Once Upon a Time 

I dreamed that I was not alone. I dreamed that I was held close by another person who didn't want me for my body, didn't want anything from me, just wanted to hold me close and was able to love me for myself, without any demand that I love them back, without any need for whatever it was that I possessed, and without any judgement of me. This person didn't bother about my name or where I came from, didn't regard me as an object, and didn't blame me for anything that I had done, or demean because of anything that others had done to me. It was so new a feeling, to be held without having to give, to be simple accepted as myself, without my asking, to be comforted without any pressure, any requirement at all. It was an unconditional love, of a kind that I had never experienced before, so strong and so selfless, so complete and so enduring, that I opened my heart to this person and took them into me. No words were ever exchanged, no names, no pack drill. I was given no orders, no instructions, no direction. Just an all-pervading love that suffused my whole being and invigorated me. I felt as if I had been re-born.

I did not consider this dream to be a religious experience; my parents, although they both came from families with long histories of Christian belief and tradition, had never opened any doors for me. Children of the 60s they had eschewed conventional religious life and had searched for Truth and Enlightenment in the East. they had immersed themselves in Buddhism, particularly Zen Buddhism. For my 10th birthday I was given two books: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Sound of One Hand Clapping. What a 10-year-old was supposed to make of them was never made clear to me, and I can honestly say I made it to about page 10 in each of them. Nothing remains except my love for riding on a motorbike, with the wind whipping my hair out – no crash helmet for most of my life – and seeing the road unwind like a reel of cine-film rolling around and often over hills, sometimes straight as a ruler, then whipping and twisting so that your bearings fall away and the only thing certain is the seat of the bike and the driver whose body you are clamped to. And for my 11th birthday, the last that I spent partly at home, before I was plunged straight into Dante's Inferno and from which I would not emerge for more than 4 years, I was given some artefacts from the Ba'hai Faith which I left behind together with my grandmother's locket which I had kept safe in my bedroom since I was 5 and had been a personal gift from the old lady whose stories about the seedier side of Edinburgh I had consumed voraciously for much of my early childhood. The fact is, I had been closer to my Grannie Dumbiedykes than I ever felt to my parents.

And Stacey was still a thorn in my flesh, the cuckoo who had been planted in my nest to displace me as my mother's only child and it would be at least 10 years and probably closer to 15 before any true acceptance would replace the bitter bile of sibling rivalry – ha! sibling hate, more like.

I don't claim some kind of revelation, anything like Saul the Tax Collector had which turned him into Saint Paul, Collector of Souls! I wasn't on the road to Damascus – I was in a damp and mildewed flat in Maryhill, not particularly clean and tidy (that's both me and the flat) and reeking of sex, having been the central recipient in a Bukkake Party given by a delighted father as reward for his son passing his Finals and now entitled to be called Doctor. And fifteen guys had stood around me, jerking off and squirting their spunk all over me – especially my face and hair; and this was after and before

various permutations had shagged me, two or three at a time. By the time I got back to the little flat I shared with three other girls, I was so drained and bruised that I just crawled into my damp bed and fell headlong into a black hole: actually it felt exactly like something out of an old film noir in which a silhouette of the heroine is shown spiralling into a well, I'm pretty certain I was still 12 at the time, not even officially a Teenager; just a cash cow for my owner who ran this little string of cheap whores cheaply enough to make a good living out of us – and he probably had more identical flats with more identical child brides for hire, by the hour or by special arrangement.

So it was more like the sleep of the dead until the dream started, until I felt myself wrapped in a protective blanket of love – not sex, LOVE! And I surrendered myself to it, willingly, hopefully, totally, although I had no idea what it was. It seemed to surround and fill me, at one and the same time all-knowing and not-caring: not caring who I was and what I did and what was done to me; this was the first time in my life – well from the time I became aware of the world around me – that I had been held and sheltered and enfolded so completely. And for the first time in a long while, I felt turly safe and protected. I didn't know if I was awake or dreaming, alive or dead, and I honestly didn't care. The only thing I wanted was never to have to wake up and open my eyes and find myself in that damp bed in that damp and stinking hole of a flat and once again the property of my owner, the man who had bought me like a bag of groceries – and probably for not much more than that – and who milked my body for every penny it could earn. We never got to keep any of the money, we got fed minimum wage but not in cash, just basic food and drink and enough drugs to keep us able to work the streets and the parties and the specials; Cindy, Candy, Cody and Cassie – the names the man had given us and we answered to, having all but forgotten our true names, because what did they count for? I'll tell you what: Nothing! I was Cindy – probably the umpteenth Cindy in his string, for all I knew there were likely Cindys, Candys, Codys and Cassies in every flat the man owned. They could have been numbers tattooed on our wrists for all the difference it would have made. We did what we were told, with whoever we were told to do it for; we asked no questions – of the man. of the punters or of each other. You quickly learn that it's too dangerous to ask questions. You just open your eyes in the morning, or the afternoon, or whenever you need more dope, and carry on as before. Days, weeks, months – who's counting? It wouldn't have made any difference. There were no set working hours, we worked when and where we were told. No days off, we worked every day and night. And the only thing we had to look forward to was enough dope to get us to sleep and enough dope to keep us awake and earning.

I couldn't tell you how many men had me – I didn't care. I was nothing to them and nothing to myself. All I wanted was to close my eyes and never open them again. Actually that's not true. All I really wanted was enough dope to deaden my senses and keep me that way, so I wouldn't feel the men on top of me and inside me. They treated me like a doll, well I wished I was a doll and they could do whatever they wanted without me knowing or caring or feeling them. Because I knew, sure as Hell, that I didn't have the courage to take that step and kill myself. And yet, and yet.

As I felt my entire being wrapped in that soft and supportive embrace, I wondered if this was what it would feel like to be dead. I had never listened to my parents when they spoke about their religious searchings, so I didn't know what they knew about After Death, or probably After Life! I just thought of it as a big nothing. Total shut-down. Like when you switch all the lights off and are left in absolute darkness. But their was something different now, filling my head with light. Not blinding, dazzling light, like when the man shines his torch in your eyes and tells you to shift your arse, he's got paying customers waiting. Not that kind of light that makes your brain ache so much you want to scream – and sometimes do, which just gets a slap on the head or a kick on your legs, and more orders, get up, get dressed, get fucked and earn him his money.

No, this was a warm light, more yellow than anything, and the softness of the light and the softness of whatever it was that surrounded me, made me feel happier than I ever remembered. I never heard any words, but I felt thoughts inside my head – as if someone was communicating with me without speaking, or maybe it was all my imagination, but at times it felt like a conversation, between something in me and something outside. And yet none of it was in words that I could make out. I'm not very metaphysical, much more existential, but it reminded me of the way a mother instinctively knows what her baby needs – now, how the fuck would I, at still only twelve, know about what being a mother entails? Yet it was like being cradled by a mother – not my real mother, that's for sure – but a mother with an intense closeness to and knowledge of her baby; and I was that baby, or more to the point, that baby was inside me, I can't explain it any clearer. My body was inhabited by this mother's baby. It filled my mind, felt my pain, I suppose I'm talking about my Soul or Spirit or whatever consciousness is. I don't think I'd ever thought about it before, about having a Soul that was more real than my body. But it melted away all my fears and pains, and I surrendered myself to it – without really understanding what it was – surrendered completely and absolutely. But I had no idea what to do about it!