I Dare You To Read This Book.

Playing The Game Of Seven Doors: Part 1

I'm not sure how we started, or who had the idea first, but when I was in middle school I had a group of friends who would all go into the woods together past the race track and play a game we called "Seven Doors." This game involved one girl laying her head on the lap of another; the second girl would cup her hands over the eyes of the first girl to block as much light as possible from shining through their eyelids. We would all circle around them, seated on the forest floor, and chant softly, "Seven doors, seven doors, seven doors..." etc.

The girl who's hands were cupped over the first girls eyes would ask her questions after we chanted for a few minutes. What do you see? Where are you? Do you smell or hear anything? All leading sensory questions that would paint a picture of a location in the mind's eye. The girl lying on the ground would begin telling us what she saw, describing what she was doing, even where she was walking. Usually every "session" like this started in a forest similar to the one we played in, except that the girl who was "traveling" would be alone.

Within the woods were seven doors, each one a different color; there was red, blue, green, yellow, orange, purple, and white. They were scattered, and usually the goal of each session was to find a door, open it, catalogue what was inside of it and get back "safely" to the "entry point", or the clearing in the woods that all of us originally arrived in when it was our turn to travel.

We only had 45 minute lunches, so we would usually only have time for one person to go under per day. Originally, it was just in fun; we would giggle and chant and listen with rapt excitement and attention at the visual story the girl who was traveling that day would spin for us, finding all manner of animals and plants in the "forest." We respected the hunt for the doors; no one was eager to slip a discovery into their story until it felt right or made sense. Thus it took us two weeks to find three of the doors and explore a little bit of what was beyond each.

The blue door was found first, and it led to a deep valley lake, with short white houses cut into the cliff sides around the lakeshore. We hadn't delved deep enough yet to know if the small cliffside villages were occupied or not, and by whom.

The red door led a huge city, built from gold, metallic terra-cotta type material, with towering buildings that connected and re-connected through complex sky-bridges. Again, we had yet to encounter any sort of dwellers or people here, only a few strange birds that followed our progress through the city any time one of us ventured into the Red Door.

The Green door led underground, into a dank, glowing grotto, filled with soft phosphorescent fungus that wove across the ceiling like a webwork of fine jeweled thread. There was a single fire pit with a crackling fire lit at the water's edge, and a small tent suitable for one or two people at the most further in the darkness.

We were slowly moving beyond the point where it was a game. In the beginning, perhaps we had tapped into the effectiveness of soft repetitive noise and some sensory deprivation by blocking the light from the eyes, and achieved some very mild meditative states. It may have helped with our intuition, our ability to get lost in our world that we all created together. Like a creativity exercise done to stimulate those more abstract portions of the brain that we are so plugged into as younger kids, and lose access to as we get older. Maybe we were just at that right age; not quite children anymore, not quite grown women, but in-between, a gray state of being; transitional creatures each with a foot in two different worlds.

Maybe this is what made us susceptible. Who knows?

I remember going under on a Wednesday, when my turn came around again. My friend, we'll abbreviate her name to Jay, had her fingers cupped loosely against my cheeks. She had been taking guitar lessons, and I remember how calloused her finger pads were against my twelve year old skin. It made it harder for me to concentrate for a while, to sink into that soft fuzzy half-awake state that made it easier to make up stories. A flash of irritation shot through me but I quenched it, squeezed my eyes shut, and tried to concentrate. The anticipation in the circle around us had changed in the last week. No giggles or smiles; we used to make faces at each other across the circle to try and get one another to crack the chanting with a laugh, but the last few days everyone had intently stared at whomever was on the forest floor, focused. Resolved. There was a mystery here and we were going to figure it all out.