The dream was about merchant marine ships. The problem was that the cargo that was on a slower ship needed to be transferred to a faster ship somewhere in what seemed like the South Pacific, and the interaction of characters had to do with the competitive nature of the crews on the two ships. The Captain and the mate of the faster ship had flown to an earlier port than the slower ship so that they could discuss the transfer of the cargo and arrange the logistics of the coming transfer before they got to the port where the faster ship waited.
A couple of incidents seemed so strange that they should have made me realize I was dreaming. The first one involved the speed of the slower ship. The "slower" ship got up to speeds of 60 miles an hour. To my knowledge only nuclear-powered ships could go that fast at all, much less a small cargo ship. The actual cargo was never discussed. But, there was an conversational exchange between the mates of the two ships as they approached the port of exchange that indicated the priviledges of the faster ship. The faster ship got the choice of all the top-rated movies for later viewing at sea even before the slower ship arrived in this port, and the mate of the slower ship was miffed at this priviledge.
The first incident happened at the earlier port where the captain and mate of the faster ship boarded the slower ship. The captain of the faster ship got aboard the launch of the slower ship okay, as his rank would be priviledged, but the mate "didn't quite make it" as the slower ship pulled out of the port. The mate jumped in the water to try to catch the launch boat, and when it looked like he was too slow, he literally started running on top of the water to catch it, and it was only the efforts of the one of the crew members of the launch who got down on the guard rails of the launch to catch his hand as he raced across the water that he was able to board the launch.
The speeds attained on the slower ship may have only seemed rather remarkable to me as the dreamer. In my own experience on destroyer-class vessels where trial speed runs between Oahu and Midway Islands only got up to 36 knots with the whole ship trembling like it would vibrate apart if we went any faster, so the speeds attained in the dream seemed incredible to me, even though more modern vessels especially built for speed might go faster. Maybe I saw the ports as being of the South Pacific because of these former speed tests.
The ships only stopped at these two ports to pick up the captain and mate and to make the exchange. They were not military oriented ports. There were neon lights shining across the water at the ports but we never went ashore. The slower ship got painted with phospherated stripes at the first port to help it be recognized at the port of exchange to speed up the logistics of tranferring the cargo. This would not ordinarily happen so the paint stripes should have appeared as unusual too.
As the dreamer I saw the ship leaving port and was aboard it too to hear the conversations. It was as though I was not perceived as being present to hear the conversations, but was there as a witness nevertheless. I seemed to be invisible. it seemed like I was in an out-of-body state and not a participant.
I have been present on what has seemed like space ships in other dreams, so maybe being on water-bourne ships would not have seemed all that unusual to me. The uniforms were of a nautical fashion, but too casual to have been military ships. The water was beautiful. It had that greenish tint that deep water always seems to have, and it was almost translucent.
In my experiences with certain research chemicals I have seen the characters on some of the space vehicles as various creatures that wouldn't ordinarily have the forms they did and also possess that level of intelligence. In ordinary dreams without special inducements I would have changed the various creatures into having more ordinary features like humans. To see them in the chemically-induced visions as large insects that commanded space ships was almost too spectacular to believe, and so this difference makes me think I automagically changed them into something more familiar in regular dreaming. Maybe even to the point of changing the scenario from space ships into nautical ships.
Sometime I get the impression that anthropologists "create" our former incarnations into "ape-men" with primitive features such as they show in scientific magazines with the same facility. The intellectual abilities are of the same order, but it's the experience in giving order to the elements involved in prehistoric times that is primitive. The actual intellectual primus is already in place and has been from the beginning and survives death.
Writing about dreams is so digital. I don't remember dreams sequentially, although they do seem to occur in linear order. It's just that my memory of them is so nebulous that it takes remembering one part of the dream before I remember other parts of it. Probably the most intriguing incident of this last dream was the mate trying so hard to catch the launch and not be left behind, so that he would have had to catch an airplane and be left out of the logistics meetings, inspired such fervor that he literally swam so fast that he was able to attain enough speed to emerge from, and run across the top of the water, was intrinsically fascinating and helped me to remember other parts of the dream.
I suspect that if I had waited an hour to write the dream down the memory of it would have faded altogether. The incidents that allow the digital-like recall seem to exist as the real trick to remembering any of it.
When I begin to write about those unbelieveable incidents is the key to the whole recall process. I suspect the fantastic nature of what is considered unbelievable is specific to the dreamer's beta state experience though. I have a couple of friends who teach chemistry who would have probably seen unbelievable molecular structures instead of nautical ports like I did, because that's their ordinary beta state activity, and they would have written about what seemed fantastic to them just as I write about what seemed fantastic to me. However, I think all of us would have been pretty impressed by a guy running across the top of the water. LOL
Maybe this equating what one experiences in ordinary beta state life in dreaming is the real secret to lucid dreaming. To recognize one is dreaming in real time, some specific incident in the dream has to appear unusual to the dreamer. And what appears as unusual to a person who makes a living as a lawyer, and what appears unusual to a person who makes a living as a chemist would seem completely different. What would appear fantastic and unbelievable to both a lawyer and a chemist might pass right by a dreamer who makes their living as an assembly line worker at the local Ford plant, who was dreaming about court systems and chemical labs.
There are other states we all seem to participate in besides the ordinary day-by-day "wakening" beta state and the alpha-theta dream state. The delta state is an example. The delta state happens at the very bottom of the dream cycle and doesn't seem to associate with the beta state in which we normally make a living. It may associate somewhat to a mixture of all the various states we encounter, and the average person might not make that connection in the delta state in such a way that some part of what happens in the delta state seems unusual enough that we realize we're dreaming, and be able to take control of dreaming in the delta state.
Maybe this is what happens with experienced meditators through their long experience in attaining the various states and recognizing the different associations possible in each state or combinations of states. Their familiarity with what might seem unusual in one state or the other allows them to realize what can be brought to lucidity, and thus control.
Friday, July 11, 2003
There is a voice I hear sometime just before I wake up or just before I go to sleep. If I hear it as I fall asleep I find it almost impossible to go to sleep, and if I hear it in the morning I can't go back to sleep. It doesn't happen often.
The last thing I heard was that I would die unexpectedly. That death would catch me off-guard. It was a pretty simple statement. And not anything more than that. It did not tell me how soon I would die unexpectedly, just that I would, so it could be anytime.
I came close to dying a couple of years ago. I was eating with my mother and niece in a restaurant and some sausage I was trying to swallow went down the wrong pipe and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I was totally unprepared for this. Nobody had the slightest idea what was wrong, only that I was acting funny. I was very calm about it at first.I tried to cough the sausage out, but that didn't work. Then, when I realized I was going to be able to get enough air in my lung to blow the sausage chunk out of my wind pipe I stood up and continued to try to get air in my lungs. Nothing I did was getting me air. Finally, a young man a couple of booths away approached me and asked me what was wrong. I could no more speak than I could breathe, but I used my arms and hands to indicate the Hiemlic manuever, he realized the meaning of my gestures, and got behind me and forced the sausage out. It took a few minutes to get to breathing correctly again. I sat back down realizing that I had come very close to death. Maybe, if I had passed out from a lack of oxygen and fell to the floor the sausage might have come out on it's own and I wouldn't have died, but from the reaction of the people around me I don't think so.
This event made me realize the fragility of life and how I am always just moments away from being a dead man. Something like this will probably kill me, I just don't know when, and somehow I don't really care. Better this than to lay suffering for months and perhaps even years withering away from some disease that slowly takes my life.
Perhaps a car accident will cause my death or somehow I will get caught up in some violent incident in which I get killed by gun fire. Maybe I'll drown during some unpredictable way. The way I imagine it, I'll be living my regular life one moment, and the next moment I will be struggling to live without even realizing that this is my final moments in this body.
Why would death be any different for me. I have lived in a very reckless manner much of my life. I have taken chances with my life on a fairly regular basis when I was younger. I have even went through the motions of taking my own life a couple of times and that obviously didn't work.
Probably the one time I thought death was certain was the time I jumped of the mountain in Yosemite National Park. I was in a situation where I thought death was inevitable, and so I acted in a way that at least indicated some choice on my part.
The one thing that worries me somewhat about dying unexpectedly is that I may not realize that I'm dead. When I do die, I want to realize that I am dead and move on with the choices available when death takes my body away from me.
My out-of-body experiences have convinced me that there is life after death. One experience when I was out on the road hitch-hiking was particularly convincing. I got put out at the intersection of two Interstates somewhere down south of here early in the morning hours about three o'clock, traffic was fast and there was very little of it at that time of day, there was no sign of any houses or stores around this intersection for me to disturb anyone by my singing, so I danced around and sang at the top of my lungs as a diversion from the extreme fatigue I was experiencing from being out on the road so long. Suddenly I found myself high in the air above my body and looking down at this fool singing and dancing in the middle of nowhere. My only thought was, "What has become of me." In that moment I realized I was not that fool down there singing and dancing, but rather, the "me" that was up in the air looking down at that fool.
This is what I think will happen when I die, unexpectedly or not. If at the time of my death I am attached to my body and don't realize that it is dead, I will hang around it trying to bring it back to life, maybe forever.
I don't know and probably can't know if there are choices about what to do next upon the event of the death of my body. I have read stuff that indicates that there will be choices, but if the spirit that is really me is unable to accept the death of the body and hangs around futily trying to get back in my body and reanimate it I may miss any choices that may exist at that time. The Tibetan Book of the Dead paints a scenario of this order that kind of makes sense to me.
But, without a living body, which I have always returned to when I lost my sensory contact with the world, it is hard to understand what really happens at the moment of death or what happens after that. When I have lost contact with the physical world previously, like when I have been in the hospital and lost that conscious contact through anesthesia, I don't remember anything. When I lost consciousness from eating trumpet flowers down in Key West, I don't remember anything after I passed out. When I smoked the Diviner's Sage and fell into a stupor however, I was consciously aware, but I was totally disassociated from any awareness of who or where I was, and that's how I think it will be when I die.
I had read everything I could to prepare me for smoking the Diviner's Sage. I spend a couple of days reading other people's accounts of what happened when they did it. Nothing I read prepared me for what happened though.
I had a sitter for this occasion. I had read that having a sitter was a good idea because some of the reports I'd read warned that people do strange things after they inhale the smoke, along with the warning that how a person reacts can be unpredictable. The ritual requires that one attempt to get as much of the smoke into their lungs before the ingredients of the sage takes over and does what it does. The biggest problem is that some people jump up and run and can hurt themselves by doing that. I was going to smoke the sage upstairs in my bedroom, and I wanted someone to be there to stop me from running and breaking my neck trying to get downstairs. Later, when I was sitting for a friend of mine while he smoked the sage, he did jump up and run, and it happened so fast I couldn't stop him. He did not get hurt.
I used a combination of some regular sage leaves in the bottom of the pipe, and packed some concentrated sage that was five times stronger on top of it. I wanted to have the full experience on my first effort, and I thought using the concentrated stuff would optimize those chances.
I was also warned to inhale the smoke while I was sitting down so that I would not fall and hurt myself when I took the smoke into my lungs. So, I sat down on the edge of my bed so that if I fell backward I would fall on the softness of my mattress. This turned out to be a good decision. I lit the pipe and took as much of the smoke into my lungs as was possible and held it down for as long as I could. My sitter was helping me light the pipe, and was urging me to hold it in as long as I could. When I couldn't hold the smoke any longer I blew it out, and immediately took another lungfull from the pipe. I held that as long as I could and took another.
Before I finished that toke I felt the effects of the sage. I experienced a bunch of colors with my eyes closed, and those colors had a shape that became my entire sensory awareness. The shape was like a the Nautilus seashell. Event the colors I saw conformed to and was arranged like the little growth ridges in the shell. It was out in front of me at first as though I was seeing a circle of light on a flat plane in front of me, and then that circle swooped over me similar to flipping a hoola hoop over my head. It became the only thing I was aware of. As the flat circle of pontilistic colors enveloped me into itself I heard a circus-like voice shouting, "Here we go!", and as it swooped over me and enveloped me I fell back on the bed. That was the last thing I was aware of as a human being.
At that point I was inside of the shell-like environment with the colors existing as my only awareness. I had no concept of being a human being. I had no idea that I had a body or lived on the earth. I had no memory of anything and just was. I was totally detached from anything that reminded me of my former self. I was just there. I lay there struggling for orientation. I didn't know where I was or who I was. There was nothing to attach this awareness to. There was just the colors. I somehow found myself searching for the origin of that voice I heard as the smoke overtook me. I had no concept of time in the least, just that I didn't know what was going on. I felt helpless. After existing in this formless, timeless place for what seemed like an eternity I became aware of some entity and I reached out to it. I realized that I was trying to get a grip on something... anything! I realized I was communicating to this entity, but I didn't know what I was saying or what it was saying back to me. I was lost in the immediacy of the moment, and could not store information about what was going on. It was going on, but I could not reflect on what was going on to make sense of it.
The first awareness I had of being a human and where I was happened when I asked the entity, "Have you got me?" It was at this moment that my sitter, thinking that I was talking to him, answered me by saying, "I am here."
When I heard my sitter's voice I began to orient myself to the situation I was in. I lay there for a few minutes realizing that what I had experienced had happened because I had inhaled the smoke of the Diviner's Sage into my body, and that I was alive and had a body, and that I was laying on my own bed in my bedroom. I wasn't dead.
This is what I think will happen when death comes. Total disorientation and helplessness. The brain will not function at all and no memories of what has happened when alive will be available to latch on to. There will be consciousness, but nothing to attach that awareness to. The memory of the sensory world will be gone and that conscious awareness will be alone with itself. Only the Other can help that conscious to orient itself to the situation it's in. If there be such. Only if there be such. I do not gnow.
The last thing I heard was that I would die unexpectedly. That death would catch me off-guard. It was a pretty simple statement. And not anything more than that. It did not tell me how soon I would die unexpectedly, just that I would, so it could be anytime.
I came close to dying a couple of years ago. I was eating with my mother and niece in a restaurant and some sausage I was trying to swallow went down the wrong pipe and suddenly I couldn't breathe. I was totally unprepared for this. Nobody had the slightest idea what was wrong, only that I was acting funny. I was very calm about it at first.I tried to cough the sausage out, but that didn't work. Then, when I realized I was going to be able to get enough air in my lung to blow the sausage chunk out of my wind pipe I stood up and continued to try to get air in my lungs. Nothing I did was getting me air. Finally, a young man a couple of booths away approached me and asked me what was wrong. I could no more speak than I could breathe, but I used my arms and hands to indicate the Hiemlic manuever, he realized the meaning of my gestures, and got behind me and forced the sausage out. It took a few minutes to get to breathing correctly again. I sat back down realizing that I had come very close to death. Maybe, if I had passed out from a lack of oxygen and fell to the floor the sausage might have come out on it's own and I wouldn't have died, but from the reaction of the people around me I don't think so.
This event made me realize the fragility of life and how I am always just moments away from being a dead man. Something like this will probably kill me, I just don't know when, and somehow I don't really care. Better this than to lay suffering for months and perhaps even years withering away from some disease that slowly takes my life.
Perhaps a car accident will cause my death or somehow I will get caught up in some violent incident in which I get killed by gun fire. Maybe I'll drown during some unpredictable way. The way I imagine it, I'll be living my regular life one moment, and the next moment I will be struggling to live without even realizing that this is my final moments in this body.
Why would death be any different for me. I have lived in a very reckless manner much of my life. I have taken chances with my life on a fairly regular basis when I was younger. I have even went through the motions of taking my own life a couple of times and that obviously didn't work.
Probably the one time I thought death was certain was the time I jumped of the mountain in Yosemite National Park. I was in a situation where I thought death was inevitable, and so I acted in a way that at least indicated some choice on my part.
The one thing that worries me somewhat about dying unexpectedly is that I may not realize that I'm dead. When I do die, I want to realize that I am dead and move on with the choices available when death takes my body away from me.
My out-of-body experiences have convinced me that there is life after death. One experience when I was out on the road hitch-hiking was particularly convincing. I got put out at the intersection of two Interstates somewhere down south of here early in the morning hours about three o'clock, traffic was fast and there was very little of it at that time of day, there was no sign of any houses or stores around this intersection for me to disturb anyone by my singing, so I danced around and sang at the top of my lungs as a diversion from the extreme fatigue I was experiencing from being out on the road so long. Suddenly I found myself high in the air above my body and looking down at this fool singing and dancing in the middle of nowhere. My only thought was, "What has become of me." In that moment I realized I was not that fool down there singing and dancing, but rather, the "me" that was up in the air looking down at that fool.
This is what I think will happen when I die, unexpectedly or not. If at the time of my death I am attached to my body and don't realize that it is dead, I will hang around it trying to bring it back to life, maybe forever.
I don't know and probably can't know if there are choices about what to do next upon the event of the death of my body. I have read stuff that indicates that there will be choices, but if the spirit that is really me is unable to accept the death of the body and hangs around futily trying to get back in my body and reanimate it I may miss any choices that may exist at that time. The Tibetan Book of the Dead paints a scenario of this order that kind of makes sense to me.
But, without a living body, which I have always returned to when I lost my sensory contact with the world, it is hard to understand what really happens at the moment of death or what happens after that. When I have lost contact with the physical world previously, like when I have been in the hospital and lost that conscious contact through anesthesia, I don't remember anything. When I lost consciousness from eating trumpet flowers down in Key West, I don't remember anything after I passed out. When I smoked the Diviner's Sage and fell into a stupor however, I was consciously aware, but I was totally disassociated from any awareness of who or where I was, and that's how I think it will be when I die.
I had read everything I could to prepare me for smoking the Diviner's Sage. I spend a couple of days reading other people's accounts of what happened when they did it. Nothing I read prepared me for what happened though.
I had a sitter for this occasion. I had read that having a sitter was a good idea because some of the reports I'd read warned that people do strange things after they inhale the smoke, along with the warning that how a person reacts can be unpredictable. The ritual requires that one attempt to get as much of the smoke into their lungs before the ingredients of the sage takes over and does what it does. The biggest problem is that some people jump up and run and can hurt themselves by doing that. I was going to smoke the sage upstairs in my bedroom, and I wanted someone to be there to stop me from running and breaking my neck trying to get downstairs. Later, when I was sitting for a friend of mine while he smoked the sage, he did jump up and run, and it happened so fast I couldn't stop him. He did not get hurt.
I used a combination of some regular sage leaves in the bottom of the pipe, and packed some concentrated sage that was five times stronger on top of it. I wanted to have the full experience on my first effort, and I thought using the concentrated stuff would optimize those chances.
I was also warned to inhale the smoke while I was sitting down so that I would not fall and hurt myself when I took the smoke into my lungs. So, I sat down on the edge of my bed so that if I fell backward I would fall on the softness of my mattress. This turned out to be a good decision. I lit the pipe and took as much of the smoke into my lungs as was possible and held it down for as long as I could. My sitter was helping me light the pipe, and was urging me to hold it in as long as I could. When I couldn't hold the smoke any longer I blew it out, and immediately took another lungfull from the pipe. I held that as long as I could and took another.
Before I finished that toke I felt the effects of the sage. I experienced a bunch of colors with my eyes closed, and those colors had a shape that became my entire sensory awareness. The shape was like a the Nautilus seashell. Event the colors I saw conformed to and was arranged like the little growth ridges in the shell. It was out in front of me at first as though I was seeing a circle of light on a flat plane in front of me, and then that circle swooped over me similar to flipping a hoola hoop over my head. It became the only thing I was aware of. As the flat circle of pontilistic colors enveloped me into itself I heard a circus-like voice shouting, "Here we go!", and as it swooped over me and enveloped me I fell back on the bed. That was the last thing I was aware of as a human being.
At that point I was inside of the shell-like environment with the colors existing as my only awareness. I had no concept of being a human being. I had no idea that I had a body or lived on the earth. I had no memory of anything and just was. I was totally detached from anything that reminded me of my former self. I was just there. I lay there struggling for orientation. I didn't know where I was or who I was. There was nothing to attach this awareness to. There was just the colors. I somehow found myself searching for the origin of that voice I heard as the smoke overtook me. I had no concept of time in the least, just that I didn't know what was going on. I felt helpless. After existing in this formless, timeless place for what seemed like an eternity I became aware of some entity and I reached out to it. I realized that I was trying to get a grip on something... anything! I realized I was communicating to this entity, but I didn't know what I was saying or what it was saying back to me. I was lost in the immediacy of the moment, and could not store information about what was going on. It was going on, but I could not reflect on what was going on to make sense of it.
The first awareness I had of being a human and where I was happened when I asked the entity, "Have you got me?" It was at this moment that my sitter, thinking that I was talking to him, answered me by saying, "I am here."
When I heard my sitter's voice I began to orient myself to the situation I was in. I lay there for a few minutes realizing that what I had experienced had happened because I had inhaled the smoke of the Diviner's Sage into my body, and that I was alive and had a body, and that I was laying on my own bed in my bedroom. I wasn't dead.
This is what I think will happen when death comes. Total disorientation and helplessness. The brain will not function at all and no memories of what has happened when alive will be available to latch on to. There will be consciousness, but nothing to attach that awareness to. The memory of the sensory world will be gone and that conscious awareness will be alone with itself. Only the Other can help that conscious to orient itself to the situation it's in. If there be such. Only if there be such. I do not gnow.
Monday, July 07, 2003
Other than my reading about Semiotics lately, I have been stymied in my creative efforts recently by my decision to go on a diet and lose some of my rather immense girth. The diet I am following, more or less, is a low-carb diet basically along the lines of the Atkins diet. I have been avoiding sugar, rice, potatoes, and breads for about a month now. I didn't weigh before I started this regimen and I haven't weighed since I started the diet, but it has had a strong effect on me. I seem subject to grumpiness and a bit of depression during this time, and my enthusiasm for writing about my life has literally gone down the drain.
I suspect my physical life depends on the habitual use of sugar in one form or the other, and that what I am experiencing has to do with the withdrawal sympthoms of this addiction. While these withdrawal sympthoms evidence themselves more in my physical body, my mental life seems to have an equal toll taken upon it in the form of the depression I have been experiencing.
Depression is an old, old story with me. It doesn't sneak up on me as it did when I was a kid. I'm familiar with the signs of it to such a degree that I'm aware of the smallest parts of it as they appear. Depression is something I have a habit with. There was a lot of it going on in my early life during the time of my teen years and expecially during my twenties. I ended up committing myself to the state hospital when I was in my late twenties.
Prior to the time I committed myself to the state hospital I spent a considerable amount of time going to see psychologists and psychiatrists to attempt to understand why I felt so depressed. I think most of them tried to help me in the best way they could, but this is a very difficult area to deal with, because they are humans themselves. At one time I thought I wanted to enter this field as a professional, but in the years since I realize there is not much they can do without endangering themselves simply by their association with their patients.
I didn't follow through with my interest in becoming a psychologist. When I started taking courses in that subject I found it to be the most boring subject I encountered. My impression is that the people who do go into this field do so to help themselves. Instead I decided to study acting.
Formal education has not worked with me. I think I know why, but I can't say I'm certain about it. I think it has to do with my determination not to let myself be gulled the way I was when I was a young prepubescent kid. I believed everything anybody wanted me to.
In the times of past
when I was a boy
I listened to every word,
and the meaning of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fear
of doing wrong.
I wasn't strong,
but I'd sing a song.
Just to settle down
I bought a wife
with the pictures
that she saw
of her mother's smiling eyes.
She did not understand
that I was a man
just for loving,
and Lord, I can't smile.
Then, my chances come
for me to run
from all the golden rules.
To be the biggest damn fool!
To buy my way into the dreams
to make things fit
into my schemes,
and Lord, how I screamed.
I could sing a song
about pretty girls,
and all the friends I know,
but the song I sing,
with a distance ring,
is about a man
without a plan
to own the future,
or kill the past.
fmp '69
Even as a kid I seemed prone to conversion, brainwashing, and the sympthoms of metanoia. One of the first times that I remember clearly was in a church by a preacher named Reverend Cox. I was nine years old. It shocked my parents to see my small body walking up to the pulpit to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. They didn't think I understood the implications of such a decision. They were right, of course, I didn't understand the implications, but I was in the full throes of conversion, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They had no choice but to go along with me on this. It was probably a mistake on their part to leave me alone with this guy for his "instruction", but doing the Christian thing in a small town in the Bible Belt was expected, and they probably had a difficult time finding arguments to restrain my enthusiasm. The next event of conversion happened when I was thirteen, and it given the direction of deciding I'd had enough of Christianity.
My decision not to take Psychology as my major in college probably had a lot to do with my susceptability to conversion. Somehow I realized that to get into the field I had to undergo a type of conversion to allow it to happen, and I had enough of that. In fact, I think that's why formal education did not take with me. Any and all of it requires such a conversion. My studies in dramatics seem to lead me much more effectively toward my unseen goal, that of learning to induce conversion myself.
I suspect my physical life depends on the habitual use of sugar in one form or the other, and that what I am experiencing has to do with the withdrawal sympthoms of this addiction. While these withdrawal sympthoms evidence themselves more in my physical body, my mental life seems to have an equal toll taken upon it in the form of the depression I have been experiencing.
Depression is an old, old story with me. It doesn't sneak up on me as it did when I was a kid. I'm familiar with the signs of it to such a degree that I'm aware of the smallest parts of it as they appear. Depression is something I have a habit with. There was a lot of it going on in my early life during the time of my teen years and expecially during my twenties. I ended up committing myself to the state hospital when I was in my late twenties.
Prior to the time I committed myself to the state hospital I spent a considerable amount of time going to see psychologists and psychiatrists to attempt to understand why I felt so depressed. I think most of them tried to help me in the best way they could, but this is a very difficult area to deal with, because they are humans themselves. At one time I thought I wanted to enter this field as a professional, but in the years since I realize there is not much they can do without endangering themselves simply by their association with their patients.
I didn't follow through with my interest in becoming a psychologist. When I started taking courses in that subject I found it to be the most boring subject I encountered. My impression is that the people who do go into this field do so to help themselves. Instead I decided to study acting.
Formal education has not worked with me. I think I know why, but I can't say I'm certain about it. I think it has to do with my determination not to let myself be gulled the way I was when I was a young prepubescent kid. I believed everything anybody wanted me to.
In the times of past
when I was a boy
I listened to every word,
and the meaning of my prayers
was to wash away
the guilt and fear
of doing wrong.
I wasn't strong,
but I'd sing a song.
Just to settle down
I bought a wife
with the pictures
that she saw
of her mother's smiling eyes.
She did not understand
that I was a man
just for loving,
and Lord, I can't smile.
Then, my chances come
for me to run
from all the golden rules.
To be the biggest damn fool!
To buy my way into the dreams
to make things fit
into my schemes,
and Lord, how I screamed.
I could sing a song
about pretty girls,
and all the friends I know,
but the song I sing,
with a distance ring,
is about a man
without a plan
to own the future,
or kill the past.
fmp '69
Even as a kid I seemed prone to conversion, brainwashing, and the sympthoms of metanoia. One of the first times that I remember clearly was in a church by a preacher named Reverend Cox. I was nine years old. It shocked my parents to see my small body walking up to the pulpit to accept Jesus Christ as my savior. They didn't think I understood the implications of such a decision. They were right, of course, I didn't understand the implications, but I was in the full throes of conversion, and I wouldn't have it any other way. They had no choice but to go along with me on this. It was probably a mistake on their part to leave me alone with this guy for his "instruction", but doing the Christian thing in a small town in the Bible Belt was expected, and they probably had a difficult time finding arguments to restrain my enthusiasm. The next event of conversion happened when I was thirteen, and it given the direction of deciding I'd had enough of Christianity.
My decision not to take Psychology as my major in college probably had a lot to do with my susceptability to conversion. Somehow I realized that to get into the field I had to undergo a type of conversion to allow it to happen, and I had enough of that. In fact, I think that's why formal education did not take with me. Any and all of it requires such a conversion. My studies in dramatics seem to lead me much more effectively toward my unseen goal, that of learning to induce conversion myself.