Anyone can have a lock break, experience a lightning strike, win lotto, have a bulb blow or hear a rap on the roof, but in my case it was the timing that mattered, since the incidents nearly always occurred in conjunction with my own thoughts and emotions.
Meanwhile the house was still 'active' and I was concerned about putting a 'haunted house' on the market. I had no choice but to sell it now. At least whatever was in there with the dogs and I appeared to be friendly. One morning upon waking, I heard a loud bang inside the sideboard cupboard. It sounded as if someone had opened and then shut the door suddenly. One night I was standing at the kitchen sink washing up and there were three faint knocks on the outside of the house close to where I was standing. If a person was doing it, they would have had to 'float in mid air' in order to knock where they did. I didn't like the stuff that occurred outside the house. It was dark and I liked to be able to see what was going on. Again, switching on the outside light seemed to stop it from occurring.
As I was preparing to move us out of Ridgehaven Circuit, I couldn't make up my mind whether I would take the furniture with me, so I got a quote from two removalists. The second one came out to quote onsite. After talking for around half an hour on the paranormal I said to the guy, "This place is haunted."
He said, "I thought so."
I said, "What do you mean?"
He said, "I am sensitive to that kind of stuff."
"Really?"
He then added, "Don't tell anyone I said that. You generally can't talk about these kinds of things to people."
"Okay. So where did you think 'it' was coming from?"
He looked up and pointed above his head. "It's coming from in there," he said. "It's coming from inside that room."
He was pointing to the second bedroom.
"Yep, you're right," I smiled.
I was always grateful for any confirmation of my experiences, which often came from unexpected places. As it turned out, it was peak season for people to be moving back down south at that time. Therefore, the cost of moving all the furniture to the next suburb was almost the same as moving it to Sydney, almost 4000kms away. It was too much and so I sold all the furniture for less than half price. The dismantling of the Ridgehaven Circuit retreat began in October in 2004, with the garden and several garage sales. Since a lot of the stuff was still new, people would ask me if I was opening up a shop underneath my house. I had well and truly let go of the idea of a retreat by that stage. However I still felt pangs of loss as I began to sell off things within the garden that I had worked so hard on. I left a few little treasures for the next owners in order to have the garden maintain its positive energy. The atmosphere of the garden was peaceful, gentle and serene, almost unearthly.
Not long after the excitement of the garage sales, I had spent the night in Darwin Emergency after a suspected heart attack. I was released with an all clear at 5.30am. I had been connected up to oxygen and various monitors. Andrea waited in the hospital with me. While I was being pumped full of oxygen, I began to go into a trance. I had a vision one of the 'consciousnesses' standing at the edge of a snowy clearing. I believed that this was caused from the oxygen and my very low blood pressure. As it turned out, I had not had a heart attack. The problem had been with my central thoracic nerve. What had them concerned, was that my blood pressure was so low that I should have been losing consciousness. What they didn't know was that my blood pressure had been like this for around eighteen months now. Once we got a moment to ourselves, Andrea looked at me and said, "They are not used to dealing with people with CFIDS."
"Yeah," I replied. "That's because it doesn't exist, right?"
