She Had an Invisible Friend

Carole King

Hypnagogic Active Imagination, a technique developed by the psychologist Carl Jung, makes use of the twilight zone between wakefulness and sleep, between the realms of the conscious and unconscious minds, as a means of tapping the wisdom of the integrated self.

The singer-songwriter Carole King apparently had a spontaneous experience of something like that at a moment of crisis in her relationship with her abusive husband Rick.

Isolated and indecisive, her interest in music diminished, fearful of physical and emotional attack, she needed help. And that night in a rainy LA during the recording of her Welcome Home album, some mysterious other part of herself provided it.

“At 2:02 a.m., I awoke and saw Rick sleeping next to me,” she recalled. “I turned my head and registered the time on the clock. Then I turned my face up toward the ceiling and lay on my back, motionless. I knew who Rick was, but I couldn’t remember who I was. At that moment, if someone had asked me my name, I would have drawn a blank. Suddenly I heard someone ask a question. It might have been I, but I hadn’t spoken. It was as if I were outside myself hearing the question asked in my own mind.

“’Who am I?’

“I sat up slowly, attentively, the way people do at night when they think they’ve just heard something but aren’t sure… I stepped quietly down from the bed, and started to go … where? Where was I going? I couldn’t remember why I had gotten up.

“Suddenly my perception shifted and I was regarding myself as if through someone else’s eyes. I watched myself walk over to the window and look out. Then I saw myself turn from the window and, with a movement like that of a silk scarf slipping off a mannequin, the woman I was watching slipped down and collapsed on the rug at the foot of the bed. At that moment, she — I — curled into a fetal position and disappeared. I had no thoughts. I had nothing, and I was no one.

“Then I heard another question in my mind as clearly as if I had spoken it aloud.

“’Where’s me?’

“An answer grew out of the nothingness and shaped itself around the person I was experiencing as not-me. It wasn’t sudden, like a thunderbolt. It was an unguent, a healing sense of possibility that slowly permeated my consciousness, a balm that soothed my soul, reanimated my body, and infused my mind with a renewed sense of identity and purpose.”

She recalled her success as a songwriter, her joy as a mother and the financial independence she had won for herself. She determined, if not to leave Rick, then to seek professional help to improve their unhealthy relationship.

“With clarity and resolve, I stood up, walked to the bed, climbed in, and immediately fell asleep,” she wrote.

And that was the beginning of the end of Carole King’s abuse.

Source: “A Natural Woman” by Carole King