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Romania is not a strange place for me. I’ve been here quite a few times and like the people. Romanians are Latins descended from ancient Romans, now surrounded by Slavs. The cultures are very difef rent. I prefer Latins because they are more like us.

The country has always been poor. For this reason, when the Slavic people migrated to Europe, they passed through Romania on the way to wealthier places. Because they didn’t stay, Romania remained true to its unique culture and religion. Its people are Orthodox and very parochial. The everyday person is welcoming, honest, and highly educated. Just poor. My kind of people.

I can’t help but envy the Romanian men because their women are scorchingly beautiful and much more. If a Romanian woman says she loves you, she means it. She will bathe her man in her hot blood – if she trusts him. If unfairly crossed, he better beware. She will serve him a cold dish of revenge. Oh, those Romanian women. Na. Ta. Lia. Net.

* * *

My name is Natalia. I’m visiting the school this week, but not as a student. They asked me to translate for a visiting American named Thomas. I’ve patiently waited for him. You are about to learn why. The school is a highly selective, unique place. Our government brings “employees” here to study. For most, it’s a charm school preparing us to disappear into the world of spying. Emphasis is on the study of linguistics, geography, psychiatry, transcendental meditation, chemistry, and quantum physics.

Staff in white coats perform diagnostic testing and try to figure out if any of us are special. The last time I was here, our parapsychologists discovered something about me that interested them. We all knew I was a lucid dreamer. Not such a big deal. But on that last trip, I exhibited an off-the-chart potential in the extrasensory perception tests, prompting a decision at high levels of the SRI to include me in an experiment that introduces lucid dreamers to a psychedelic drug called anteril that enhances ESP capability.

Anteril was a black-market psychedelic that quickly became a favorite of the American hippies in the 1980s. It was deemed safer than LSD and with fewer side effects. Scientists wrote articles and even books about it. Some claim that it can take users to a different dimension. For example, the CIA and the KGB investigated anteril. Schools like Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and Boston University researched potential commercial and military applications.

In Moscow, the Landau Institute, the elite producer of physicists in what is now the former Soviet Union, jumped in. The Russians weren’t about to lose the quantum physics race.

My life changed during that last trip. I sat back on a couch in the medical clinic and got comfortable. I took off my jacket, placed a pillow under my neck, and put my feet up. I swallowed a blue tablet containing 30 mg’s of anteril. A nurse told me I should feel tired and disoriented but encouraged me to stay awake. Drowsiness set in roughly one minute later.

A parapsychologist sitting in the next room, separated from me by a glass window, spoke into a microphone and asked if I was ready. The unexplainable happened next. I felt myself rise from my body, leaving it behind on the couch, and I walked through the wall to join the parapsychologist in the next room. The doctor was unaware of my presence. She was laying down cards, preparing to ask me to identify their shapes without being able to see them. I looked back through the window at the chaise, where my body remained, and thought, What’s happening to me?

I still had control of the voice in my inert body.

“Fire away.” My body on the couch mimicked what came from my mouth. The female doctor started turning cards. “Natalia, please relax, keep your eyes closed and tell me what you see.”

“Circle, Wavy Line, Square, Cross, Circle, Star…” I watched the cards as she turned them, calling them out with my body in the next room. Of course, I got 100 %. In disbelief, the parapsychologist shuflfed the deck and asked me to try again. I re-ran the table. The tester excitedly summoned her supervisors, and the SRI Ops Manager, Florin Oltean, hurried into the room.

With the eyes on my inert body still closed, I called out the third deck – 100 %. Oltean was flabbergasted. Oltean checked the barriers on both sides of the window and questioned the card flipper to see if she somehow cooperated. Finding no such evidence, he deemed the experiment “well-controlled.”

I walked through the same wall to rejoin my body and fell asleep on the pillow. But my first out-of-body experience was NOT over.