Reality

Well, it's your own fault!” Jonas reproached. But when he saw my sparkling eyes, he fell silent immediately and continued to listen willingly as I immediately began to tell again.

“But back then, when I didn't yet know about my witchcraft, my gift of 'foresight' scared me terribly,” I said. “Sometimes I even felt as if I could hear what my interlocutors or my playmates were thinking. Often they were just scraps of her thoughts. Most often, however, I thought I could hear and understand scraps of thoughts from Finn, my friend with whom I had been friends since childhood. Several times I wondered if it was because we had such a close bond. Because he, too, often seemed to know exactly what or what I was thinking about. However, it should take years before I properly perceived and recognized this phenomenon.

I was also plagued by nightmares that haunted me during a few nights of my childhood. I kept dreaming of huge, scary-looking figures with hexagonal eyes. These figures came to me on the nights of my nightmares, tore me out of my warm, cozy bed and flew with me through the open window. When they reached a certain height, they suddenly dropped me. I fell through the clouds into hard earth almost every time. And while the giants flew with me through the sometimes uncomfortably cold night air, they angrily whispered to me that they didn't like my calming manner that I exude and that they thought it was dangerous. With every flight to the dark and wet clouds, they told me that they wanted to have the whole universe to themselves. There should be no other inhabited planet except yours. But with my calming manner, I might be able to make people and animals live together more harmoniously and in the end probably even give up on exterminating each other. The gruesome figures who held me in their clutches were apparently afraid that the creatures of the individual living planets might give up waging wars against one another and annihilate each other. Because this would mean that the worlds and life on them existed for a long time. During my flights with the giants, I learned that the inhabitants of each planet were trying to save their world from destruction. Of course, as a little girl I could not quite understand that there were other animate planets in the great universe and that they were all threatened by these hideous creatures and had to fight against them. At that time I also did not know that and how one could calm these large, terrifying creatures and take away the fear they themselves felt of the inhabitants of the neighboring planets. Because on those nights when I was flying through the air as a four-year-old, I had no idea that I was chosen to bring the people of the shimmering blue earth closer to one another, to take away their fear of each other and the uncertainty. At that time I was just a perfectly normal, little human being who lived with his family and who had a fairly severe physical disability.

These giants, who came to me at fairly precise intervals, were about ten feet tall, had light green and perfectly smooth skin and had a strange musty smell. Her eyes were hexagonal and quite small in relation to the size of her head, which was the size of a large, plump melon. Most of their clothes looked torn.

Despite their size and massive body weight, these huge creatures were so dexterous and agile that they managed to squeeze through the narrow crack of a tilted window. And because my family practically lived in meadows and fields, they generally slept with the windows open from spring to autumn. So do I. So it was easy for these giants, who did not seem to come from this world and who were also capable of magic, to come to me at night when everyone was asleep. But as soon as they got into my room, of course, they had to open the window completely to fly away with me.

And during my fall through the clouds and the air, a kind of angel with a friendly face, bright brown eyes and a snow-white beard always appeared out of nowhere, caught me with his strong arms and gently and safely brought me back home . When I was back in my warm bed, this angel, who had just saved me from certain death, sat next to me for a while and spoke to me soothingly. Strangely enough, my pajamas or nightgown always dried so quickly that I never had to change after my flight through the wet clouds and damp night air. Because as soon as the angel laid me in my bed, I was dry and warm again. Funny! I wondered about this phenomenon. But when I woke up the next morning, I thought anyway that my journey through the clouds with the giants was just a bad dream and that the friendly angel who saved me would have dried my nightwear again in no time. Because nothing is impossible in a child's dreams and fantasies. Still, I asked myself why I in particular had these horrible dreams and had to endure these fears. But I never dared tell my family about it or ask them questions.

And so I kept all my questions to myself and continued to wonder and fear.

I lived with my family for twelve years. Then my father decided to send me to a boarding school near Frankfurt am Main. He supposedly wanted to protect me from my mentally ill mother, who suffered from paranoia due to a terrible childhood event. However, at this point I was already fully aware that the real reason had to be something completely different. My mother suffered badly from paranoia. This was true. But this suffering was by no means so bad that my father had to bring us children, or Steff and me, to safety from her.