Autobiographical Fractal Framework of my Life as Me in this Dream…..(or the Many Lives and Deaths of the Stitcher of Seams)

(I started writing this about 5 years ago, and never made it past ‘the trip’ at the end(over 20 years ago! There are So many more Living Deaths whose stories need told!) . I will continue when I can, and also go further into various fractal pathways that I skipped in the initial framework.)

In this Life, I was Born in 1980….and I grew up in the Wilderness of Virginia in a hand hewn log cabin built solely by my father.  In the early days, it was  me, my father, mother, older brother and younger sister. Later on, we were joined by my little brother 8 years younger.  My parents raised us outside of the mainstream, very wild and free. I rarely wore shoes, unless we were in school or I went with my grandmother to her house. My feet were like leather, and I was one with the Earth. We had an endless forest and mountains to explore and discover, as well as the Shenendoah River, and a creek behind our house. In our first cabin, when I was very young, we all slept on the same mattress in one room. Some nights it would get so cold that you could hear bottles breaking in the kitchen. There were bats in the house often. We made baked potatoes in the coals of our woodstove.  We often took baths in the creek.  I grew up so in tune with my surroundings and the beautiful wilderness and forests, that my Spirit remained intact. I always felt very different from other people. Like I was a million years old in a tiny body. I grew very strong and athletic, as well as learning to read very early, long before school. I was passionate about art and drawing as well as writing. I would spend hours in the tops of trees writing poetry or drawing in my journals.   I was painfully shy at a young age, and extremely sensitive. I observed everything, and felt like I could see right through anyone and everyone.  I was looking at their Spirit.  I was always creating worlds in my imagination, and playing them out in the forests. Often I would play alone, and sometimes felt others presence as an intrusion into my creative space. I loved and was very close with my siblings when I was young. We were all approximately a year apart….and my childhood was one of immense joy and connection with the wildness of the natural world and the authentic Self.  We never had any money, and I grew up poor as far as material wealth goes. In terms of the spirit, I was wealthy beyond measure.  I do not recall ever feeling as if my parents were trying to mold me into something, or prevent me from being Me. I had such vast freedom physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, that it was not til I was older that I realized how unique that was. I dont know if they ever even realized what they were doing, but my soul has been grateful my entire life for what I was given in that precious time of childhood.

 My father was a passionate and  charismatic yet mostly solitary bearded mountain man who had a dream of creating artisan log cabins in the mountains. He was honest and hardworking, with a high amount of Integrity and a big dash of eccentricity. My mother was quiet and introverted, but held our family together. She could fix anything, and had a very bright mind. I never recall hearing her say a negative word about another person, ever.   Though my father was an avid reader of the Bible, we were not religious per se. He detested organized religion, and would go on long monologues of religious/spiritual/philosophical pondering with us as his audience. I loved to listen to him expound, and I would ask questions and then spend hours in the forest or in a tree thinking about the nature of the world and reality. I loved to take the long ride into Town with him by myself, listening to him talk about all nature of things. My mom would play card games with us, and do puzzles and puzzle books, and seemed to me to be the most beautiful person in the world.  Even now I am brought to tears when I really think about all the things they have given me just by their authentic presence in the world, and for never having asked me to conform to anything. They both modeled Integrity, Honesty, Acceptance, and Uniqueness. I am also grateful for the abundance of Humor that existed in my home. There was never a dull moment, and I learned to see the world through Laughing eyes. 

From the age of about 2 1/2 til about 5 I had almost nightly astral adventures where I would open the ‘trap door’ in our rickety old cabin and descend to the dirt floor ‘basement’ beneath, where my ‘friend’ would await me and take me on adventures. This friend was a large python type snake that seemed half cartoon/half realistic, and wore a red winter toboggan style hat. This entity, whom I dont recall ever having a name for, ‘trained’ me for several years in how to use my astral/dream body and on our nightly excursions I gained ever greater control of my lucidity, my maneuvering, control of my energies, etc. I never realized at the time that it was out of the ordinary, I didnt even question it….my whole life was outside the mainstream, so it never occurred to me that what I was experiencing was somehow unique or strange. I vaguely recall mentioning these experiences to my mom and her lack of confirmation on the reality of me leaving the house each night led me to keep quiet about it in the future. However, I still experienced OBE at night and had also developed a method starting around age 5/6 to alter my Dreaming if I did not like what I was experiencing. We had moved into the recently built cabin which was on the same property as the initial cabin with the trap door. I would find my way to the new cabin/my house and then take a very particular path up the driveway and around and down another steep hill/driveway toward the old cabin. In the middle of the path down…there would always be a very large seesaw type structure, which I would jump onto and it would sling me into the air very high. As I was shooting up I would get a little nervous…..thinking maybe it wasn’t a Dream this time, but if on the way down as I plummeted toward the ground, I could remain alert and focused…..right at the moment I would have hit the ground, I would jar myself awake inside the old cabin, standing in the middle of the floor facing the old sliding glass door. I would walk down the several steps, push open the huge hand hewn wooden outer doors, and as I stepped out into the light I would be in an entirely different Dream frequency. Sometimes I would go thru this ritual several times in a night to alter my dreams. I believe the ritualized path etc helped me to focus my energies. I needed it at the time, to allow me to shift my Perception I suppose. Just as in the beginning of my ‘astral bootcamp’ I would always use a piece of square plywood laying behind my old cabin in order to fly. In my mind, it was easier to accept that I could fly on it, like a magic carpet. Inevitably I progressed past the use of those things.


      There were nights I would awaken feeling like I was suffocating… find myself stuck in the ceiling, my dreambody lodged in the fibers of the unfinished sheetrock….I would pull myself out and around the walls of the tiny one bedroom cabin and outside. Other times I would find myself sunk down into the springs of my mattress, feeling tangled and stuck….I would have a hard time maneuvering away in those moments, as if I couldn’t quite get my body to work. If I could get out of the house, I was totally free, but inside in the vicinity of my sleeping physical body,  it seemed such a chore to get around or to control my movements. I never talked about these things. Sometimes they were scary. I slept in the living room of the cabin with my siblings, we had no bedrooms, and the tiny cabin was about 500sq ft in total, housing our whole family. As I grew older and into my teenage years, my Dreaming changed.  I had less and less OBE experiences but the lucidity of my awareness in my dreams remained high, and it was a routine to share each morning with my sister and friends our dreams. It was second nature, and I realize that keeping that alive was a positive thing for me, because I never lost touch with it nor looked at it as ‘unreal’, even though I knew that not only parents, but mainstream societal explanations would consider it meaningless.

    There were two different instances in my young childhood that I believe created a literal ‘crack in the cosmic egg’ for me. When I was about 2 I fell out of a moving car. We were not moving very fast, and this was before seatbelts and carseats were part and parcel of the everyday car experience (at least for my family!)… I somehow opened the car door and plummeted onto my head. My mom says I did not seem to be hurt very badly , that I had a bruise on my forehead but that I seemed ok so we just went home. By that night my whole head was incredibly swollen with fluid and much larger than normal, and she took me into the hospital. It turned out that I had a hairline fracture all the way down the right side of my skull, across my right temporal lobe. They could do nothing but drain the fluid, and my mom was told to keep me in a  helmet for some time, because another bang on my head could prove lethal, and I was still a toddler and accident prone. So I spent what seemed like eternity wearing around a big ole motorcycle helmet to keep my skull safe. Even after I stopped wearing it, I was very attached to it, and I recall my older brother eventually tossing it over the hillside to my cries. It was sacred to me.

   The other incident took place when I was about 5. I was at my grandmothers, whom I was very close to and loved to stay with. We were eating pudding and popcorn and watching a movie when I came down with a horrible stomach ache that would not go away. I was never a whiny child and I tolerated pain well, so when my cries didn’t cease my grandmother got worried and took me to the hospital. She lived several hours away from my parents, and when we got to the emergency room they did not know what was wrong for some time, so kept me overnight, even though the symptoms were classical appendicitis. My mother arrived either that night or next morning, and by the time they realized what was wrong, my appendix had already ruptured and was pouring infection through my body. My body started to go into septic shock and I was rushed into emergency surgery. I remember being on the bed rolled swiftly thru the halls of the hospital, with my peepan at my side and looking up at my mothers worried face. When the doctor asked me to count down from 10 to 1 with the anesthesia, I did so, and as I went under, I rose from my body and watched them prepare the surgery, and floated around for a bit. I was not afraid. Because of my experiences in Dreaming and OBE, which I never understood intellectually at that age, I was comfortable in that state, though it was a shock to see my body undergoing such a treatment. I never told anyone about witnessing the surgery, or my OBE. I spent the next several weeks in the hospital recovering. They had to insert a long tube into my side where I had a 4 inch or so incision that was not sewn up… they could drain the infection from my intestines and body. Every day they would pull the tube out a little further and cut it, dripping with infection. They would give me a shot in the butt, which didn’t really help the pain and I would watch them do it each day. I had to learn to write with my left hand because my right hand was on a constant IV. When they finally let me go home, they left my incision mostly open, so that my mom could continue to insert a very large syringe into the opening and squirt hydrogen peroxide inside.  I was bedridden for a quite awhile til the hole closed on its own, and I ended up with a very large nasty scar. I nearly died that day. For the second time. It was hard, being such an active and athletic kid, to be stuck in the bed while everyone else was out playing. I was able to hone my visualization skills though, and practice my dreaming techniques. 

    I am sure that those experiences contributed to my somewhat precocious awareness of mortality and my almost obsessive thoughts about what happens when one dies;  It was as if i were undergoing a series of shamanic initiations as a child. I experienced frequent headaches growing up, migraines that debilitated me. I had the classic Aura associated with them, and many altered states. I also had what I now understand as Ecstatic Seizures,  from the time I was a child still to this day. These experiences last anywhere from 10 seconds to a minute, and feel as if a wave of bliss ascends up and through my body, so intense that I lose conscious awareness of my environment for a few moments. I am forced into a prone posture on my back and I feel everything dissolve around me, until I am pure Awareness of Soul, and suddenly I know ‘everything’. I see the bigger picture of existence, all the pieces fit, not just in this physical dimension, but through layers and layers of consciousness and wholeness. It all happens in a flash, and yet feels infinite in scope. When I was young it would scare me, because of the overwhelming nature of it. I dont recall every telling anyone about this, nor about most things I experienced. I was already ‘weird’ in many ways, and I was extremely shy and self conscious.  When I would come out of these ‘spells’ I would feel in tune with everything around me, and could see everything so vibrant and alive. I guess I assumed it happened to everyone. I have learned to prolong these ecstatic seizures at this point, and they still happen regularly, maybe once every couple months, sometimes more. 

     I can remember being about 8 years old laying in my little bed in the same room where my now three other siblings slept, awake for hours pondering eternity and the things I read in the bible and heard my father speak about. In my head I was trying to conceive of Eternity intellectually, and as far as my 8 year old self could figure, at that point, if there was a ‘heaven’ (or hell) that someone went to for eternity after they died, then didn’t that mean I had already died? That I was already in heaven/hell/eternity? How could it not? How, if there was a such thing as eternity, could I not have already passed the point of death, and be in the eternal? As I became aware of this paradoxical situation, I remember being seized with both Fear and Excitement. Terror actually, because I knew, I felt in my bones, in my heart, in my soul, I KNEW, that one could not NOT BE and the immensity of that to my 8 year old intellect was crushing. The innate and experiential Soul Awareness that came from my Dreamtime adventures and OBEs, and the ecstatic seizures….mixed with the intellectual philosophizing  created within me a hyper-spiritual nature and an ability to see Patterns and understand connections and metaphor. I thought in pictures. I spoke in metaphor.   

    One of the things I used to do before sleep, which I am aware now most likely contributed to my ability to lucid dream and my superb visualization skills, was to create in absolute vivid astounding detail, entire worlds and lives. I would create a Character that I wanted to be, that embodied all the things I wanted to do and how I wanted to be perceived etc. I would see it and feel it and create it down to the last detail, the hair on the skin, the smile, the laughter. I would create my situation, where I lived. My family tended to be in the visualizations, usually as themselves. But I would be my enhanced, idealized version of the Self I believed I was Inside. I never had my own room as a kid, always slept in the living room with my siblings, and so I would create fantastical bedrooms, I would have it outfitted down to every crack exactly the way I wanted it. I would live out entire scenarios, for hours and hours before falling asleep. I can still remember many of the little ‘fantasy worlds’ I created, and can still feel flashbacks of action=filled scenes.  By the time I was a teenager and extremely involved in sports, I would do the same things except I would play the entire basketball game out in my mind before bed, I would rewind and rewind my vision til I got it all exactly right. I would feel every dribble, every fancy move, every shot, deep into my cells. I know now that Olympic athletes and science validates the authenticity of this method for training your mind AND body. It was natural to me, and just something I did without question or prior teaching.  I believe this also contributed to my natural athletic ability and mind/body connection and control. There was nothing I did not KNOW I could do, and do well.

    I was very close to my grandmother during my childhood and teenage years. She was always a bit eccentric, though not in a flashy way. I loved being with her. I would stay with her any time I could, and as a middle child who never really got the kind of attention I craved as a kid, I felt special when with her. Like I was really Seen by someone. She would tell me about her dreams. She had some prophetic and precognitive dreams, and I was impacted greatly by a dream she told me when I was little.  I liked her openness and her shared interest in dreaming. She always listened intently to me, and found the things I talked about interesting. She liked to tell everyone about me being on the honor roll, or how good I was at sports, or various other things. Part of me liked it, but mostly it annoyed me and made me turn bright red and feel exposed in a way that made me feel very uncomfortable. I never handled praise or complements well as a child, though I craved acknowledgment. I thought often that I would like to live with her, that it could be the two of us. Me and Granny vs the world. I think she probably imagined the same thing at times. I think I am very much like my Grandmother now as I have gotten older. She is quirky, and has alot of nervous energy. The difference is, I learned to channel that energy and ground it (for the most part ) as I got older, so I do not appear visibly anxious the way she does. I have always felt protective of her, and indebted to her for all the things she did for me as a child. The things I cherish most though are the doors she helped me open in regards to the dreamtime, that neither she nor I realized she was helping to open. She and I would wax lyrical about religion and beliefs about the world and life after death from the time I was very young. These things are embedded into my consciousness and influenced me greatly. 

     I was also writing poetry heavily even at a young age, and much of it had a morose and cynical tone to it, verging on the depressive.  Other times I would write long sagas that really had nothing to do with my own life, but seemed to be ‘stories’ I was channeling of other peoples lives, that I felt within me. Themes that were much older and more mature than my years. When I reread some of my writing now, from my journals, I am struck by the sorrowful nature of it. Which is funny, because I was never ever a dark or depressed kid or teenager. I was always pretty outgoing and cheery around people I knew (though quite shy in social situations outside my every day parameters), but my inner world is where I was obsessed with the Shadows, with the Psyche, with whats There on the Other Side, in the places I had visited so often, so young. I was always drawn to the dark places. To the weird people. To anything that didn’t quite fit in. I loved strange adults, I would observe them. I made friends with all the outcast kids and people, and in many ways was always an outcast myself. I was never bullied and rarely picked on, but I was also never ever in a clique or a group, nor did I care to be. I was the person who wove myself in and out of all the different groups and peoples. Maybe it was my quadruple scorpio nature mixed with an aries moon (in astro speak 😉 that made me lean toward these spaces and energies yet have the childlike impulsiveness and purity of heart, yet lack of fear, that kept me alive in my pursuit and navigation of the same. I don’t know.

    I had many very odd and paranormal experiences as a child that I never spoke about, but that affected me deeply and shaped me. I had experiences of missing time, and strange altered states, foreknowledge of my adult life to come. I always felt alien to my surroundings, and as if I were just ‘waiting’ for my real work to begin. A paramount sense of having come here with a particular mission, and a boredom with things most people took interest in. I never could understand mainstream life, it made no sense to me. I couldnt understand why people couldnt see what I saw…..or why people played so many mind games. Growing up out in the mountains, in a tiny town, allowed me much freedom and space to wander and wonder. I had experiences of a very dark nature, that I could not discern whether was ‘reality’ or a dream. I locked them all away into my mind, out of sight, because they were traumatic for my psyche. Being very secretive as far back as I can remember, I seemed to know or to feel that something very bad could happen to me if I were to talk about the things I was experiencing on other planes of reality. Some of the things were so odd and my consciousness so distorted that I still am unsure of the exact nature of the occurrences. I have odd scars that appeared out of nowhere…including three deep round scoop marks in a triangular pattern on the side of my left leg/shin. They are still very deep and obvious now. I often found that I would ‘dream’ something very strange and then awaken with marks or bruises. I bruise easily and my veins are very close to the surface. In hot water or when my temperature is up from hard exercise, its as if you can see right through my skin to the blue veins networking all over underneath. Ive always been ‘thin skinned’ and sensitive 😉  I also always felt protected. I seemed to know that no matter what I did, I was ok….as if I remembered having lived this life many times before, and that I was trying to hurry through the early parts to get to where I needed to be, this time around.  Life was one big deja vu. There were several faces that often appeared to me as a kid, and that seemed to be ‘watching me’ in some way. I felt watched all the time, actually, as if I knew that everything I did was visible to the awareness of eyes in some other realm. I had a deep sense of shame at anything I did wrong, or any mistake I made. It was as if I were living two lives, one on the outside….and another in some hall of mirrors on the inner planes. My deeply private nature meant that I never discussed anything about my inner experiences with others, especially grown ups. My night time adventures often consisted of Missions and very adult themes, of other places and worlds, and my abilities in those realms transferred over to the waking reality as extreme self confidence when it came to anything that required use of my body or mind or spirit.   Many of my memories are hard to articulate, and of a dark and traumatic nature on the inner planes. I still am unsure exacty what some of them are, or mean. I will adress things like that in future blog posts. 

    When I was about 13 I accidentally burned down my grandmothers cabin. She had moved into the original cabin my dad had built, that my family had moved out of around age 5.  My uncle had eventually fixed it up for her after several other families who had rented from my dad for years, finally left. It was right next door to the cabin my family and I lived in. I used to stay with her alot, as I loved her company and hanging out and watching movies with her. She had gone to town or something, and I was watching a movie, and was supposed to make sure the woodstove didnt go out. This was nothing new and I was used to keeping fire in the stove. But I got engaged in the movie and forgot for a long time, and when I finally checked it, it had burnt out. So I tried and tried to get the kindling lit the way I usually did, but it just wouldnt work, even with newspaper. I saw some fingernail polish remover sitting on the counter in the kitchen, and knowing that it was flammable, though it may help me to get the flame to take hold. So I lit the newspaper under the kindling, and when it flamed up, I opened the fingernail polish remover and dowsed some of it into the stove onto the flame. Of course the fire sprang to life, but also caught onto the vapor trail leading to the bottle still in my hand, which even though it was several feet from the stove by that time, went up in flames while I was still holding it. I dropped it onto the floor. Immediately the fire and fluid spread to the carpet and to a chair that was near the stove. I ran to the bathroom to get some water, and ran back and poured it onto the flames. Not knowing that chemical fires get worse with water, I was suprised to see the whole chair burst into flames then, and ran back for another thing of water, not realizing why it had happened. By the time I came back out, the entire curtains covering the sliding glass door (which was the only door out) were in flames, as was the ceiling and most of the furniture in the living room. It was an inferno. I stood there for a moment, trying to decide what to do. I was surprisingly calm, but filled with shame. I had to rip down the curtains with my hands, while they were in flames, and pull the door open and run outside. I took off in a sprint to my  own cabin just 1000 feet away or so, and I turned back to look, and the entire front of the cabin was in flames, with the orange and red tongue of fire licking the sky. I remember saying over and over to myself as I ran ‘ oh my god oh my god oh my god; oh my god oh my god oh my god’. It was like a dream. So surreal. I was afraid of my dads reaction, so I ran right past him into the bedroom and yelled to my mom instead. ‘Grannys house is on fire!!!!’. Of course my dad had already heard me and took off out the door, along with everyone else, and it looked liked the house was going to be devoured completely. They phoned the fire department, but we live so far out of town in the woods, and up a steep and winding road, I figured theyd never make it. In the meantime my dad and the rest of us did our best to put out the fire, and we did eventually get it, right about the time the fire dept finally showd up, barely making it up our dirt hill. The house was not completely burnt down, but it was unliveable. There was soot all over everything, the entire fron tof the house was charred, and most of my grannys things that were in the living room and kitchen area were destroyed. She had to move out. I felt so horrible. The sens of shame and gulilt ate me alive. Of course, I was terrified to tell the truth about what happened, that I had did something realy stupid and tried to light the fire with fingernail polish remover. I knew better, so I felt stupid and careless. And did not want my parents to know how stupidly I had acted. So I lied and told them that I had come out of the bedroom to check on the fire and there was a flame, that must have started from coal falling out of stove onto carpet. And that I had tried to put it out, but it got worse. I am sure they knew, that I was not being honest. At one point, im not sure whether it was the same night or later on, I tried to relieve my guilt and the lie, by  hinting at what the true story was. I told my mom ‘Maybe the fire was made worse because there was a bottle of fingernail polish remover sitting on a table near the stove?’  My mom looked at me with her ‘look’ and said ‘you didnt try to start the stove with fingernail polish remover did you?’ and I responded, as if horrified she could suggest I was so stupid, said ”of course not, Im not an idiot’. Or something along those lines. For a kid that already felt deathly sensitive, especially to shame, this was something that caused a deep descent into the inner worlds. My parents however, never did say too much about it to me, never yelled at me or acted angry or shaming. I am sure they were just grateful I was ok, and that it had not been worse. It was my own inner guilt and remorse that made it hard, not any kind of external punishment.    

    I can remember being in 10th grade and observing all the people in my class including teachers, and analyzing their spiritual energy (though I would not have called it that at the time 😉 I would wonder about each…..who were they Inside? Where did they come from? Were they or would they become Pure of Heart? Would they Perish in the Darkness of Ignorance? These things were metaphors to me, but I wondered about the state of each of their Souls. There was a Christian slant to my ponderings, but only loosely. I was preoccupied most of the time on matters that had nothing to do with my immediate surroundings, and I had no real interest in school other than Athletics. I was always a sponge for information though, and could absorb the teachers words and the lessons without even paying attention, so I did well academically without ever trying. I never did homework til the bus on the way to school. I never ever studied. I didn’t care at all. But I got good grades. It seemed pretty easy to me. Having become a veracious reader from a very young age, I had a great vocabulary and could make connections easily. I believe that helped with the schooling.  I was patiently plotting my escape from the tedium of a small town that seemed to offer no respite to anyone longing for a life other than young motherhood and a job in the supermarket.  I often skipped art class because most of the students there were only there because it was an ‘easy’ class and they had no interest in art. Which meant it was not challenging at all, and I was bored to death. I would instead hang out in the computer room, where I my quiet presence was welcomed by one of my favorite teachers, Mr. B.   He allowed me to use his computer, while he taught his physics class etc, and I would write poetry, or use the graphics programs to design greeting cards etc. He never really asked where I was supposed to be, but let me stay there and do my own thing. My art teacher never said much about it either. When I did go to art class, she let me create my own projects, and challenge myself. I would sit in my government class and work on large detailed drawings while my teacher would teach. I never paid any attention. I hated government class, I hated politics even at that age and thought it was a waste of my time. But I never caused a problem, just zoned out with my art. I remember another student getting called out by the teacher once, for not paying attention. He asked how come ‘chickie’ was allowed to sit and draw every day and not pay attention but he got in trouble. The teacher replied, that ‘at lease Chickie comes to me after class and shows me what she is working on, and is not distracting other students’. 

     In the first week of 10th grade, I had an assignment in my english class, called an ‘introspection’. We were supposed to write an essay about who we really were…..give an inside look into our life and person.   Well, always one to create worlds and stories, and also deathly private about my true inner world( suprise surprise, with an ascendent, sun, uranus and mercury in scorpio ;), I wrote an entire paper about how I was really a girl named Mary-Anne Walsh. I asked the teacher to swear not to repeat what I told, that it was ‘hard enough to live with the secret’ myself. I talked about how I had been adopted when i was really little. I cant remember what I said about the reason for using a different name. But I wrote that I always felt I was living someone elses life. I said things like ‘now you know why I never wear makeup….its hard enough being someone else, so putting on makeup would be like wearing a mask over a mask’. I got really creative and made it very heart-tugging. I handed it in, and a few other kids knew what I had done. We laughed about it. I thought for sure the teacher would know it was a joke, but instead I received the paper back with a private note  that said ‘thank you for being honest. If you ever need to talk, I am here’, with the teachers signature. Oh no!!! I now felt really bad, because someone actually had been affected by what I wrote. I said nothing, but felt really odd afterwards. Then a few days later, other teachers started calling me Mary-Anne, and smiling at me….It turned out the teacher had gone to the guidance councilor and office to check up on the reality of this tear jerker story, and found that it was all make-believe. The teacher himself never actually confronted me about it, if I remember correctly, but it became a joke for awhile. 

   When I was almost 17 I was raped by a person I knew and trusted, in a situation that remained hazy for a long time afterword, because I had been drugged. I felt so invaded and dirty afterwards when I acknowledged the reality of the situation that I tried to scrub my skin raw with hot water to get ‘the demon out’. But afterwards, I locked it away into the deep recesses of my psyche and never spoke a word about it, though I wrote feverishly in my poetry about it, though almost always in a coded manner.  A good friend of mine was involved in the situation too, but we never spoke of it. I later came to learn that she had been molested for years by this same person, both before and after my rape.  We put the whole story together about what had happened that night. I felt guilty after that, feeling that if I had told someone perhaps I could have saved her from the years of trauma. It was about 10 years after the experience that she  contacted me and told me she was in therapy and asked me what I remembered about that night. It was then that I also finally talked about it to my parents. This event catapulted me even further into my obsession with the human mind and psychology, and also secrecy. I have always hated anything to do with victimhood, and I refused to be a victim. So it was easier to just never talk about it. I did not want to be ‘that girl’, and I did not want anyone feeling sorry for me or treating me differently. So into the dark plutonic underworld vault it went. 

    Around this same time, toward the end of my senior year of high school, I became completely jaded about normal mainstream life and sometimes felt like I would die from the ache that was carving itself through my soul. I watched the faces of those I knew, to see if they knew what It was, but I could see by their eyes that they did not know. They didn’t even know that they didn’t know. Or that there was anything to know. Or so it seemed at the time. So I began to distract myself, began to get drunk when I could, the typical behaviors of being totally bored with society before even hitting adulthood.  The summer after highschool I went on a spree of carnal indulgence, as if testing Fate….as if courting Death and disaster. That feeling deep down that I was protected….was still there, but I was taunting it. Testing it. And along the way, I was fragmenting myself further and further, splitting apart from my core self…..yet at the same time I knew that I had a voracious appetite for Experience, that I wanted to Know, to Feel everything. I felt that until I had experienced something , I was not entitled to an opinion about it. So I started ticking off my checklist of extreme behaviors, one by one, daring life to tell me No. I could feel the inner darkness gaining a foothold, but as long as I kept distracting myself with Physical Experimentation, I could stay one step ahead of the darkness.  The summer after highschool was filled to the brim with dangerous and daring behaviors. I was courting the reaper. The dull and robotic world around me became my stage. I would put myself into all kinds of situations, simply for the experience to analyze the psychological aftereffects, of not only myself, but of those I came into contact with. The world was my playground, and it was a risky one at that.  

    I ended up in college at East Carolina University…..I wanted to be as far away from anyone else that I knew or grew up with as possible.  I wanted to be able to be ME, not the ‘me’ everyone thought they knew, the ‘me’ that was the ‘story’ inside other peoples psyches. I didn’t want to hang out with the same few people I spent my  school years with. I didn’t want to party at the local hangouts with the same high school and college kids. I wanted to see something different. I wanted to see myself differently. So there I went. I got to fabricate myself from the bottom up, spontaneously, freely, and with great excitement. I started to play with my clothing in new ways, my hair, I started to See who I really was, underneath the labels that mold a Being, especially in a small town.  I loved living in the dorm, and wandering around downtown Greenville which was literally outside the back door of my dormitory. I kept my distance, still, from any crowds or cliques or sororities or anything else that had a herd or hive-mind mentality. Always the Loner, unless I was drinking and partying…I then became the loud and exciting party animal that led the crowds into this or that debauchery.  I had many run-ins with the police while at college….several times was threatened with being arrested for ‘insubordination’…a theme that was to follow me for many years 😉  I once was at a keg party that got invaded by police. They were trying to stop the party and make people leave. I walked up to an officer and said that I did not have to leave, that ‘this land is my land’….and started to sing. The lady officer tried to tell me to dump out my drink and to leave, and I told her that this was my flag (with pretend flag stuck in the ground) and a crowd gathered around me. This went on and on, the crowd cheering and backing me up, me laughing and mocking the police woman, and her trying to be the ‘boss’ but for some reason feeling the silliness of the whole charade, and somehow endeared to me, but not too happy about having been made a fool of. I was able to discern the limit of tolerance, almost always, and leave before I ended up in cuffs.  Another time, some friends and I jumped a fence after a punk rock show and went skinny dipping in a hotel pool. We ended up caught by police, and one by one had to to get in the police car and give information for the ticket. I started talking away to the rather hefty policeman, and asked if he got internet on all the fancy equipment in his car. ASked him if he liked to eat, then said he clearly did, and asked if he would like to have dinner with me sometime. This went on and on, and once again the officer seemed to find my obnoxious mocking behaviour somehow not only tolerable, but likeable. We had a funny conversation and he wrote the ticket anyway. I still have the ticket, with the offense stated as ‘showing private parts of the body in front of members of the opposite sex’……how ridiculous!!! OF course, I never showed up to court.  Too many stories like that to recount. Always sneering at the thought of Authority, and doing everything in my power to see how far I could push the boundaries.   I nearly got kicked out of college in the first semester. I was caught in the boys dorms several times, against rules, because most of my friends were guys and that is where I hung out. I was written up each time. Then one night in my own dorm room, the police invaded our little late night stoner session. I had a few friends in the room two of which were guys, and we were all stoned out of our minds, with music blaring and the whole room smoky. When the knock on the door came, and I peeked out the hole and saw two cops, I just ‘knew’ that was it for me. I couldnt even bare to open the door. I just sat back down and closed my eyes and told the others I was going to just pretend i was asleep and be an osterich and maybe it would just go away 😉  One of the others finally opened the door because they kept knocking. They said it was like a factory in the room, and asked if we had been smoking. ha! They gave us the ‘drunk’ test and found a bag of pot stashed by one of the guys, who instead of claiming it rightly as their own , planted it in my room and let me take the fall. So that was that, the next day I was in the deans office again, and was told that I could no longer live in the dorms. When they realized I was out of state and I told them I would be unable to continue school, they felt sorry for me I guess and gave me ONE LAST CHANCE. The thought of being kicked out was horrifying, after all my parents went through to actually get me in….having no money and having been screwed over with financial aide bcause of a mixup by my guidance counselor, they had taken out a huge loan.  I felt such utter shame( a recurrent theme!) that I made sure that I kept my self in line for the next semester. Never had another problem….on campus at least. 

   I had a Religion class that really impacted me. It was a ‘critical’ study of the bible, not a ‘devotional’ one, and the teacher was wonderful. I started to hang out with a few of the guys i met in the class who introduced me to Buddhism as well, and who were of a philosophical bent in general. We would eat a hit of acid before class and hang out in their room listening to the grateful dead……..philosophizing about anything and everything. I pushed away Christianity and everything to do with it, while acknowledging that as a metaphor it was a perfectly acceptable language. But I needed to distance myself from it. I started to delve into Alan Watts, Alduous Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Albert Hoffman etc etc. Anything that penetrated the nature of the psyche or the soul drew me in. I would spend hours and hours in the computer lab, with the relatively new INTERNET, and research everything I could….as well as scouring the university library.  I started building my own webpages by teaching myself html from viewing other pages ‘source codes’ and printing out sheets of code. I used these as ways to catalogue my poetry and art, as well as all the research I was doing on Consciousness, philosophy, and spirituality.  I was now 18, and ‘officially’ an adult, and was ready to dive through the rabbit hole.

   Then, I had an experience where I ate 4 hits of acid, and went to a rave for the first time with a friend. It was fun, but  not necessarily my kind of scene. What I did enjoy was the acid trip, which was far different than the 1 hit trips I had done while spouting theories about the world with my buddies before religion class. This was different. This had catapulted me into a very different world, and I was absorbed in the experience. It was not so much about what I saw, or experienced, but the PROCESS of it all, the fact that I knew I was not ‘hallucinating’ but that a veil had been torn asunder and I was seeing what was there all along, yet hidden from our everyday sight. Outwardly I danced and wandered, but inwardly I was exploring the nature of reality.  About halfway thru the night, I redosed with a few more drops of liquid  and left with another friend. We had a great adventure. It was that night that my eyes were reopened to alternate dimensions….I had experienced those things in a different way in childhood through the Lucid dreaming, OBEs and ecstatic seizures. But through my earlier teenage years had more or less forgotten that part of myself and the world.  After this experience, where I realized without doubt, that Its All Energy, I really became excited with the prospect of adventuring INWARD. I found my place. I found what I wanted to do. I wanted to travel, but I wanted to travel Consciousness. My studies and research became almost obsessive and singleminded and I started to put together notebooks with my research. I still have some of those ring binders today. I have an entire binder filled with LSD and psychedelic research, Albert Hoffman, etc. I saw no need to overdo the substances themselves, in fact I don’t believe I participated more than a couple times after that while in college…..but I wrote more and more poetry and my artwork, which I had also been deeply involved in since a child, became more and more intricate and expressive of the connective nature of the universe as I saw it.  It was never the Product that interested me, it was the Process.  Right around this time, when I was a freshman in college, In my second and last semester….I was re-introduced to my Dreaming Self.. I seemingly ‘woke’ one night and could not move on my bed, all around me was vivid red and oranges almost like smoke, but denser. It was hot. I couldn’t move but I could see, and I was terrified. I struggled against this force til I SNAPPED upwards, sitting up with back straight. My bed seemed to be floating in a hellish red and orange hot smoldering landscape and I thought ‘holy shit, its real. No fucking way. Hell?’ At that moment I woke again, this time for real, I thought. I got out of bed, incredulous. At that time I had not even thought about my OBEs as a kid or lucid dreaming etc. I got up and walked out of my room and down the hall outside my dorm. People were scattered about, drinking, music was on, the usual scenery. Except that no one paid any attention to me. I started to try and get their attention. Nothing. It was like I was a ghost. I started to scream as loud as I could. Nothing. I was terrified. I was definitely dead. I was a ghost. I freaked out. I thought I had done it. I had condemned my soul to hell with all the debaucherous things I had done, etc. Then, I really did wake up. It was such an intense and disorienting experience. I wrote a poem about it. It stayed with me. I started to think about what it was. I started to remember the OBEs as a kid, the finding myself awake in the ceiling, the feeling of the heaviness of the ‘air’, the suffocating nature of it at times, when I couldn’t maneuver my body appropriately. All the sensations. It all started to come back to me and I started to put it all together and realized that I had had an OBE but had thought Id died. I started to pay attention to my dreaming again. I was re=initiated into the Dreamtime. I was also catapulted into intense self-scrutiny. The imagery and the hellishness of it led me to analyze my behaviour and indulgences. I split into two variations of myself….one was the same hyper-spiritual person who I remembered from early childhood and parts of highschool…the other was the temptress of fate, pursuing my own death and flirting with the abyss.  I had several more strange ‘missing time’ incidences around this time, that I still cannot explain fully but I have theories based on new awareness gained over the years. 

     The flashy illusion of college and career had crumbled before my eyes. And I didn’t care. It was a good riddance. Except that I still felt guilty about all the money my parents went into debt with, in order to give me that single one year of college experience. I felt I had let them down, let everyone down, even though my inner self knew the whole system was bogus and that it was a prison for the mind. I could not face going back to my hometown, even though I had decided there was no way I would go into debt further for more of that ‘education’ experience. So that summer I stayed in Greenville and worked sporadically, living with a few roommates for two months on a sublease.

One night, I awoke in my bed and watched as the limbs of a tree started to contort and twist into the window, grabbing me. I came to in a large brightly lit room, steril, with people in lab coats and others in black suits. I was bound and unable to move, and seemingly being drugged and perhaps experimented on. I struggled and struggled. I went in and out of conscious awareness, terrified of what was going on. Part of me remembered this, however, as if I had been through it all before many times. Flashes and scenes from my childhood memories passed through my mind. IT was like being in a feverish state where nothing made sense but everything was connected. I was in that ‘same space’ that I remembered. Eventually I managed to struggle and escape, which was not expected. I managed to get out of the large warehouse style building into the forest. I was naked, alone, and bruised and scraped and bleeding from the experience and the struggle. I staggered and ran in a half ‘drugged’ state deeper and deeper into the forest. This went on and on, hungry and tired, and exhausted, but having no idea where I was or how to get out. In my mind I knew I had been wandering for 18 days, and that I was in bad shape, and that ‘they’ were watching me, I knew that they could come get me if they wanted. That was even more creepy. Then I awoke in my bed. I was disoriented. I had a very bad headache. I was living off campus at the time, in the summer right after college, in a house I shared with a few people for short term. I was weak, and I had bruises and scratches on my body. I could remember everything, it was real. I knew it was real. It was not a dream, it was not an OBE as I had experienced plenty of those. This was different. I could not explain it but I knew it was the same kind of experience I remembered as a kid. I was terrified. It was 2 full days after I had fallen asleep. I have no idea if I was actually physically gone at any point, and there was no way to tell. But my consciousness was gone, for 18 days, in some other experience. And I had marks on my physical body. I wrote some crazy poetry about the experience and then ,just like everything else, stuffed it down into the vault. Never told anyone. I was already walking a tightrope of ‘crazy’ so I just spiralled back down into my own mind and inner world, while outwardly dancing with the devil. 

   For the rest of that summer I began to party heavily, and drank lots of alcohol. I Tried to drown out the voice. The voice I began to call the Madwomans Whisper. It was calling to me, but I was afraid to follow it. I thought I might still be able to ‘make something of myself in this plastic world’, I thought I might be able to trick my soul into finding happiness there, in the ways that others seemed to do. So I just went to punk rock shows and sold cds to get enough money for beer and  punk rock shows. Then toward the end of summer, I was told by someone who I considered an alcoholic ‘you are always drunk. You are either drunk or you have a beer in your hand every time I see you’. That was a wakeup call. I thought of my family, of my family history of alcoholism and addiction. I saw myself. I was terrified. NO! anything but that!!!!!! How did I get so far down in this pit? I was repulsed at my own behavior, once again. The indulgences .The self destructive tendencies.  I went home that night, didn’t tell my roommates, or my family or anyone else,  and packed up my car with all my belongings. I drove the 6 hours thru the middle of the night back to my parents house in VA. I just knew I had to leave there or I was going to die. And the death I was headed for was far worse than a heart that no longer beat. And being impulsive, always, when something comes over me, I had to act….. Immediately. I could not wait and plan, I moved instinctively, stealthily. Two days later or so, Greenville was hit with a hurricane. It was 1999. The house I had been living in was pretty much under water, there was massive damage to the town. The swine farms in North Carolina had caused devastation. Had I not left when I did, I would have been fucked. Royally. I had no money, no family there, no one to go to had I needed help. I was out of my zone. And through Grace , once again, I had been led to safety. That was just one among many situations in which I learned that it was always good to trust my intuition, even if it was disguised as something else.

     When I got home I decided I was finished with alcohol. I could see nothing positive about it. I was going to get my shit together. My time was spent writing in my journal, which I had learned to keep for years because my dad prompted me when I was a kid. He always kept journals and I began to follow suit. They acted as my life raft for so many years. They kept me sane, I believe, being able to articulate myself, delve into my feelings and shifts in moods and perceptions. I would write poetry that seemed to come from somewhere else; I was not writing about my own ‘life’ as it were. I was telling archetypal myths. I was spelling myself out in morning dew, across pages that crystallized my thoughts and reflected back to me the stories I had lived in other times, other places; and stories I would live in the future. But I didn’t know that then. At the time, I was just trying to keep my soul alive. I now realize I was leaving Notes and Ciphers and Clues for mySelf. Fractal patterns that contained the Whole of me, and this Game, this simulation. 

    AT first I worked with my dad, building stone pillars, and painting fences, and then his boss paid me to drive him around running errands so he could drink beer and get drunk….and he would tell me crazy stories while picking up lumbar at Lowes and other random things. Not a bad way to earn 10$ an hour, especially at that time! For several months I worked  there, and lived at my parents house. I had avoided all alcohol or any other temptations. Til one evening I was driving in town and ran into a friend of mine from highschool. I ended up driving around back roads while he did coke, and I declared that I would be sober. Eventually we got wind of a party, and I decided to park my car at McDondalds and ride with him and someone else to stop in at the party. I had not seen anyone from my hometown or hung out there since I left for college. . We got to the party and I mostly just observed, and was rather quiet. It was weird seeing so many familiar faces, and watching them still doing the same things. I ran into my first boyfriend there too, and we reminisced. I still hadnt drank anything and was really trying my best to stay sober and true to my word. But eventually, I watched as a few of the gusy pussyfooted around a big bottle of jim beam on the table, afraid to take a shot. I finally walked over, and said ‘this is how you do it’ and tipped it up and chugged about a quarter of it. I got lots of stares and ‘holy shits’. In college I was the person carrying around the fifth of whiskey and drinking it straight all night. But I had not had a drink in quite some time, and when it hit me, it really hit me. I turned from my quiet observer self into the wild and raucous sub-personality that was typical of my drunken debauchery. Eventually, as the party winded down around sunrise, my ex boyfriends  friend, and my ex,  gave me a ride home. But on the way, which is way out in the boondocks, I asked him to pull over, so that I could throw up. But when I got out, he ended up driving off and leaving me.  My ex told me later that it was because he didnt want me to puke in his car. So there I was, so drunk that I was like a staggering animal, walking along the country road miles and miles from my house out in the middle of nowhere. I dont remember much after this, just vague dreamlike visions of staggering along the road and falling down again and again in my punk rock skirt and boots. Eventually my neighbor, who I knew well, pulled over because he recognized me. Apparently he tried to give me a ride home, and thought I was on drugs. But I kept running away from him and falling into the ditch. I wouldnt let him near me so he finally drove off and went to my parents and told them he had seen me, and the state I was in. Sometime shortly after that,  I must have gotten a ride from someone else, because I ended up at the outfitters down the road past my house, which was at least 4 miles from where the neighbor had seen me…so I doubt I made it there by walking. I apparently was yelling crazy stuff at people, who were arriving for their early weekend canoe trips……probably hordes of city dwellers out in the mountains for a great weekend, and being faced with a local yokel clearly inebriated and yelling inanities. I was so obnoxious that the owners of the outfitters called the police. But right as the police were coming up the road, my ex boyfriend, who had come back to find me after the friend who drove off and left me on the road dropped him at his car. He was worried about me I guess. He pulls up in his car and i jump in. Right then, the police come to the window and asks him who he is. He has out of state tags. I yell ‘hes my boyfriend!’ and I tell him to drive. The cop tells him that if he drives off he will be an accessory. He hesitates not knowing what to do for a moment. Then, He hits the gas. We fly down the road, police cars behind us. This is all hazy fragments of my memory filled in by information by him and others.   We speed down the dirt roads along the river and turn up a long driveway and lose the cops. We sneak into a vacant ‘rental’ cabin up in the woods. That was saturday morning, probably around 8am. The party was friday night. The next thing I remember is waking up on my moms couch sunday evening around 5pm. I can smell food cooking. I have a bit of a headache. I rouse myself and ask ‘whats cooking?’ or something like that. Right then, the phone rings. I go check the caller ID and see it is my friend. So I answer. She says ‘Chickie! They found you!’ And I have no idea what she is talking about. But I know it must be bad. I immediately go outside to talk to her and she tells me all about how I had been missing, and that the neighbor had told my mom about seeing me ‘on drugs’ on the road and I wouldnt let him bring me home. They had gone to look for me, and called the police. They had been told that I had gotten into a white car with out of state tags, at the outfitters. So, of course, they imagined the worse. My parents had my siblings scouring the river banks and everywhere else, looking for my body apparently. Freaking out. But I had not been seen since, and my car was parked in town, untouched.  As my friend relayed all that she knew, It came back to me, being at the party friday night, but I could not remember anything except dreamy hazy images after that. When I hung up, I went inside to face the doom and, once again, the absolute Shame. I sat down on the couch, as my mom sat in a chair playing a nintendo game, with an expression on her face that I will never forget. Her cigarette was pure ash, still smoldering away in her lips. She asked me ‘Where were you friday night?’ I told her whose house I had been at. She said ‘what were you on?’ I said ‘I was drunk’. She said ‘people dont act like that on alcohol’ . I told her ‘Alcohol is the only thing that makes me act like that’. In reality, It was possible that I had been on something else at some point after being really drunk and not remembering. But I dont think so, I know how much whiskey I downed within a very short time, and I am surprised I lived through it. Wouldnt be my first brush with death from whiskey, nor would it be my last.  She asked me if I had any idea how much danger I had put myself in, and I said yes, that I did and that I understood, and that I was really sorry that I had worried them and caused such a situation. I felt terrible. My heart hurt for the pain I had caused, and the thought that I could not remember almost two days of my life was, once again, a wake up call.  I had no idea where my car keys were, and I had no idea who I had been with or where I had been. As It was told to me, my parents had been out looking for me again, on sunday, and then when they returned, I was laying on the couch passed out. So they had no idea how I had gotten there. But then the next day ( i think) my ex boyfriend came to the house with my car keys. It was not til several months later when I ran into him again randomly, that I actually heard the full story of what had happened, after running from the cops. I guess it is the true story. I suppose I will never know. From what he told me, we had hung out in the cabin we snuck into for awhile, and eventually he had to leave, but I did not want to go, and passed back out. So he left me there. And then when he saw my car still in town the next day, realized I must still be there, and went back to check on me and I was still passed out. Probably comatose. He carried me into the car, and drove me to my parents house, and no one was home so he left me on the couch and left.  No matter how hard I tried to leave this world, even if I didnt know what I was doing, I didnt seem to be able to. Something wanted me here. 

   A month or so after this, I got a job in Harrisonburg, Va, about 45 minutes from my hometown. I worked at Spencers Gifts, a holiday popup store. When I applied, it turned out that the boss knew both of my references…..she had gone to school with one and dated the other 🙂 So that probaby helped me to get hired She was great, she was funky and unique and we hit if off really well. I had alot of fun working there. She eventually made me supervisor. Even with my  nearly shaved head with ‘devil horns’ cut into it, and my septum ring, and my funky punk rock leather pants and furry velvet cow vest clothes. Soon after, I moved in with a workmate, who needed a roomate. This was my attempt at ‘getting my shit straight’ and doing the ‘normal person thing’ with a ‘real’  job and responsibilities.  I worked alot, and spent alot of time reading and delving into my books about consciousness again, like Alan Watts, Books on buddhism, etc. One book that really stuck with me, and changed my path I believe, was a book called ‘the power of your subconscious mind’. I began to meditate and do alot of Intention work, and work with my subconscious. I already knew the power of it, because I had unknowingly done alot of the those things my whole life. But now I was disciplined about what I was doing, and on the straight and narrow.  It was around that time that I also began to hang out with my brother more, and because of his own recent experiences,  he shared a deep interest in Consciousness and the psyche. Now I had someone to talk to and compare notes. Eventually, sometime in the beginning of  December 1999, coming up to the whole Millennial hype, we decided, along with my cousin, to do a large heroic dose of LSD. I hadn’t tripped since college. I was well versed in set and setting, and all the minutiae, and I was well read in the subject and had a pretty good framework. Or so I thought 😉 I had just turned 19.  We planned to ‘go inward’ and see what we could find. Time to  Buckle Up. There was no getting off this ride. 

a doodle from 2000

The Trip

I ate 13 strong gel tabs if I remember correctly, My brother had more, and my cousin had about the same as I. Anyone who has experience with lsd knows that 13 hits is a serious endeavor, and nothing to play around with. This was not recreational. This was a conscious dive into the abyss. If I had tempted fate before, this was a whole different level. I can still remember chewing the wad in my mouth, and knowing that I could not change my mind. It was done. The number was dialed.

    We were in a tiny cabin in the woods, oddly reminiscent of my childhood home. The sun had just risen and we had started the morning off watching a documentary on Albert Hoffman, who had synthesized LSD in his Sandoz laboratories. Or so we are told, in our version of history. That’s what prompted the notion of the trip. All I could say was ‘why not?’

   We dosed and then put on Alice in Wonderland….the version with Martin Short as the mad hatter and whoopie Goldberg as the Cheshire cat. I remember thinking to myself…’buckle up, theres no going back now’. I knew that my life was irrevocably altered, even before the acid hit me. I knew that I had just dug a grave, metaphorically, and I was going to lie in it and hopefully rise again from it. I was heeding the Madwomans Whisper, and I was daring to face the dweller at the threshold. And I knew, with every fiber of my being, that I just might not make it back out. At least not as the same person who went in.

    IT didn’t take very long to kick in, and it is at this point that I have no idea where my memories converge with theirs, but I can only speak from what my experience was. I remember looking at my hands, they were my measuring stick to how much the acid had taken hold. As it started to come on, it was like the Nothing in the movie The Neverending Story. It was coming. You couldnt see it . You didn’t quite know what it was, or how it would show, but you could feel it. Coming closer. It was so overwhelming, the feeling of implosion, that it was almost impossible to even be afraid of it. Somewhere in the beginning, I started to get so uncomfortably hot and felt like my body was on fire. An electrical fire. Like my nerves were burning up from inside, because they were Inside Everything and could not handle the charge. Like there was so much of Everything  Inside Me, or so much of Me inside Everything, that I couldnt be still. And then I had to get onto the floor, my body was contorting into these strange postures and positions. My spine was flexing and elongating and I was a slave to what my body was doing. I had no control over it, I simply knew that If I did not concede the power over to it, or what was Inside It, that I would Die for sure. I would explode into a million universes and never ever find my way back to the one I Was. At the time, I had never come across yoga. This was 1999 long before the trend of yoga here in the US . I had never even recalled seeing a book about yoga. But in retrospect, I realized my body was going into spontaneous yoga poses. At the time, I just thought every nerve and cell in my body was expanding at such an incredible rate and speed that if I did not flow with it, it was the End of Me. I am not sure how long this went on. I remember around the same time wandering outside into the forest and I think my brother retrieved me. I felt confused and disoriented and yet astounded at the beauty of everything around me. I had barely even scratched the surface of this trip and it was already so far beyond anything I had felt or experienced up to that point. As the trip slowly built toward a crescendo, I was further and further astonished into Nothingness .What started as amazing insights into the nature of reality and the mind and Energy, faded out into nothingness. I had no concept of it because there was no me to experience it. At some point I started to feel like a tiny spark of light in an immense dark heavy fertile void that was teeming with potential Isness. And I experienced myself take on the form of billions of years of evolutionary consciousness, all the way from single celled organisms and growing in complexity, all the way through the Awareness of the planet and past, into the larger fractal galaxies and Beingness of entire Creations. I WAS these things. I knew what it was to BE these versions of Self.  For a very long time, aeons, I had no concept of my human self. What felt like millions of years later I started to feel as if there was ‘something on the tip of my tongue’ that I just ‘ couldn’t put my finger on’ That feeling. That feeling that theres something to Know, to figure out. That I am a Something. Like a puzzle or something. And when I first caught a tiny trail of epiphany and was able to follow it without losing myself to the myriad distractions, I managed to pull myself through a ‘cloud’ of vagueness into a seemingly solid facet…….a familiar feeling of something that I was. And I traced it and traced it, again for what seemed like Aeons, noting the spaces in which I had been before. It was like being lost in the labrynth of my psych, or the Psyche of the World, and knowing that Im trying to get out, but not knowing to where, or even knowing What a Where Is. Wandering. And learning that Focus is key. Focus and Will and Intent. I could not be ‘pulled hither and thither’ and ever find a coalescent sense of Self to latch onto , I had to maintain some kind of direction, and it didn’t seem to matter What that Was, as long as It remained steady and I could withstand the assault of infinite stimuli and sensory overload. I was not a human being while traveling this labrynth. I still had no concept of that. It was all very abstract. All very mathematical and geometric. It was as If I was Language, and I was interacting with Language; I was Self. All Is Self. There was nothing else. Nothing At All. And yet the gradations of that knowing slowly leaked and I held on like a thread that was woven round and round in patterns of infinite beauty and terror at the same time. When I finally managed to weave this Selfness into a concept of Human, I have no idea how much time had elapsed. In fact the whole trip except for the very beginning and ending, is a mash of intermixed feelings and images and experiences that have no real coherent order, and much of my attempt at articulating is using logic in order to place events. Suffice it to say, for probably 6 hours in ‘consensus reality time’ I had no idea I was a person, there was no cabin, there was no forest, the external environment was moot. In ‘Awareness Time’ I had been in that maze for millions of years. It felt as If I was so intimately familiar with that place, though. As if I had done it all before, time and time again. The feeling of ‘not this again. Not this hall of mirrors. ‘  It was like being in a compressed version of a simulated Light and Geometry Matrix, devoid of all warmth and feeling and emotion and compassion. I was inside the computer. I was inside the code room of the hologram. I was ancient by the time I started to remember Who I Was. 

     And then I was on a throne, a huge, massive throne it seemed, overlooking some kind of kingdom. But the kindgdowm was made up of shapes and geometries and frequencies and spectrums of light….thats the only way I know to articulate it. My head was drooped. Almost as if I was unconscious, or that I could feel my fleshly body in a stooped daze….but my third eye/pineal gland was pulsating and  could see without my fleshly body….so I was aware of both worlds in some strange overlay type way. Whereas in the beginning, for aeons, I had no connection to this reality at all, now I at least had some kind of foothold.  As I watched out over my kingdom It felt like watching a pinball game or something. And then right in the center of this kingdom there was an immeasurable Mass that seemed almost like a ball of energy of different pixels of color and light and density. It was not perfectly round. There would appear to be a ‘pixel’ that would be absorbed into the mass, and at exactly the right spot on the reflected part of the mass, that same pixel or a variation of it would pop out. Every Action the Reaction. There was nothing in this swarming Mass of Beingness that did not create some equal Measure in return. I watched and watched, and it was like bees in a hive, only it was fractally infinite scope of color and feeling and concept. I understood everything when I saw it, when I felt it, but I still to this day cannot fully articulate it or put it into a concept. I knew that any thought or word or feeing or action was infinitely tied to the Whole Scope and there Was No Escape. That was very humbling. But it also felt very sterile. It felt like being inside the Mind of an immense Computer Program built from holographic code. 

    At one point I am following a Concept thru a tunnel of Energy, speeding faster and faster and faster, feeling like I am really getting somewhere, starting to feel comfortable in this realm, this is toward the end of the trip, when I was coming down but still tripping harder than I had ever tripped on any other dose. I am speeding thru the tunnel, which was very much like when I am in my ‘astral’ body and traveling thru a vortex, and I feel like I am getting closer and closer to IT, when SNAP! It felt as if a million ton brick slapped me in the face except I really didnt have a connection to my physical face at the time. And then this GIANT EYELID opened, I was in the lid and I was the lid, and I was staring into this Infinitely vast Eye. The terror and palpable feeling of ‘ The Inner Eye Staring Into Mine’ as I remember writing it afterward. There was nothing that could hide from this Sight, and yet I knew it was my own Sight, I knew that I was the Eye, The Sight, The Seen and the Act of Seeing. All at Once. Not as an intellectual concept. Not like reading it in a book. But like walking through the corridor of it, and feeling my cells dissolve in the light of that awareness. It was as If I had a direct connection to my own Pineal Gland, which connected me to the Pineal Gland of the Master Computer Programmer. 

     I carefully and concisely started to reconfigure my personal story as the Self that was me in that moment in that cabin. Realizing I had a human form, even though I was not connected with it at all. I had just navigated through something, and somehow had found my way out through the keyhole. Baby steps. Baby steps. One Thing at a Time. I then relived my entire childhood from this life. It helped that the cabin I was in was so eerily similar to the cozy little cabin I called home for so long. At some point, some other people had come into the cabin and I can remember being vaguely aware of them. One of them was a friend of my brothers who I knew only slightly. I watched as before me there was a massive block of makeshift apartments, like a large nyc building, except there was no wall on the front….and I could see into each cubicle/room/apt……I would be drawn to a particular cubicle and in it was my brother, and the friend, and they would be acting out a scene of some archetypal relevance. . Everything was Archetype at this point. It was like speeding ever faster and the closer to SourceSelf I got, the simpler things got. I was riding waves of Cosmic Inspiration and Expiration….the Great Breath, and the further out on the wave of the outbreath, the more complex and detailed, whereas the further in on the inhale I sped thru to Vast Love Spaces that seemed to need no minutia. In these play acts between my brother and the friend, who in appearance to me at that time resembled my mother and father in a primal way, As soon as I would Understand or Innerstand the Concept or archetypal interaction etc they were acting out for me, they would immediately stop, turn toward me, bow and a curtain would close over the cubicle/apt. Then my awareness would be drawn to some other cubicle and the whole things would start again, only it would be a totally different situation/archetype/Vast Insight into Self. And I would get quicker and quicker at figuring it all out, and the bows and curtains came quicker and quicker til the whole building eventually collapsed in a heap.

Another interesting part of the trip was even later on, when I was back to my HumanSelf enough that I not only knew I was human but I knew I was charleen and that the entity next to me on the couch was my brother). We are staring at each other, with huge nervous smiles. We are still in a web and nexus of energy pulsating all around us. We are in the Matrix, we are In Code. I am watching the equations of our thoughts. And then I hear a booming voice crash through the Programming and say ‘You’ve done it this time. You’ve gone too far. You’ve done it this time. You’ve gone too far’. It is my fathers voice! I feel Shamed, I feel like I didn’t Heed some primal warning and that I was so deeply and existentially aware that I was conscious of my own Lostness. Our own Lostness. It then became very clear to me that I may never get out of ‘this Place’. And I knew the place was Within ME, as well as Outside of Me. And I wondered how long we had been there at that point. Had it been weeks? Months? Years? Millennia? I had no way to know. I had no reference point. I knew with every fiber of my being, that I had clawed my way out of this Matrix time after time. That it was as familiar to me as breathing. That this was like a simulation within a simulation, and how deep did the fractals go? How many mirrors had I been lost in, TIme after Time?  Which Waking was the final Escape into Base Reality?

   As I began to coalesce more and more back into my Everyday Self, I was relieved, exhausted, terrified, excited, humbled. Humility. I felt as if I was shown in a a billion different feeling-sense ways, that approaching the Vastness without Humility is a dire dire thing. And I also knew that at the End of It All, there Was Just Self, and so it was Funny to Me. The Paradox. The Hilarity of It, as I later wrote in my journal. ‘The Hilarity of It, preceded me’. The now indisputable Fact, that there was no way to Die, that there was no Death, that there was no way to ever NOT BE, that Consciousness ItSelf was  Playing Games with ItSelf, OurSelves……It was so excruciatingly obvious and funny and yet created apprehension. The Exhaustion of Being. The Terror of Immortality. We have never been Created and We can never be destroyed…..but we CAN be trapped within Loops of Time and Space, for Eternities within Eternities…..The NeverEnding Story and The Nothing. It IS coming . It has been, always. You cant get away from Being. And when you Navigate your way through the Land of Mirrors, The Mind of Self, and are able to ReIntegrate everything You have ever been and Are, all the way down to the Core Essence of your Eternal Spirit….THAT is when the Mirrors Shatter, and the Walls of the Matrix Implode. And what I learned, in that trip, was that when you are Aware that you ARE, it is WAY MORE FUN than when you are UNAWARE that you ARE, because you still ARE. And I learned that my only real desire in ‘Life’ was to be capable of containing ever greater immensities of the Self that is All in my individual ConsciousnessUnitSElf …..HoweverYou Want To Define It… be abe to BE purely What I AM, In Every Moment. If I could expand my boundaries over and over and over again, without losing cohesion. COHESION. The golden word. I could be SHATTERED by the vastness, and have to ‘start all over again’ at least in a manner of speaking. But If I could penetrate and be penetrated deeper and further and RETAIN it, without being shattered, and while ReMEMEMBERING Which WHO I AM at THIS point IN THE spectrum, and build on that, I am actually GIFTING THE MULTIVERSE. We are being BREATHED. By our Very Own Self. And each outbreath sends sparks of Intent ‘outward’ toward the periphery of Self in magnificent patterns of Incarnation and experience and Play and Love and Light and further out toward the periphery, where these things Dance with the Denser experiences of Pain and Longing and Separation and Sorrow. Like a cosmic wind or wave, becoming particles or more PARTICULAR on the journey outward until like a slingshot the containment capacity is reached and the INbreath is drawn, and the PARTICULARS or particles start to journey back ‘inward’ to coalesce and take all that Awareness, and consciousness, back to the AllSelf and when all those Individual Selves are reunited in the self of all selves, the entire ‘Organism’ is a vast ‘Orgasm’ of Awareness and Potential………and then again, the Exhale and the process starts again.

So I asked, what if one can make it all the way outward, and then all the way back in, without losing COHESION? Taking all the experiences, memories, reMemberences with itSelf back and forth. What happens then? Is ‘God’ Godding ItSelf? Implosion Explosion InGoesYou OutGoesYou 

By the time this trip ended and  I decided I was disgusted with much of the previous human I had been, at least in the year or so preceding the experience, and I felt that my hair was reflective of my Thoughts and Patterns and History and I knew I had to fully shave my head to get it off me, to release those attachments and purify myself. And so it was. Out came the clippers.