The New SSS Blog

Caressed - Chapter One

Sunrise was still an hour away when Peter Ladouceur awoke in his small home outside of Edmonton. He turned on the lamp on his bedside table, got on his knees beside his bed, and began his daily morning prayer.

Although Peter was a devout evangelical Christian, he began with a meditation, a focus on his breathing, in and out, fifteen or so minutes of centering, making himself ready to speak to God in prayer. It was during this time that Peter Ladouceur became the first human to experience the caress.

It began as a light pressure, a tingling, arising in the brain stem and traveling slowly down the spine, then outward and back along every nerve pathway, down the arms, into the hands and fingers, and back, out to the surface the torso and to each organ and back, down to the legs, to the feet, to the toes, and back, then up again to the brain stem. A traversal of the network of nerves.

The pressure then moved upward, into, through, and around the structures of the brain, moving from the oldest, most primative, to the newest: first the hindbrain, the medulla, the pons, the reticular formation; then into the midbrain and the cerebellum; the limbic system – thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hypocampus; and finally into and around the cerebral cortex and its frontal, parietal, occipital, and temporal lobes. A voyage that caused massive disruption