Season 5

When Amina first came to Pål-Esben, she smiled, had done her hair and make-up, and did not bring up her problems in the first conversations: she had come to learn shamanism. But what radiated from her, he says, looked like a grey, jagged hedgehog. Once she had received help, he told her that last time she had looked like a hedgehog, and that she now looked much better.

A few years ago, Amina dated a man who could live with all the alternative things she was into, until the subject of aliens came up. That, he said, was where she had gone mad. Pål-Esben, for his part, has a good friend who spent more than two decades in Tibetan monasteries, where the wisest teachers say plainly that their land was once visited by beings from elsewhere.

When the thermometer in Pål-Esben’s office in Germany passed 30 degrees this summer, he didn’t wish the heat away. He decided to install air conditioning. Amina, who once disliked sunny days and worried about bills, learned to ask herself whether she could live in a tent if she lost her flat, and found that she could.

This past summer, Pål-Esben’s old house of oak and clay in the middle of Germany, which normally stays cool in the heat, got so hot that he started talking about installing air conditioning. As a child, Amina couldn’t even watch children’s films like The Lion King: it took her weeks to get over them.