The Child Who Could Float

My first experience of the invisible came before I knew the words for it.

IF — What if…?

A Childhood Memory

My first questions about the invisible did not begin in a library. They began in my childhood bed. I knew no difficult words and needed no theory. I experienced something that, to me at the time, felt like a game.

Only many years later did I begin to wonder what others would call it. The child within me was freer than the adult who later sought explanations. That child did not judge the experience. He felt calm, lightness and wonder.

When I look back on that memory now, I want to preserve something of that simple openness. The intense night after the crisis of 1981 also showed me that an experience can be both inexplicable and truly meaningful.

Above My Own Bed

The peace I felt then did not come from reasoning. It was simply there. Its influence remained in my later life and in the courage with which I began again. IF therefore asks not only what might have happened.

It also asks what an experience can change within a person. Perhaps part of its reality lies in what it leaves behind: more love for life, less fear and the desire to stand up again. Some childhood memories have faded. This one has remained.

I was still a small boy; I no longer remember my exact age. Perhaps five or six, perhaps a little older.

The Older Woman

When I lay in bed at night, I could feel as though my body was growing lighter and lighter. It seemed to me that I left it and floated above it. I saw my room, my bed and myself lying there. It happened many times.

I knew the feeling that came before it and sometimes tried to bring it back. For the child I was, it was a game. I was not afraid. I felt freedom and a deep calm.

During one of those experiences, I remember an older woman. She did not speak and I did not know who she was. Her presence did not frighten me; she seemed to radiate calm.

The Freedom of a Child

Whether she belonged to a dream, my imagination or something else, I cannot say today. At the time, I knew no expression such as out-of-body experience. I had read nothing about consciousness or near-death experiences. Only much later did I discover descriptions in which I recognised something: above all, the peace and the absence of fear.

Other accounts were nothing like what I remembered. As an adult, I have often wondered what was happening. Was I dreaming? Was I between sleep and waking?

Was it a child’s imagination? I have no final answer. What is certain for me is how natural and peaceful it felt. Perhaps this memory helped nourish my curiosity: my desire to look beyond what is immediately visible.

The Night After the Crisis

It made me receptive to questions about consciousness, intuition and the meaning of our existence. When I think back to that little boy, I see above all the difference between then and now. The adult man seeks an explanation. The child was playing.

I want to preserve that memory without making it greater or more certain than it is. It too belongs to my life. After the crisis of 1981, I was in one of the hardest periods of my life. During the day, I tried to find solutions.

I had to start again. I wanted to remain strong for my family. But at night, I carried the tension with me. During that period, I had an experience that has never left me.

It began with an explosion.

Peace Without Conditions

I saw its force throw my body several metres away, where it fell. But I felt no pain. On the contrary. At that same moment, I experienced an incredible calm.

A feeling of bliss I had never known before. I was outside my body. Weightless. As light as a feather.

From above, I saw people approaching my body. Doctors were also trying to resuscitate me. I saw everything they did. I called out that I was all right.

That I was not lying there. That I was above them. But no one heard me. I tried to touch them.

My hands passed straight through their bodies. They felt nothing. I kept calling, but to them, at that moment, I did not exist. Then the experience changed.

I began to fly.

Back in My Body

Free as an eagle, I moved above the world. I travelled at a speed I cannot describe. Yet there was no fear. Only freedom.

Only peace. The earth looked different from everyday life. The sky was an exceptionally intense blue. The grass below me was a bright, almost fluorescent green.

I saw colours for which I knew no names. Everything was purer, sharper and more alive than what our eyes usually perceive. I felt completely happy. Not the kind of happiness that comes when something goes well.

It was happiness without conditions. A deep peace in which there was no fear, pain or worry. I had never felt anything like it. And I have never fully found that feeling again.

The Strength to Begin Again

Eventually, I felt myself returning very gently to my body. Like a light feather slowly descending and finding its place again. Then I woke up. I was crying.

Not from sorrow. I cried because the experience had felt so intense and so real. Part of me did not want to lose that sense of peace. Another part understood that I was back in ordinary life, with all the worries waiting for me there.

Was it a dream? An experience between sleep and waking? Was my consciousness creating another reality under the pressure of that difficult period? Or had I briefly touched something we cannot yet fully understand?

I do not know.

What an Experience Leaves Behind

I do not want to pretend to a certainty I do not possess. But I do know what I experienced. It has become deeply embedded in my memory. I will carry it with me for the rest of my life.

It also gave me something I badly needed then. Strength. After the crisis, I had to learn to believe again that a fall need not be the end. In my experience, I saw my body fall, but my consciousness rose.

Perhaps that was neither a prediction nor a message from outside. Perhaps it was my own inner world allowing me to feel that, after the devastation, there was still room. Room to start again. Room to live.

Whatever the explanation, the peace I felt changed how I looked at life and death. I did not begin to seek death. Instead, I came to value life more intensely. For when a person can glimpse a little light even in their deepest darkness, that single memory may be enough to help them stand up again.

IF — What if…?
Which memory changed the way you look at life?