Decades ago I was admitted into the hospital for a couple weeks due to an inflamed spleen. It had a swollen so large that it was putting pressure on my back and causing a degree of pain so intense that it required a morphine drip to help manage.

One day after falling asleep, I awoke to find a strange figure in the corner of my room. He was wearing a long black coat, a wide brimmed hat and was sitting in a love seat with both legs crossed. Shadows were covering him at just the right angle, making it impossible to distinguish any facial characteristics. His presence was ominous. This wasn’t night terrors. In fact, what I felt wasn’t terror, but an overwhelming feel of heaviness. Like something very serious was focused on me. I felt overwhelmed with reverence. I felt small. We spoke for what felt like an eternity and at the end of our discussion I responded,,“…that’s going to be a hard lesson to learn.”

“What’s going to be a hard lesson?” My mother was standing over my hospital bed.

“Mom, where’d the guy in black go?”

“What guy?”

“The guy that was sitting over there. The guy I’ve been talking to.”

She paused for a second

“You have been asleep for hours. You were mumbling and then woke up talking about some type of lesson.”

Later that night my spleen ruptured and I was rushed to emergency surgery. I live with an almost foot long scar going down my stomach to remind me of that night I almost died. But despite that ordeal, my biggest regret is the inability to remember the details of my conversation with the figure in black. What was the lesson? And for who? And why? I think about this quite often.

Down the road, as I began my astrological studies, one the first areas I explored was this event. What I uncovered became a motivation for me to continue studying this system.

Transit Saturn was moving through my 12th house and in square aspect to my natal Saturn.

Transit Neptune had gone into conjunction with my natal Sun.

Transit Pluto had gone into conjunction with my natal 8th house North Node.

Exactly what in the hell did I run into? Is it possible that I had a first hand experience with the archetypal functions/energies of three planetary bodies? That is not to say that all of us don’t experience various archetypes as they manifest in our lives, but just that this experience was so intimate and personal. Even though I can’t recall the details of that conversation, I have never forgotten the feel of it…and I wonder if I’ll be reminded of it when I’m at the end.

Hopefully, I’ll measure up.