Chapter Two: Karen Kimball’s Charmed Life by Cynthia Sue Larson

Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal
August 2003

Chapter Two: Karen Kimball’s Charmed Life
by Cynthia Sue Larson

Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from “Karen Kimball & the Dream Weaver’s Web” – information about this book appears at the end of the article.

On one particularly hot Sunday afternoon in July, Mr. Kimball was catching up on some work at the office while Mrs. Kimball busied herself with sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor. Left to her own devices, Karen quietly climbed the mulberry tree in the back yard to escape the loud banging from the garage as her brothers worked on building a boxcar racer.

She’d been reading one of her favorite books, 1,001 Magical Animals from Mythology, until her eyelids grew heavy. Soon her book was drooping lower and lower, as her arm came to rest on a branch and she began to slip into a dream.

Just before she dozed off, a blue jay landed alongside her, cocking its head to one side while gazing directly at her. Then it flew off again. She didn’t know if she were imagining it, but right before she fell asleep, she thought she heard it say, “Charmed life. You lead such a charmed life.”

In her dream, Karen watched the bird fly away. Then she suddenly felt her entire body begin to vibrate. The vibrations began at her head and were accompanied by a loud roaring noise, which grew quieter as they moved down through her neck, past her stomach, and to her feet. It took no more than five seconds for the vibrations to travel from her head to her toes, where they reversed direction and began moving back up her body. When they reached her head, Karen again heard the loud roaring sound. The vibrations continued moving up and down her body for several minutes and then stopped.

Karen felt her right hand sink into her magical animals book. She gently caressed the sharp edge of the plastic bookmark before moving her hand slowly through the soft pages and out through the slightly denser hard cover.

“If this is a dream, it’s got to be the strangest one I ever had, she thought to herself.”

With a start, Karen realized that she was feeling inside her book! She jerked her right hand free of the book and lowered her left hand down inside the branch supporting her. She felt the roughness of the bark give way to its softer inside core and stopped to stroke the smooth bump where the branch joined the tree trunk just below where she was resting. It felt good against her palm, and she savored the unique sensation of sap flowing past her fingers.

Karen felt like she was both wide awake and yet also asleep at the same time. Her body was nestled snugly in the branches of the mulberry tree, and even though her eyes were closed, she could see clouds in the sky and hear a warm summer breeze rustling the mulberry’s leaves. She felt the beating of her heart, and noticed that the vibrations that had passed through every cell in her body left her with a tingling sensation. Her left hand was still resting inside the tree, rubbing the rounded place where the branch met the trunk.

“How amazing it is to feel the inside of a book and a tree, and how very peculiar,” Karen thought to herself. She gently placed her right hand inside her book and once again felt the varying density and texture of the cover, pages, and bookmark.

Karen looked up at the sky and saw a feather twirling and tumbling on the breeze. With the thought, Float, Karen gently began to rise up out of the tree and toward the feather. She was flying high like the blue jay, sailing along easily without any effort on her part. This was wonderful!

The feeling of being free to go wherever she wished delighted Karen, and she flew low around the house over by the garage. She saw her brothers were pulling hard in a tug-of-war with a piece of wood to determine who’d get to assemble the running-board on their boxcar. They didn’t notice their sister as she floated down and sat inside the car. Just for fun, she squeezed the horn. To her great surprise, it honked loudly. She floated quickly up to the ceiling of the garage and looked down to see her brothers’ reactions.

Decker and Tad dropped the piece of wood they’d been pulling on, and Decker fell on top of a can of nails as the horn blasted without anyone seeming to touch it. Both boys stared with their mouths hanging open and eyebrows raised in astonishment.

Karen flew over to rest by some trees so she could watch her brothers from a distance. She held her sides, laughing at the startled look on her brothers’ faces as Decker removed the horn from the boxcar to discover how it could have honked by itself.

As Karen leaned on a tree, still laughing, she was delighted to see butterflies dancing around some wildflowers. If this is a dream, it’s got to be the strangest one I ever had, she thought to herself. Never before had she felt the inside of a book or a tree, and never before had she felt so awake while flying around. This was a dream unlike any other, and she hoped she’d remember all of it when she awoke.

Cynthia Sue Larson is the creative soul behind the Reality Shifters web site (“Your thoughts and feelings change the world!”), and is the author of the young-adult novel, Karen Kimball & the Dream Weaver’s Web.

You can order Karen Kimball & the Dream Weaver’s Web online through Barnes & Noble and Amazon or through your favorite local book store.

©2003, Cynthia Sue Larson. All Rights Reserved. Printed in the Conscious Creation Journal. (Feel free to duplicate this article for personal use – please include this copyright notice and the URL.) http://www.consciouscreation.com