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The first thing I saw, perhaps prompted  a little by the hypnotherapist was an enormous oak tree fully leaved surrounded by a lush meadow, and then I heard children’s laughter, but all I could see was the tree.

Then somehow as I got deeper, I seemed to be by a river bank, fairly wide, slow flowing lined with trees.  Behind me was a meadow full of flowers, so I knew it must be summer.  It felt warm , if that is the right word and ‘I’ appeared to be holding some sort of grubby little jar.  On seeing this jar I realised it had fish in it. 

I think I can remember as a child fishing with my brother for little river fish, but I have never seen a stickleback but I think these were sticklebacks.  The jar was held by a piece of string and in my hand I had a stick – my rod – very crude, not a rod at all really, a sort of home made thing to keep a child happy and I felt happy and I was indeed a child - perhaps 11 or 12, difficult to tell.

What really threw me was that I was a boy, a little stick thin child, with freckles on his skinny little arm.  I was dressed in dreadfully grubby shorts and nothing else, grey to brown cotton I guess, crude things, wide legs. And out the bottom these shorts poked two dreadfully skinny little legs with no shoes, the feet were really dirty, as were the legs.

I seemed to have packed up and was heading home.  The hypnotherapist told me to wind on a tiny bit and there I was standing in a street in front of my house.

Now this was something else.  I have never seen a place like I was in at that point.  The meadow, the trees and the river could have been from my childhood as I lived at a time when meadows were still unspoilt and flowery, but this place was unlike anywhere I have ever been.  The surrounding terrain was flat or at least just gently undulating, the overall colour was brown. The sky was wonderfully blue and the sun was going down so it must have been afternoon, but the colour was brown.

Every cottage in this village was made of mud or brown ‘bricks’ and was thatched, a sort of grey brown thatch, so probably dried grass not reeds, untidy thatch, not neat and well kept, like a mass of unkempt hair.  The street was unpaved and mud, it had deep groove marks where I suppose carts had been but was empty.  There was no paint, no colour, there were no gardens and no fences.  Every house was placed on a plot without boundaries and surrounded by mud or grass, the placing seems to have been more to do with closeness to the street [for unloading carts I suppose], or where the ground was flat enough to provide a level place to build without too much effort.  The street wound its way around the houses as though the building came first on a stretch of level ground and then the street wound its way around the houses to connect them up. 

Most houses were single story.  No churches, no shops, no large buildings, very few trees, although I seem to have an impression of one large one at the end of the street.  An unadorned basic very simple village.

I was facing a wooden door.  Crudely made and unpainted.  On either side windows, but I had no impression of glass in them, the windows were quite small.  I went in and all there was, was one large room with a dirt floor.  No one was there.  The hypnotherapist got  a bit worried at this stage because she said perceptions are made and more likely to be capable of recall  at times of high emotion, but all I seemed to feel was disappointment that no one was there to share my triumph with the fish, still swimming around in the jar. 

In the wall next to the door was one large open fireplace, no stove, just a fireplace with a chimney.  To the right a very large crudely made wooden table and benches.

To the left what might I suppose pass as chairs, but all wooden and crudely made, chairs for sitting but not sinking in and relaxing.  There was not a soft furnishing in sight, no carpets, no rugs, no cushions, no curtains, nothing.  Some stairs – wooden and open went up to the area under the roof space.  I did not go there but somehow I had the impression that is where we slept, all together in one large space.

The hypnotherapist decided to move me on a little more to see what happened next.  It was evening, still light and there were 13 of us seated round this table laid with a crude metal spoon, and a grubby bowl, in which there was a sort of gruel, grey and rather greasy looking, and a slab of very unappetising bread, rather solid looking and a sort of grey brown in colour.  We were all tucking in though and the weirdest thing I remember about this moment was that I was hungry.  In fact that feeling seemed to pervade the whole experience, I was permanently hungry, an experience I am not used to.  I have never known real hunger but this was experiencing what real hunger feels like and it was, I have to say, not very pleasant.

But again the overall impression from the whole of this experience was not one of sadness.  My mother and father and ten brothers and sisters, all of them smaller than me so I must have been the eldest, appeared to have been very happy.  We loved one another we appeared to care for one another, we played together. As the session progressed, I saw an image of children playing with home made wooden ‘toys’ if you can call them that and string [twine I suppose] and anything that appeared to come handy – in effect no toys.  But there was lots of laughter.  My father was sitting in one big old wooden chair and smoking a pipe, the room was full of smoke from the fire and his pipe, hovering just above head height.

And we were all filthy, matted hair, terribly mucky clothes crudely made, sitting on the floor, running about in bare feet.  I appeared to have one favourite amongst all my brothers and sisters called Ellie [the name came from a prompting by the hypnotherapist] and she was on my knee and we were playing some sort of finger game, she was very small, just as skinny and as pale as me but had fair hair, all knotted and messed up, but blue eyes.

So in a sense these memories [perceptions] had been made by the emotion of extreme happiness.

What is perhaps strange is that it reminded me of something that happened when I was quite small.  My mum reminded me about it when she was in the care home, but I do remember it quite vividly now I have had this session.  I told my mum I wanted her to have more children, she laughed and said how many and I said ten.  My mum, I think was a bit gob smacked and wanted to know why ten since one more seemed to be quite enough, and I said I didn’t know but ten would make us all very happy.  Well at five years old, or whatever I was then, maybe the memory of that time in the far distant past was with me stronger than it is now.