THE THOUGHT THAT AWAKENED ME IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT was a shocking one: "Your mother is dead!" The strength of the idea frightened me; her death seemed very real, so real that I cried and had a nearly uncontrollable feeling of despair.
At the time, I was working in eastern Turkey as an assistant photojournalist. And because I was at an excavation area far away from civilization, I wanted to drive to the nearest village in order to contact my relatives. My employer tried to comfort me, and when that failed, he at last allowed me to drive quite a distance to make a phone call. You can imagine my surprise when my mother answered the phone! I will never forget how amazed—even shocked—I was to hear her voice. When I told her about my thoughts, we laughed about the power of illusion. And as it turned out, I enjoyed my mother's company for another 40 years.
Not long after this, after I had begun to study Christian Science, I learned that Mary Baker Eddy described something very similar to the situation I had experienced in her book Science and Health.
