NOTE: Or does this belong in Thoughts & Awareness? Or Trip Reports -- if there's a sober section?
joshua.
by rewired
(08/03)
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"[On June 6, 2000] I awoke... absolutely confused. Though comfortably centered within, I was extremely awake and my consciousness didn’t seem altered at all... It was then that I realized what had woken me from my slumber: a noise. At first it annoyed me greatly, for I felt it was distracting me from this relaxing trance. My annoyance dissipated, however, when it suddenly came to my attention that this particular distracting sound didn't make a shred of sense. I waited, thinking it was just my imagination - but it continued. What I distinctly heard... was a baby crying in the distance. The sound was crystal clear -- as real as day. It was crying perpetually; screaming, as if it was suffering or even dying. ... I was incredibly confused, though, at how my mind could be so clear as to question the validity of such a crisp hallucination and yet still have it."
-- from `iao', by rewired (Gopher: writings from the rodents of the underground, issue 33).
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"It should be noted that children's games are not merely games; one should regard them as their most serious activities."
-- Michel De Montaigne.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On July first, 2003, I got home from the title bureau, happy that I finally legally owned the car I bought from the eldest of my two younger sisters. I did some reading and, once upstairs in my room, began feeling very tired. The bed seemed to call out for me to crash on it, and I complied.
I felt the out-of-body sensations in no time, and before I knew it I was forced into the place I call Limbo -- the place I always went right before entering into the otherworld; that large, apparently endless space where I seemed to be underwater or in zero gravity. Rather than the usual black void, the Limbo was tan, as it was when I had last been there. Strange. Even stranger, the Limbo seemed to have a ceiling, which didn’t make any sense.
As I fell away from any sense of connection to my physical body and deeper into Limbo, I decided to enjoy my time here. I began doing swaying motions, elegant dancing, trying to enjoy the underwater-like sensations.
Not long thereafter, I came to the realization that I was not alone down here. I felt hands on my feet at first, which immediately got me wondering. Then whoever it was began tugging at me. I pulled away, it tugged at me harder, and then we began to have a struggle. I couldn't see who it was, and I was getting slightly panicky.
Almost on instinct, I slipped out of Limbo and closer to my physical body - not re-attaching with the sensation of my body, but getting just close enough to get a general `feel’ for it. I then tried to relax and ease myself back into Limbo, and it worked. Once back down there, I looked up towards the `ceiling’ of the tan Limbo and saw that from where I had entered through my physical body there was this oblong portal with it’s outer edges rung with a red-yellow fire. It looked like a vagina aflame.
I still felt the presence, knowing it was down there and it would be on me again in no time. I demanded that it show it’s face.
Whatever it was, it was on me again in no time, as predicted. It started going through my other-body, and I still struggled with it, but refused to panic again. Strangely, I sensed a playfulness from it rather than a malevolence like it had been with Ee back in 1995; it almost seemed as if it was playing a game with me, testing me or trying to give me a challenge. When it began going through my body again, I looked down at it and again demanded that it show me it's face.
It had taken the form of something resembling a small, thin, snake-like creature with a shark’s face. It looked right at me with it's black eyes and it gave me this wide, frightening grin.
I began getting concerned with this tightness I felt in my chest. I was certain that it came from my physical body; the feeling of elastic being pulled to the point where it’s about to snap. I was slightly worried that I might stop breathing, so I floated towards my body close enough to ensure I was still inhaling and exhaling. I certainly felt my body doing so, but it was from the perspective of a detached observer. It was then that I wondered if it was really my physical body that I was `experiencing’, as I recalled how I had been breathing in the other-body in my last experience. I was slightly afraid that the creature might possess my body while I was away in Limbo or try to hitch a ride back with me when I finally re-attached to my body.
As I often do, if for nothing more than `psychological security' during these anomalous experiences, I said the word only I know three times in succession, which help me focus envisioning a white ball of protective energy around me.
That seemed to force me into my physical body again - but only seemed to do so. I was wrong; I was actually in the Otherworld beyond Limbo. Numerous times throughout this experience I would `fade in’ to what I believed to be my physical body only to discover that I had not yet woken up at `home’. I kept waking up at different `levels’, almost as if parallel realities or alternate timelines. I would `fade in’ to these places and `fade out’, seemingly awakening within alternate versions of myself corresponding to these alternate realities. I could control my fading in and fading out to a degree, but when I came too close to a body/reality, I would slide completely in; likewise, when I was too far away from a body/reality I was likely to slip totally out and into Limbo.
I tried like hell to get back into my physical body back home, but I couldn’t seem to find it, and it seemed as if I’d be lost in this labyrinth of alternate realities forever. I knew from experience that no matter how lost I thought I was, I always ended up back home in the end, so I just tried to relax and take it as a challenge rather than freaking out about it. I was able to maintain conscious awareness most of the time, but it did take a great deal of concentration and it kept petering in and out a bit. It was hard to maintain a continuous memory and an acute awareness in between all the rapid shifting.
Sometimes I couldn’t see anything right away save for a black or brownish blur, but I knew I was out of Limbo because I had a sense of gravity, of my feet being on the ground, and was able to touch things. So I would just walk around and touch things, trying to ascertain what they were. Other times I would fade in or awaken within a body and experience it all as clear as waking reality and just walk around the setting.
In one such setting, I was, after a few moments, attacked by a dog that I was sure was the same creature who had attacked me in Limbo. I faded out, into Limbo, and then in to another place, again thinking I might now be coming home. To no avail; it proved to be merely another alternate.
After this happened an uncertain number of times, I faded into a house. There was a group of people in the kitchen preparing for dinner. There was a parallel version of my mother, my father and my uncle there as well as some unknown girl. They weren’t surprised at my presence and seemed to take it with a grain of salt, and I suddenly figured that this was because I was merely within the body of one of my alternates. To them, it might seem as if I was acting odd, but only if they really paid attention. I figured they probably wouldn’t notice I wasn't their son (or the version of their son specific to this universe) and I probably wouldn’t remain in this body for long anyway.
At first, I tried to play it cool as usual and was very serious. Then I suddenly began thinking: why I should spend all my time trying so desperately to be careful, fearing the repercussions of acting unusual and then regretting later on that I hadn’t taken advantage of these experiences?
I decided to just let go. I went up to the dinner table and reached out for the vase that had been placed at the center of it. I turned it upside down, watching as the flowers fell out and it toppled over onto it's side. I looked at their faces, curious about any reactions they might have. I assumed they would be angry, but they just seemed confused, and perhaps even a little amused. I suddenly realized I had been afraid all this time for nothing. I suddenly got this sense of freedom and playfulness and began hopping atop chairs, jumping around and acting altogether weird. They didn't know what to do. They were totally unprepared for any of this.
I opened the fridge nearby the table, got out a jug of milk, grabbed a nearby fork and jabbed it into the jug. The unknown girl asked what it was that I was doing.
“I’m making a milk sprinkler," I said. I walked around the table a bit, pointed the jabbed end of it towards her and, with a broad smile, squeezed the milk jug as hard as I could.
The parallel-uncle character was right behind me when she picked up a large bowl of something which I believe was ice cream. She signaled me to duck below the table as she threw it at parallel-uncle, and I dropped to the ground.
I then faded out of that alternate reality.
The place I faded to next was an outside setting. I knew I was close to home, and I was approaching a house wherein I, for some reason, believed my body was lying asleep. Someone was walking along side of me, talking with me, but I cannot remember who: to them, I merely explained that I needed to go back into my body and wake up.
As I was turning the corner I saw this fenced-off area - like a sort of `cage’ made out of a chain link fence that you might put your dog in. Inside, however, I didn’t see a dog. I saw a small boy.
He was in a red and orange polyester jumpsuit and had his back turned to me. I crouched down to take a look at him, and he turned around slowly and looked me in the eyes. He looked just like the `Cheshire kid’ I had seen in the `physical reality’ in the fast food restaurant where I work on December 15, 2001 -- the one that had brought my paranoid assumptions to a brand new level. Here, his eyes were deep set and cast with shadows, and when the light caught them they were revealed to be wide, frightening, and very un-human-like. The sight of those eyes gave rise to a fear in me, and that’s what finally set me back in connection with my body.
I faded into physicality completely and instantaneously, with much more speed and ease than usual, and then sat up in bed with a shock. I assured myself that this time I was really home.
I quickly grabbed a nearby sketchbook and wrote down everything I could possibly remember -- and I’m certain that as with most of these experiences, I don’t remember everything. This experience, even more than the others, indicated the level of compartmentalization of my state-specific memory. A lot of what I remembered happening during this experience -- and I'm certain I didn't remember nearly everything -- referenced other otherworldly experiences that I cannot remember in the normal state of consciousness. It seems there's a universe of memory in the state of consciousness I’m in when I'm over there that I can access only slightly here. What I don't write down immediately upon return is likely to fade. The same seems with over there: I may have slight memory of over here, but the longer I'm over there the less information about `home' I can remember. Though again, I seem fully aware on both ends -- I'd even say I'm more aware in Limbo and the Otherworld than I am over here.
I took maybe ten to fifteen minutes to write everything down, and when I looked back at my clock it was 7:52 AM, and I was certain I hadn’t even been out for an hour. I was amazed. Even though I’m well aware that what seems like an hour down there can be squeezed into twenty minutes real-time, I felt as though it should’ve been far passed eight o’clock.
This experience got me seriously considering a few questions: was this place I went to during these sleep-paralysis-like states truly another dimension, or was it merely a full scale hallucination; a metaphorical mirror for my psyche? Since the child I saw through the fence was identical to the first haunting and `inhuman' kid I saw in physical reality in December of 2001, did this prove that my encounter with the kid in physical reality -- and the one who's eyes I got telepathically `sucked' into in April of 2002 --- were in fact nothing more than psychotic projections of autonomous sub-personalities residing in my unconscious?
If so, what was to be done about this? What could I do about this?
A long time ago, when I still hung out with my original `group’ of friends on a regular basis, this kid named Nathan had mentioned that on the verge of sleep he would often hear voices - often the voices of his friends, sometimes of total strangers. Until that point I had considered it was just another product of whatever was wrong with me, because the same thing happened to me all the time. I have since learned that this is a rather common phenomenon. Sometimes these voices say silly things that make no sense whatsoever; other times, they can say very clear and logical things.
It had struck me awhile back that if what I’ve been encountering all throughout the years have not actually been aliens (and, recently, hybrid children walking around in Northeastern Ohio fast food joints) that this would mean that my mind contains personalities - ones of a clearly autonomous nature -- beyond the ego I identify as `I’. If so, it might make sense to wait until I get on the verge of sleep and try to actually engage in a dialogue with `the voices’ - and direct it at a specific character. So on the verge of sleep on August 7 I focused intent on speaking with the child I’d seen in my vision on July first - and in the projections or open-eyed hallucinations on December 15, 2001 and April 7, 2002 - and ask him to talk with me.
I focused on one initial question as an ice-breaker: what his name was. I asked over and over what his name was to the point that I was just about to fall asleep. Then, out from nowhere, a very child-like voice called out in a hesitant fashion:
“Josh.”
I woke up with a shock at 1:48 AM and wrote it down. I had, at last, a name. It wasn’t much, but it was a foot in the right direction - of making amends with sub-personalities floating around in my psyche and occasionally wreaking havoc in my life. The child personality that seemed at first to be so sinister had, in the last out-of-body experience, seemed to want nothing more than for me to open up enough to play -- he was finally talking to me, and his name was Joshua. It felt good to break the ice that August seventh.
The following evening I was hanging out with Sandra, Nick and Terra. They were playing on their new play station, and I was rather bored - I hate games. So as I sipped a bit from the one bottle of Smirnoff I had that evening and took hits off my cigarette, I began to thumb through a book nearby on the Tarot. There were also some Tarot cards nearby. I used to seek answers or clarification through Tarot and other forms of divination such as rune stones, but it had been awhile. If it was my unconscious acting through synchronicity or merely my interpretation of ambiguous information, this could provide a means of clarification.
So that evening I asked the Tarot deck five questions. I will mention only four.
The first question was: “What am I right now?” I pulled the Ace of Pentacles; on the card is an image of a hand issuing from a cloud and holding a single pentacle. It's associated with such things as abundance, trust, felicity, ecstasy, contentment, grounding, centering, security, comfort and reliability, joy of material existence and turning ideas into something tangible.
My second question was: “What is the Child that I’ve been seeing?” I pulled the queen of swords -- which at first confused me. In the image, there is a queen holding a sword and sitting in a chair - quite distinct from a child, you might say. The chair she sits in is depicted from the side, however, and within the chair is etched an image of a child’s face. It's associated with sharp, inner wisdom; being quick-witted; having a sense of truth; having a concern with accurate details, not only of the ordinary world but with what lies behind the mask or facade. It indicates a person who wants you to empathize with them and put yourself in their shoes; it is also a card indicating mourning, loneliness, widowhood, deep sorrow, loss, absence, sterility; it indicates a person who can skillfully balance opposing factions to meet his or her own needs and overcome adversity to obtain a state of grace.
One site wrote that it is “a hard thing to pull the wool over the eyes of somebody like this - they will look beyond the face we present and see to the very core of the being. That's one reason why this Queen often represents a woman who stirs deep and complex reactions in the people who come into contact with her. They can feel uneasy, discomforted and awkward when being observed by her.”
“What should I do now?” I asked the deck, and drew two of Pentacles. On the card is an image of a dancing boy who has two pentacles, one in each hand. The pentacles are joined by a cord to make a sideways eight - a symbol for infinity, I knew. This card has associations with recreation on one hand and agitating obstacles in the other, juggling both of them with confidence and flexibility.
Then I asked what I promised myself to be the last question: “Who are the aliens?” I was pretty curious what would come up. I reached into the deck, grabbed a card slowly, and then flipped it over quickly:
It was Death. Never, in all my fiddling around with the Tarot deck in the past, had I ever pulled that card.
Later on that evening, I was in the basement - Nick’s room. I hopped on the net and checked my e-mail, and saw that I’d gotten a letter from Claire, who I hadn’t heard from in a week or two. I opened it to find she’d sent me an e-card. I suspected something sarcastic, and she’s never been one to disappoint me. In full, the card read as follows:
“I wanna teach you something about the word... FUCK. Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today is the word: fuck. Out of all of the English words that begin with the letter F, fuck is the only word that is referred as the F-word. It's the one magical word. Just by its sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most words in the English language, is derived from German. The word "Ficken", which means to strike. In English fuck falls in to many grammatical categories. As a transitive verb, for instance: Johnny fucked Shirley. As an intransitive verb: Shirley fucks. Its meaning is not always sexual. It could be used as an adjective, such as: John is doing all the fucking work. As part of an adverb: Shirley talks too fucking much. As an adverb enhancing an adjective: Shirley is fucking beautiful. As a noun: I don't give a fuck. As part of a word: abso-fucking-lutely. Or, in-fucking-credible. And, as almost every word in a sentence: fuck the fucking fuckers. You must realize that there aren't too many words with the versatility of fuck. As in these examples describing situations such as... Fraud: I got fucked at the used car garage. Dismay: ooooh, fuck it. Trouble: I guess I'm really fucked now. Aggression: Don't fuck with me, buddy! Difficulty: I don't understand this fucking question. Inquiry: Who the fuck was that? dissatisfaction: I don't like the fuck what is going on here. In confidence: He's a fuck-off. Dismissal: Why don't you go outside, play hide and go fuck yourself? I'm sure you can think of many more examples with all of these multi-purpose-applications. How can anyone be offended when you use the word? I say, use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly...”
When I scrolled down to the bottom of the letter, I shook my head at synchronicity - for there, at the bottom, was the image of a young infant. It was extending it’s middle finger with `fuck you' bubble-lettered just above his head.
Kids. They're so bitter these days.
joshua.
by rewired
(08/03)
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"[On June 6, 2000] I awoke... absolutely confused. Though comfortably centered within, I was extremely awake and my consciousness didn’t seem altered at all... It was then that I realized what had woken me from my slumber: a noise. At first it annoyed me greatly, for I felt it was distracting me from this relaxing trance. My annoyance dissipated, however, when it suddenly came to my attention that this particular distracting sound didn't make a shred of sense. I waited, thinking it was just my imagination - but it continued. What I distinctly heard... was a baby crying in the distance. The sound was crystal clear -- as real as day. It was crying perpetually; screaming, as if it was suffering or even dying. ... I was incredibly confused, though, at how my mind could be so clear as to question the validity of such a crisp hallucination and yet still have it."
-- from `iao', by rewired (Gopher: writings from the rodents of the underground, issue 33).
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"It should be noted that children's games are not merely games; one should regard them as their most serious activities."
-- Michel De Montaigne.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
On July first, 2003, I got home from the title bureau, happy that I finally legally owned the car I bought from the eldest of my two younger sisters. I did some reading and, once upstairs in my room, began feeling very tired. The bed seemed to call out for me to crash on it, and I complied.
I felt the out-of-body sensations in no time, and before I knew it I was forced into the place I call Limbo -- the place I always went right before entering into the otherworld; that large, apparently endless space where I seemed to be underwater or in zero gravity. Rather than the usual black void, the Limbo was tan, as it was when I had last been there. Strange. Even stranger, the Limbo seemed to have a ceiling, which didn’t make any sense.
As I fell away from any sense of connection to my physical body and deeper into Limbo, I decided to enjoy my time here. I began doing swaying motions, elegant dancing, trying to enjoy the underwater-like sensations.
Not long thereafter, I came to the realization that I was not alone down here. I felt hands on my feet at first, which immediately got me wondering. Then whoever it was began tugging at me. I pulled away, it tugged at me harder, and then we began to have a struggle. I couldn't see who it was, and I was getting slightly panicky.
Almost on instinct, I slipped out of Limbo and closer to my physical body - not re-attaching with the sensation of my body, but getting just close enough to get a general `feel’ for it. I then tried to relax and ease myself back into Limbo, and it worked. Once back down there, I looked up towards the `ceiling’ of the tan Limbo and saw that from where I had entered through my physical body there was this oblong portal with it’s outer edges rung with a red-yellow fire. It looked like a vagina aflame.
I still felt the presence, knowing it was down there and it would be on me again in no time. I demanded that it show it’s face.
Whatever it was, it was on me again in no time, as predicted. It started going through my other-body, and I still struggled with it, but refused to panic again. Strangely, I sensed a playfulness from it rather than a malevolence like it had been with Ee back in 1995; it almost seemed as if it was playing a game with me, testing me or trying to give me a challenge. When it began going through my body again, I looked down at it and again demanded that it show me it's face.
It had taken the form of something resembling a small, thin, snake-like creature with a shark’s face. It looked right at me with it's black eyes and it gave me this wide, frightening grin.
I began getting concerned with this tightness I felt in my chest. I was certain that it came from my physical body; the feeling of elastic being pulled to the point where it’s about to snap. I was slightly worried that I might stop breathing, so I floated towards my body close enough to ensure I was still inhaling and exhaling. I certainly felt my body doing so, but it was from the perspective of a detached observer. It was then that I wondered if it was really my physical body that I was `experiencing’, as I recalled how I had been breathing in the other-body in my last experience. I was slightly afraid that the creature might possess my body while I was away in Limbo or try to hitch a ride back with me when I finally re-attached to my body.
As I often do, if for nothing more than `psychological security' during these anomalous experiences, I said the word only I know three times in succession, which help me focus envisioning a white ball of protective energy around me.
That seemed to force me into my physical body again - but only seemed to do so. I was wrong; I was actually in the Otherworld beyond Limbo. Numerous times throughout this experience I would `fade in’ to what I believed to be my physical body only to discover that I had not yet woken up at `home’. I kept waking up at different `levels’, almost as if parallel realities or alternate timelines. I would `fade in’ to these places and `fade out’, seemingly awakening within alternate versions of myself corresponding to these alternate realities. I could control my fading in and fading out to a degree, but when I came too close to a body/reality, I would slide completely in; likewise, when I was too far away from a body/reality I was likely to slip totally out and into Limbo.
I tried like hell to get back into my physical body back home, but I couldn’t seem to find it, and it seemed as if I’d be lost in this labyrinth of alternate realities forever. I knew from experience that no matter how lost I thought I was, I always ended up back home in the end, so I just tried to relax and take it as a challenge rather than freaking out about it. I was able to maintain conscious awareness most of the time, but it did take a great deal of concentration and it kept petering in and out a bit. It was hard to maintain a continuous memory and an acute awareness in between all the rapid shifting.
Sometimes I couldn’t see anything right away save for a black or brownish blur, but I knew I was out of Limbo because I had a sense of gravity, of my feet being on the ground, and was able to touch things. So I would just walk around and touch things, trying to ascertain what they were. Other times I would fade in or awaken within a body and experience it all as clear as waking reality and just walk around the setting.
In one such setting, I was, after a few moments, attacked by a dog that I was sure was the same creature who had attacked me in Limbo. I faded out, into Limbo, and then in to another place, again thinking I might now be coming home. To no avail; it proved to be merely another alternate.
After this happened an uncertain number of times, I faded into a house. There was a group of people in the kitchen preparing for dinner. There was a parallel version of my mother, my father and my uncle there as well as some unknown girl. They weren’t surprised at my presence and seemed to take it with a grain of salt, and I suddenly figured that this was because I was merely within the body of one of my alternates. To them, it might seem as if I was acting odd, but only if they really paid attention. I figured they probably wouldn’t notice I wasn't their son (or the version of their son specific to this universe) and I probably wouldn’t remain in this body for long anyway.
At first, I tried to play it cool as usual and was very serious. Then I suddenly began thinking: why I should spend all my time trying so desperately to be careful, fearing the repercussions of acting unusual and then regretting later on that I hadn’t taken advantage of these experiences?
I decided to just let go. I went up to the dinner table and reached out for the vase that had been placed at the center of it. I turned it upside down, watching as the flowers fell out and it toppled over onto it's side. I looked at their faces, curious about any reactions they might have. I assumed they would be angry, but they just seemed confused, and perhaps even a little amused. I suddenly realized I had been afraid all this time for nothing. I suddenly got this sense of freedom and playfulness and began hopping atop chairs, jumping around and acting altogether weird. They didn't know what to do. They were totally unprepared for any of this.
I opened the fridge nearby the table, got out a jug of milk, grabbed a nearby fork and jabbed it into the jug. The unknown girl asked what it was that I was doing.
“I’m making a milk sprinkler," I said. I walked around the table a bit, pointed the jabbed end of it towards her and, with a broad smile, squeezed the milk jug as hard as I could.
The parallel-uncle character was right behind me when she picked up a large bowl of something which I believe was ice cream. She signaled me to duck below the table as she threw it at parallel-uncle, and I dropped to the ground.
I then faded out of that alternate reality.
The place I faded to next was an outside setting. I knew I was close to home, and I was approaching a house wherein I, for some reason, believed my body was lying asleep. Someone was walking along side of me, talking with me, but I cannot remember who: to them, I merely explained that I needed to go back into my body and wake up.
As I was turning the corner I saw this fenced-off area - like a sort of `cage’ made out of a chain link fence that you might put your dog in. Inside, however, I didn’t see a dog. I saw a small boy.
He was in a red and orange polyester jumpsuit and had his back turned to me. I crouched down to take a look at him, and he turned around slowly and looked me in the eyes. He looked just like the `Cheshire kid’ I had seen in the `physical reality’ in the fast food restaurant where I work on December 15, 2001 -- the one that had brought my paranoid assumptions to a brand new level. Here, his eyes were deep set and cast with shadows, and when the light caught them they were revealed to be wide, frightening, and very un-human-like. The sight of those eyes gave rise to a fear in me, and that’s what finally set me back in connection with my body.
I faded into physicality completely and instantaneously, with much more speed and ease than usual, and then sat up in bed with a shock. I assured myself that this time I was really home.
I quickly grabbed a nearby sketchbook and wrote down everything I could possibly remember -- and I’m certain that as with most of these experiences, I don’t remember everything. This experience, even more than the others, indicated the level of compartmentalization of my state-specific memory. A lot of what I remembered happening during this experience -- and I'm certain I didn't remember nearly everything -- referenced other otherworldly experiences that I cannot remember in the normal state of consciousness. It seems there's a universe of memory in the state of consciousness I’m in when I'm over there that I can access only slightly here. What I don't write down immediately upon return is likely to fade. The same seems with over there: I may have slight memory of over here, but the longer I'm over there the less information about `home' I can remember. Though again, I seem fully aware on both ends -- I'd even say I'm more aware in Limbo and the Otherworld than I am over here.
I took maybe ten to fifteen minutes to write everything down, and when I looked back at my clock it was 7:52 AM, and I was certain I hadn’t even been out for an hour. I was amazed. Even though I’m well aware that what seems like an hour down there can be squeezed into twenty minutes real-time, I felt as though it should’ve been far passed eight o’clock.
This experience got me seriously considering a few questions: was this place I went to during these sleep-paralysis-like states truly another dimension, or was it merely a full scale hallucination; a metaphorical mirror for my psyche? Since the child I saw through the fence was identical to the first haunting and `inhuman' kid I saw in physical reality in December of 2001, did this prove that my encounter with the kid in physical reality -- and the one who's eyes I got telepathically `sucked' into in April of 2002 --- were in fact nothing more than psychotic projections of autonomous sub-personalities residing in my unconscious?
If so, what was to be done about this? What could I do about this?
A long time ago, when I still hung out with my original `group’ of friends on a regular basis, this kid named Nathan had mentioned that on the verge of sleep he would often hear voices - often the voices of his friends, sometimes of total strangers. Until that point I had considered it was just another product of whatever was wrong with me, because the same thing happened to me all the time. I have since learned that this is a rather common phenomenon. Sometimes these voices say silly things that make no sense whatsoever; other times, they can say very clear and logical things.
It had struck me awhile back that if what I’ve been encountering all throughout the years have not actually been aliens (and, recently, hybrid children walking around in Northeastern Ohio fast food joints) that this would mean that my mind contains personalities - ones of a clearly autonomous nature -- beyond the ego I identify as `I’. If so, it might make sense to wait until I get on the verge of sleep and try to actually engage in a dialogue with `the voices’ - and direct it at a specific character. So on the verge of sleep on August 7 I focused intent on speaking with the child I’d seen in my vision on July first - and in the projections or open-eyed hallucinations on December 15, 2001 and April 7, 2002 - and ask him to talk with me.
I focused on one initial question as an ice-breaker: what his name was. I asked over and over what his name was to the point that I was just about to fall asleep. Then, out from nowhere, a very child-like voice called out in a hesitant fashion:
“Josh.”
I woke up with a shock at 1:48 AM and wrote it down. I had, at last, a name. It wasn’t much, but it was a foot in the right direction - of making amends with sub-personalities floating around in my psyche and occasionally wreaking havoc in my life. The child personality that seemed at first to be so sinister had, in the last out-of-body experience, seemed to want nothing more than for me to open up enough to play -- he was finally talking to me, and his name was Joshua. It felt good to break the ice that August seventh.
The following evening I was hanging out with Sandra, Nick and Terra. They were playing on their new play station, and I was rather bored - I hate games. So as I sipped a bit from the one bottle of Smirnoff I had that evening and took hits off my cigarette, I began to thumb through a book nearby on the Tarot. There were also some Tarot cards nearby. I used to seek answers or clarification through Tarot and other forms of divination such as rune stones, but it had been awhile. If it was my unconscious acting through synchronicity or merely my interpretation of ambiguous information, this could provide a means of clarification.
So that evening I asked the Tarot deck five questions. I will mention only four.
The first question was: “What am I right now?” I pulled the Ace of Pentacles; on the card is an image of a hand issuing from a cloud and holding a single pentacle. It's associated with such things as abundance, trust, felicity, ecstasy, contentment, grounding, centering, security, comfort and reliability, joy of material existence and turning ideas into something tangible.
My second question was: “What is the Child that I’ve been seeing?” I pulled the queen of swords -- which at first confused me. In the image, there is a queen holding a sword and sitting in a chair - quite distinct from a child, you might say. The chair she sits in is depicted from the side, however, and within the chair is etched an image of a child’s face. It's associated with sharp, inner wisdom; being quick-witted; having a sense of truth; having a concern with accurate details, not only of the ordinary world but with what lies behind the mask or facade. It indicates a person who wants you to empathize with them and put yourself in their shoes; it is also a card indicating mourning, loneliness, widowhood, deep sorrow, loss, absence, sterility; it indicates a person who can skillfully balance opposing factions to meet his or her own needs and overcome adversity to obtain a state of grace.
One site wrote that it is “a hard thing to pull the wool over the eyes of somebody like this - they will look beyond the face we present and see to the very core of the being. That's one reason why this Queen often represents a woman who stirs deep and complex reactions in the people who come into contact with her. They can feel uneasy, discomforted and awkward when being observed by her.”
“What should I do now?” I asked the deck, and drew two of Pentacles. On the card is an image of a dancing boy who has two pentacles, one in each hand. The pentacles are joined by a cord to make a sideways eight - a symbol for infinity, I knew. This card has associations with recreation on one hand and agitating obstacles in the other, juggling both of them with confidence and flexibility.
Then I asked what I promised myself to be the last question: “Who are the aliens?” I was pretty curious what would come up. I reached into the deck, grabbed a card slowly, and then flipped it over quickly:
It was Death. Never, in all my fiddling around with the Tarot deck in the past, had I ever pulled that card.
Later on that evening, I was in the basement - Nick’s room. I hopped on the net and checked my e-mail, and saw that I’d gotten a letter from Claire, who I hadn’t heard from in a week or two. I opened it to find she’d sent me an e-card. I suspected something sarcastic, and she’s never been one to disappoint me. In full, the card read as follows:
“I wanna teach you something about the word... FUCK. Perhaps one of the most interesting words in the English language today is the word: fuck. Out of all of the English words that begin with the letter F, fuck is the only word that is referred as the F-word. It's the one magical word. Just by its sound it can describe pain, pleasure, hate and love. Fuck, as most words in the English language, is derived from German. The word "Ficken", which means to strike. In English fuck falls in to many grammatical categories. As a transitive verb, for instance: Johnny fucked Shirley. As an intransitive verb: Shirley fucks. Its meaning is not always sexual. It could be used as an adjective, such as: John is doing all the fucking work. As part of an adverb: Shirley talks too fucking much. As an adverb enhancing an adjective: Shirley is fucking beautiful. As a noun: I don't give a fuck. As part of a word: abso-fucking-lutely. Or, in-fucking-credible. And, as almost every word in a sentence: fuck the fucking fuckers. You must realize that there aren't too many words with the versatility of fuck. As in these examples describing situations such as... Fraud: I got fucked at the used car garage. Dismay: ooooh, fuck it. Trouble: I guess I'm really fucked now. Aggression: Don't fuck with me, buddy! Difficulty: I don't understand this fucking question. Inquiry: Who the fuck was that? dissatisfaction: I don't like the fuck what is going on here. In confidence: He's a fuck-off. Dismissal: Why don't you go outside, play hide and go fuck yourself? I'm sure you can think of many more examples with all of these multi-purpose-applications. How can anyone be offended when you use the word? I say, use this unique, flexible word more often in your daily speech. It will identify the quality of your character immediately. Say it loudly and proudly...”
When I scrolled down to the bottom of the letter, I shook my head at synchronicity - for there, at the bottom, was the image of a young infant. It was extending it’s middle finger with `fuck you' bubble-lettered just above his head.
Kids. They're so bitter these days.
but you probably would have told me this story before i got around to reading it anyway.
