Discovery (Science of Psionics Book #1) Read online

  It seemed to work, if perhaps a little more vigorously than I had planned for. Looking around for something else to test with, my eyes fell upon my notebook. If that went flying, at least it would do less damage. Trying to remember the feelings that I had when the mug moved, I slowly extended my hand toward the pad and softly said “rise,” lifting my hand slowly while I concentrated. The paper fluttered for a moment, like a breeze had struck it, and then slowly, it rose off the surface of the table. Keeping my mind focused on the paper, I moved it slowly up and down a few times. Then, twisting my hand slightly, I put it into a slow spin.

  I relaxed my concentration and let it fall the few inches back to the table top and then tried again. It slowly lifted off the table again, with slightly less effort from me this time. I pulled it toward my open hand and grabbed it once it was within reach, simultaneously relaxing my mental grip on it. Ok, I now had a valid test and needed to analyze the experiment and draw my conclusions.

  Somehow, either through dementia, dream state, or paranormal ability, I could cause objects to levitate. Any of the reasons for the ability would be impossible for me to determine by myself, since I could be considered a closed system and only external input could resolve the dilemma. Well, the last step of the scientific method is to communicate your results, so I decided to go and get Linda out of bed. Walking back to the bedroom, I tried to think of how to approach the subject, but was baffled about how to begin. Opening the door, I turned on the lights and saw Linda lying peacefully over the covers … about eight inches over the covers to be precise.

  Chapter 3

  Linda: Dreams in the morning

  One of the vices that I reveled in was lying in bed late. As much as I loved sleeping next to Mark, there was a certain satisfaction to be found by having the bed to yourself and stretching out anywhere at will. The bedroom was perfect for this today, being neither too hot nor too cold, and I was enjoying it fully. On a morning like this, I could cross the line between sleep and wakefulness easily, and the vivid dreams this brought out in me were amazing.

  Dreams like this could even be controlled to a degree. Some people referred to this as lucid dreaming. Some of my best story ideas came out on mornings like these. Today though, I had a more primal type of dream; I was flying. Raising my arms high and wide, I leapt off the back deck of my house and soared high into the crisp clear morning sky. Banking right, I turned to follow the path of the stream winding its way up the mountain, willing myself to go higher and faster.

  Halfway up the mountainside was a pool which took in numerous trickles of water before making the stream that I had followed. I hovered there for a moment, enjoying the way the morning sun created thousands of sparkling jewels from the flowing water. A doe was drinking from the pool, her spotted baby beside her. Everything looked so tranquil; I couldn’t help but pause and enjoy how wonderful this dream was. The deer suddenly looked up at me. Either I had made a noise, or it caught my scent.

  “Peace, little darling, I won’t hurt you,” I said calmly, but with feeling. The deer looked at me for a moment longer before resuming her drinking. I lowered myself down to the surface of the pool and scooped up a handful of the ice cold water to take my own drink. I stretched myself out fully to better enjoy the feeling of the hot sun all over my body. I watched the deer, now sated, walk away to forage for her breakfast. I let myself rise up in the hot sunlight almost like I was riding an updraft.

  Suddenly, the sky started to darken and the world began to shake. Panicking, I felt myself start to fall. Faster and faster I plummeted toward the ground, unable to slow my descent. Screaming, I slammed into… the bed. Breathing fast and heavy from the adrenaline surge, I looked around quickly and saw Mark standing over me with his hand on my thigh.

  “Easy honey,” he said in a soothing tone of voice, “you were dreaming … and umm … more.”

  “What?” I asked, still a bit freaked out with the sudden scary ending of my otherwise pleasant dream.

  “Get dressed and I’ll go make some fresh coffee. I need to talk to you about something a little odd,” he said as he left the room.

  Crawling out of bed, I grabbed my robe and headed toward the bathroom to take care of my morning ablutions. All through my shower I kept thinking about my strangely vivid dream. I could usually remember my morning dreams, but they were always a little bit fragmented. They were also usually somewhat more distant and dispassionate. By the time I had finished drying my hair and put on my robe, I had re-run the dream through my head at least a half dozen times.

  Stepping out of the bedroom, I detoured to the kitchen to put together a tray with mugs, cream, sugar, and a carafe of coffee before continuing on toward the office where Mark was waiting for me. Glancing over his shoulder as I walked past him, the word ‘Psionics’ caught my eye. As I sat down, I wondered what new project he had in mind that had him researching the paranormal. Setting the tray down next to my laptop, I leaned toward Mark to get my morning kiss.

  “Morning, hon,” he said as he leaned toward me for the kiss.

  “Morning,” I replied with a smile as we broke apart. “What are you working on now?” I asked as I fixed up my coffee with some cream and sugar.

  “Well,” he started, “I’m not quite sure how to explain it.” He seemed unusually hesitant to me. “Perhaps I should try and show you rather than attempting to explain.” Putting action to words, he took a deep breath, and slowly extended his arm toward the coffee tray. My eyes widened in shock as I saw the carafe slowly rise off the tray and float toward his outstretched hand.

  “What…” I began incoherently. “I must still be dreaming.”

  “Sorry hon, but that’s my line. Find one of your own.”

  “How did you do that?” I finally asked.

  “I’m not quite sure, to be honest. The first time I did it was this morning when I accidently knocked my coffee cup off of the table. I tried to catch it before it fell, and found it somehow hovering above the floor. I tried to reason it through, and could only come up with crazy, dreaming, gifted, or some combination of all three. I tried to work it out logically, but can’t really get anywhere from inside, so to speak. So now I put the ball in your court to see what you can come up with.” With that last statement, he refilled his mug and floated the carafe back to the tray.

  My head was spinning with the implications of what I had just witnessed. Not knowing what to say, I took a sip of coffee while I tried to compose my thoughts. After a moment, I asked: “So … I have no idea if this is dream or reality, but assuming somehow that it’s reality, how exactly are you moving things without touching them?”

  “I have no friggen clue on how or why, but the mechanics of it seem to be wholly mental. Using hand and arm gestures also seems to help intensify my control over the object in question.” He paused for a moment, deep in thought before continuing. “I’ll try and explain what I’m thinking and feeling while I do it, but I think that you somehow already know.”

  “What on Earth are you talking about? I haven’t the faintest idea how you did that!” I exclaimed.

  “Well, I’m not sure how to say this, but when I walked into the bedroom to wake you up, you were floating in midair above the bed. I don’t think I had anything to do with it since I wasn’t even in the room; you were just lying there hovering. I watched you for a minute or two in shock before walking over and shaking you awake. You fell back to the bed and then sat up screaming. The rest you know. ”He then explained as best as he could how he did this bizarre thing. Finished, he put down his coffee, crossed his arms, and stared at me expectantly.

  “I’m still at a loss for words,” I said after a moment. “None of this is even remotely possible.”

  “I know exactly what you mean, but just because it’s impossible, doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen. Why don’t you give it a try and let’s find out how crazy we both really are?”

  Frowning, I agreed, since either failure or success might help clarify the situation.
I turned my focus toward the coffee carafe when Mark interrupted me.

  “Wait,” he said, grabbing his notebook and tossing it to the floor. “Try with that, it’s much less likely to do damage if your control is off. I broke the first cup I experimented with.”

  “Ok,” I agreed, turning my chair to face the book on the floor. Frowning in concentration, I tried to calm myself with several deep breaths before pointing my arm toward the book and focusing my will on it. Nothing happened. Looking quizzically at Mark, he gave me a comforting smile and urged me to try again.

  Turning back to the book, I focused my attention on it to the exclusion of everything else. Once I had the details locked in my mind, I closed my eyes and stretched out both my arms. Holding that position for a few breaths, I then sharply snapped my hands inward while thinking COME, picturing the book coming over to me.

  I sat there stunned for a moment, as the breath exploded out of me with an involuntary “URG”. My eyes still watering, I looked down to see the book fall between my legs to the ground.

  “Nice,” Mark said, giving me a thumbs-up. “Next time though, you’ll need to be a bit more careful on how hard you move something. If a small notebook can knock the wind out of you, imagine what something like the carafe would have done.”

  Catching my breath, I nodded to agree with him. “Ok,” I started, “that was … weird.” I said, for lack of better words to describe what just happened. Regaining my composure, I watched as he slowly floated the book back to its original position across the room from me.

  “Try again,” he urged, “but slower this time.”

  Nodding, I carefully ran the details of what occurred last time through my mind and began to focus. I started the same as last time, narrowing my focus down to the book, concentrating on all of the small details that I could: the angled scribbles of his writing, the crossed out words and lines, the bent corner at the bottom right of the top page. I closed my eyes, recreating the picture in my mind. Hopefully, with a firm idea in place, it would do what I actually wanted.

  Once I had all the details worked out, I opened my eyes and let ‘er rip... gently. Slowly I saw the book rise up and float toward my outstretched arms, angling upward as it closed the distance. It progressed up to the point where it was between my hands and then gently came to a stop, hovering there like it was sitting on an invisible podium.

  An idea came to mind then and I carefully rotated the book until it was facing me right side up. I gently flipped the fingers on my right hand and watched with gratification as the page turned as if my hand was actually touching it. I flipped a few more pages and then floated the book over to the table and released it.

  “That was perfect!” Mark said enthusiastically. “You seem to have better fine point control than I do, and that was only your second attempt!”

  “What next?” I asked, a little breathless.

  “Breakfast” he answered, with a lopsided grin. “I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”

  Chapter 4

  Mark: Breakfast Adventures

  I wasn’t actually as hungry as I led Linda to believe, but I hoped that something normal like cooking and eating would bring some reality back into an unreal morning. I should have known better. Linda can be like a bulldog when she gets her teeth into something, and this new development was no exception. I opened the refrigerator door to pull out what we would need, when I suddenly had to duck, as the jug of Orange juice went flying past my head.

  I stepped back quickly as a steady stream of food started moving out of the fridge to rest on the counter next to the stove. Eggs, bacon, ham, onion, chilies, mushrooms, and cheddar all made the trip under no visible support. Looking over at Linda, I saw a smirk on her face, both triumphant and satisfied.

  Being a fairly competitive guy, I couldn’t let her outdo me, so after a few moments of thought, I had a plan. With what I was preparing to attempt firmly in my mind, I quickly locked my arms on the counter in case of failure, and pulled my knees up toward my chest. Quickly giving my legs some mental lift, I waited a second to make sure that they had support, and then crossed them into a Yoga position. I moved my center of balance forward, released my grip on the counter edge, and threw Linda a smirk at my success.

  “Showoff,” She said to me and stuck out her tongue. “Watch and learn, noob!” she exclaimed, jumping straight up and crossing her legs beneath her at the peak of her jump. She hovered there for only a split second before falling on her ass.

  Trying not to laugh, I reached out to give her a mental ‘hand’ but seeing what I was about to do, she waved me off, and bowed her head in concentration. Slowly, legs still crossed beneath her in a mirror of my own, she rose up off the floor until she was at about the same height as I. Looking up at me, she smiled, nodded her head toward the counter with the food, and said “Your turn.”

  Guessing her meaning, I took a deep breath and very carefully grabbed control of a knife and floated it over toward the cutting board. Using a second mental ‘hand’, I grabbed an onion and placed it in the middle, rotating it slightly so I could chop off the root end. Aligning the knife over the end, I brought it down and watched the onion roll away and fall off the edge.

  Grabbing it with a quick mental catch, I moved it back to the cutting board and took a firmer hold of it. Moving the knife back into position, I tried again to slice off the root end, this time succeeding. Encouraged, I chopped off the other end, rotated the onion ninety degrees, and split it in half.

  Grinning with my success, I started to tear into the onion with greater confidence. Linda, seeing that I had the chopping under control, started moving pans onto the stovetop. By the time that I had finished with the onion, I had the necessary action figured out fairly decently, and I made short work of the rest of the ingredients.

  I moved everything that I chopped into a bowl that Linda placed next to the cutting board, and opened the carton of eggs. After holding everything so firmly for chopping, my mind grabbed the eggs a little harder than I should have; the first two literally exploded as I tried to move them. Linda, who was in the middle of flipping some bacon, paused and started laughing at me, the piece of bacon bouncing in mid-flip along with her laughs.

  Throwing her a dirty look, I handled the next one much more carefully and met with success this time. When the time came to flip the omelet, I was pleased to discover that a mental flip was much easier to perform for me than doing it by hand. By unspoken agreement, we sat normally in chairs at the dining table to eat. Once we started eating, we both discovered how ravenous we really were, as we devoured every last crumb. After we cleaned up the breakfast dishes, we settled down on the couch to try and make some sense of this weirdness.

  “So,” I began “Did you want to go first, or shall I?”

  “Go ahead. I really have no clue where to begin.”

  “Well, I doubt that we’re both dreaming, so I’ll be working on the theory that this stuff is all real somehow. The only thing I noticed that was different this morning was that the hairs on my arms were standing up, like I was inside some kind of electrical or magnetic field. It pretty much had the same feeling as last night during the peak of the storm.”

  “The hairs on the back of my neck felt like that both last night and today,” she agreed.

  “Let’s run with that for a current working theory, until we think of something better. If this is the case, it seems that we somehow obtained some kind of ‘biofield attunement’, giving us access to telekinetic abilities. At least that’s what I could come up with as a name for this thing during my brief internet search this morning.”

  “Biofield … it sounds like you’re trying to cover both mystic and scientific angles. Or at least covered as well as scientific magic can get.”

  “Psionic actually, not magic.”

  “What’s the difference?” I asked.

  “In effect, probably not much, however, psionics refers to a mental ability. Magic, on the other hand, usually refers to ‘
spells’, sometimes with components necessary for the casting of them.”

  “Hmm … Ok, I’ll buy that for now. How much does psionics cover?”

  I stood up and said “Let’s go back to the office before I answer that. I think I left some of the psionic info pages up on my computer.” We made our way into the office and settled down in front of my machine. “Here we go,” I said.

  The term psychokinesis comes from the Greek "psyche", meaning mind or soul; and "kinesis", meaning motion. This literally translates as "mind-movement". This is also referred to as telekinesis with respect to describing movement of objects. Psychokinesis is also a generic term for various related special abilities which may include telekinesis, pyrokinesis, cryokinesis, teleportation, apportation, levitation, and transvection.

  “So let me make sure I have this straight,” she said, composing her thoughts. “Telekinesis is moving stuff around, teleporting is when you move yourself somewhere instantly, and levitation is moving yourself. What do the other ones mean?”

  “Pyrokinesis and cryokinesis refer to telekinesis at the molecular level, where you speed up the molecules, (heating them) or slow them down (cooling them). Apportation is like teleportation, but with external objects, rather than you. Transvection is basically just flying, and doesn’t seem to be too different from levitation.”

  “What other kinds of psionic abilities are there?”

  “There’s dozens of them ranging from semi-plausible, like telepathy or empathy, to the truly bizarre, like transmutation or matter manipulation. Do a net search if you want the full list.”