I'm Gretchen Rubin and this is a little happier.

I recently read writer and anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston's haunting 1942 autobiography

Dust Tracks on a Road.

It reminded me of Carl Jung's memoir Memories Dreams Reflections, and that is high praise

indeed.

She described something very mysterious that happened to her when she was about seven

years old.

Now, one note as I read this passage, she mentions the journalist O.O.

Macintyre, who was a very popular newspaper columnist in the 1920s and 1930s, as well

as the British writer Rudyard Kipling.

Here is a lightly edited reading of what she wrote.

Again she's about seven years old.

There was some cool shade on the porch, so I sat down, and soon I was asleep in a strange

way.

Like clear cut, stirry opticon slides, I saw 12 scenes flash before me.

Each one held until I had seen it well in every detail, and then be replaced by another

there was no continuity as in an average dream, just disconnected scene after scene with

blank spaces in between.

I knew that they were all true, a preview of things to come, and my soul rides an agony

and shrunk away.

But I knew there was no shrinking.

These things had to be.

...