I'd love to give you a brief run down of my 'awakening' though I can't really remember ever not knowing I was different somehow. May be the Catholic upbringing made me conscious of spirit, albeit that it was me feeling like a little angel with wings who could talk to the animals, and I ended up taking Francis as my confirmation name because of St Francis of Assisi.

From those early times (7 or 8) the house I lived in had a very large long window and at night I used to spend hours looking out there at the stars using a telescope when I was a bit older but the dreams...they were so incredible I still feel them, mainly of walking outside of my house and seeing a planet right on the horizon, similar to paintings I've seen, huge planets, different colors sometimes looking like Saturn with the rings, but they were immense. And even now when I see mother moon huge in the sky I am overwhelmed because of the impact seeing that huge body has on me, it almost frightens me. The planet dreams were very strong as a young child.

The others were of looking up at the sky and the constellations being so clear but not as they are now, but as actual 'star pictures' of different animals all together in the sky, so real and colours to each of the stars that made up the picture. In the dream I would spend seeming hours looking at them. Just thinking of all this now brings me back to those early days.

My sister and I always used to look for, get this, 'marzipans' as we called UFOs back in the 60s. With the windows being as huge as they were you could see so much and we lived on the northern beaches of Sydney then so there wasn't huge amounts of light from the streets, and the two of us would be looking for these marzipans (gosh knows why we used that name,but it stuck) every night, scanning the sky. I can't even remember learning about extraterrestrials of UFOs it's just always been with me.

I was always aware of the unseen and the different from a young age, the sense of spirit. I have a need to know and there's always been a sense of wanting to 'get there,' goddess knows where that is, but I wanna get there. I started studying astrology at 14 or 15 on my own and then progressed for more formal courses around 19, the stars have always been in my life one way or another.

A very close friend of mine said some years ago, you are a star child, no doubt about it. She is not really 'into' new age things as such, but has an awarenesss and I was rather stunned when she said that because of who she was. Then reading various literature (Brad Steiger, Michael El Legion, and others) I started seeing a thread running through my life. I love the fact that I may have come from another star system (Pleides?) and I am rather obsessed by space and life out and around us, but sometimes I get impatient for 'something' to happen, though with the time slipping by so quickly now, its hard not to notice and seeing all these people everywhere starting to shed their gunk and come into their own, it feels wonderful.

Lisa Sutherland-Fraser lfraser@petermac.unimelb.edu.au