In my work as a psychoanalytical psychotherapist for children and their families I sometimes met patients who heard voices.  These were scary voices who told them to self harm or commit suicide. Sometimes the voices were so dreadful, that my patients wanted to die, just to escape them.  Now all my patients had, by definition, had traumas in their childhood, neglect, violence, sexual abuse etc  At the time I thought that the voices they heard were externalisations of their hatred and fear about what had happened to them.  I never rubbished these voices – they were very powerful, but tried to understand how they arose.  I was an atheist at the time, and never considered that they may be spirits, or ghosts or some such. 

In my 60s, I too started hearing a voice.  This was the voice of the Sun, and unlike my patients, this filled me with joy, laughter and love.  I didn’t want to escape this!  But was I mentally ill, like my patients?  I was incredibly lucky in having a loving and secure childhood.   Might that voice be an externalisation of the loving atmosphere I experienced?  My parents were not religious; my mother said vaguely, when asked that she thought there might be something but she didn’t know what.  My father said there was no evidence.  We rarely went to church, only at weddings and funerals and christenings.   It did not fit into the insipidly Christian framework of our society.

The difference is that the Sun tells me things I did not and cannot know.  About the structure of the universe, how astrology works, that we will all become a god someday, like it is.  And there are many more things that seemed deeply unfamiliar to me.  I dutifully listed all the many books, fiction and non-fiction that I’ve read, which might have influenced my unconscious in constructing the wise and witty voice of the Sun.  I’ve put a lot of personal information in the book, to help my readers make up their mind, is she mad or not?  My family and friends say that I’m away with the fairies, kindly.  But the Sun’s voice makes me deeply content and sometimes, wildly ecstatic.  Why would I want to dismiss this?  Why shouldn’t I try to share this with our sad old world, so caught up in fear and anxiety?