REVIEW

EXCERPT

REVIEW

EXCERPT

REVIEW

EXCERPT

The reality of my books comes from my dreams. They write themselves. There are moments when I am sure that there is a giant library somewhere in the mass consciousness that contains each of the books into which I have tapped and I am the one recording the messages to which each person in this universe has access. Throughout the years, many people have told me that I have written their stories.

The Crystal Skull: Destiny's Courier was conceived early one January morning in 1979 when I awakened with a dream so powerful I felt compelled to write it down. For fifty-one hours, I wrote Kara's diary. At one point during the third day, exhausted and punch drunk, I completed the tale that had been thousands of years in the telling and dropped, exhausted, into my bed. When I awakened and read the words I had written, I felt an emptiness sweep over me because I did not know what to do with the missive I had recorded - how to begin the story, where to end it. Kara's diary ended up on the top shelf of my hall closet, alongside years' worth of stories and ideas.

Almost three years later, I discovered a leather bound notebook in a stationary store. After lifting it, smelling it and running my fingers over the cover, I bought it. Once home, I picked up my pen and wrote my name inside the cover. "This is Alan's notebook." The words swept over me with such nostalgia that I knew their truth. But, who was Alan? That night, I dreamed that I discovered a treasure on the top shelf in my hall closet. I sheepishly checked the shelf. Only stacks of manuscripts. I swallowed my disappointment and turned back to bed when it came to me. Alan Lewin was Kara's psychiatrist! That is how the new notebook came to contain the chapters on either side of Kara's diary.

Another year would pass before Cash Wilson and Eddie Stevenson told their story and this would happen after a traumatic event when I had finally dropped to bed, physically and emotionally exhausted. In the dream, a distant uncle, an evangelical minister, told me that he had visited a prison and one of the prisoners had admitted a crime for which he had never been punished. In the dream, my uncle told me that the man had absolved his guilt but had placed a burden on my uncle. Upon awakening, I knew immediately that this type of relationship would be the perfect vehicle to convey the story that Alan Lewin and Kara Courtney had begun - the story of a crystal skull that linked a band of humanity together from time's beginning.

Thus, after a five year period, The Crystal Skull: Destiny's Courier was completed.

It would be another two years before The Crystal Tunnel wormed it's way to the forefront of my mind and encouraged me again to take pen to paper. By this time, my mother and I had moved to Sedona, Arizona and we were hiking a trail near the top of one of the majestic red rock buttes. Stormy gray clouds had appeared and it was obvious that a storm was brewing off to the north. As I watched, astonished, a completed double rainbow appeared stretching in a perfect arc from one horizon to another. I looked over my shoulder and was surprised to see that the state highway below was only a narrow ribbon of steel gray winding through the red rocks. I watched a tiny pickup truck pulling a trailer creep toward the northernmost end of the rainbow. Mesmerized, I observed as the vehicle approached a small slope that preceded the curves leading into town. As it crested the slope, it passed through the glorious, vibrant bands of the rainbow, at one point completely within the rainbow, then dropped over the hill and was gone. I felt tears well to my eyes and a lump come to my throat, unaccountably touched in a way no physical event had ever affected me before.

I should have expected it. Sometime in the night, I awakened and the dream that remained with me had a rainbow at its center and, instead of the pickup and trailer, I was the one passing through the vibrant bands. Did I know I had passed through the rainbow? Was I a different person than I would have been if I had not passed through this rainbow? Was the world changed, in some way, because I passed through that rainbow? How could I explain to someone that I had changed? Who would I tell? Thus, the idea of probabilities, the core of The Crystal Tunnel, was born.

The Crystal Spiral was waiting to be recorded immediately upon the completion of The Crystal Tunnel. On the day that I wrote the last paragraph of the epilogue to The Crystal Tunnel, a dear friend dropped into my shop in Sedona and we looked at the magnificent expanse of red rocks outside the window. "They're different every time I look at them," she said, wonder echoing in her voice. "They're never the same."

The dream that summer night in 1988 was strange, even disturbing. In this dream, Bell Rock, an amazing Sedona natural landmark, was moving. And it was moving under its own propulsion. Somehow, I knew that I would not be harmed, but that it was necessary that I recognize that this beautiful rock formation was not only capable of movement, but that it had the same powers of intellect as did I. Did everything in this reality have these same sentient abilities? Since they are sharing our space, do rocks tell us things? Do rivers and oceans share information? Can deserts become ill? Does the air grow angry? Do mountains vent their frustrations? What if all the rocks in the world saw humans as merely materials for their consumption in the same way that the mass of humanity has seen and utilized the totality of the earth's natural resources?

Is this space I know the only space that there is? Do the rocks and the trees, the rivers and the air, the mountains and the oceans each have their own reality -- existing in this same space -- in which they see the human race as something outside of them, something separate, something valuable only for its use to that reality? It was a frightening dream and one that inspired me to seek an understanding to reconcile my fears. The result was The Crystal Spiral.

Crystal Dreams, the final book in the series, brings together characters from the three previous books and will be available here when it is completed.