Chapter 07: “If the Devil Can’t Get You Any Other Way, He Sends a Woman”

WILCOCK’S FIRST GIRL

Our story continues in my senior year of college. After an entire adolescent life, I was 21 years old, well over two years clean and sober, and still had not ever had a girlfriend.

I had been with two women in my freshman year of college, both one-nighters, and since that time I had felt very badly about what I had involved myself with and decided not to pursue relationships any further.

Besides, a standard rule of the addiction / recovery process was to wait one year before getting involved in any romantic capacity. I could lie to myself and say that everything was fine, but in reality this sense of separateness and alienation from society was definitely starting to have its effects on me.

I was not happy about being “left out” from something that almost everyone my age had experienced at some point or another. All of that was about to change very soon.

I had met another good friend, Eric, in his junior year of college. Eric was an interesting guy, doing a complete 180 from a punk-rock background to his then-current status as a Classical Guitarist and music historian.

[Eric went on to get an MA in Library Science. Eric and I would eventually become housemates, living together throughout all of my development prior to my moving to Virginia Beach.]

We seemed to have a lot in common with each other, and we often spent time hanging out. After a year of life in Bouton Hall in SUNY-New Paltz, Eric and I were back, as seniors. Our friendship continued to develop and blossom.

You have to understand that by this point my life was totally different. My former life as a marijuana user seemed like Ancient History to me now.

Everything about my life had changed so dramatically once Ray told me of the NASA UFO information that I could only look at my chemically addicted life as my own personal Dark Ages. I almost never thought about anything from that life, including all my high school experiences.

I was not able to compare the lessons I had learned while I was still active against what was going on in my life in the present, as it literally seemed like a “past life” to me.

Indeed, the life I now led could be thought of as the Age of Enlightenment by comparison. By the time I was a senior in college, I had expanded my mind in ways I could have never possibly imagined.

A few books in particular had opened up my consciousness, and my favorite book of all was “Our Ancestors Came from Outer Space” by Maurice Chatelain. I had borrowed it from the library so many times that my name literally went all the way down one side of the card inside the book.

I had allowed a much greater vision of reality into my consciousness, and I had changed considerably during the intervening years. I tried to be as open-minded as possible, while also not being an idiot and simply believing everything I read.

I did certainly seem to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff, as all I needed to do was feel the book in my hands before I considered buying it. If it had an electric tingling feeling, then I knew I was supposed to read it.

If I didn’t get anything than I would put it back, no matter how interesting it looked at the time.

I also had been through a negative experience throughout my junior year, where after two quick room changes I ended up with a very self-centered roommate who resented sharing his space with anyone else. We were almost constantly at war during that time, and it was a big lesson in asserting myself as a person.

The war itself led me to my initial foray into religious studies, and I consulted the Bhagavad-Gita, the Dhammapada or Buddha’s Book of Righteousness, “A Flash of Lightning in the Dark of Night” by the Dalai Lama and the Wilhelm / Baynes version of the I Ching textbook.

So, as a result of my life experiences I was also coming into a much greater appreciation of the spiritual literature that was available out there, as well as the UFO / metaphysical books. (Soon after my NASA “trigger event,” I began rigorously journalizing every major event in my life, and thus this whole experience is quite well documented.)

And now it was my senior year, and Eric and I were becoming better friends. He had seen a remarkable change in me in the last year, saying that I had become much more caring about other people.

When we would hang out together, he often spoke about how attracted he was to Oriental women, specifically Japanese. I did not seem to agree with him on this point; yes, they were cute, I would say, but no more interesting than girls of any other type.

I couldn’t understand why Eric was so attracted to them. But before too long, Eric had befriended the best-looking Japanese girls in Bouton Hall, and was spending lots of time with them. They really were quite unusually good looking! I would soon become a part of this hanging out as well…

One girl seemed particularly interesting to both Eric and I; her name was Yumi (not her real name.) Along with one other friend who was also named David, we ended up focusing on Yumi and spending a great deal of time with her.

She was stunningly attractive and quite full of life and love. It became pretty obvious to Eric and I that either one of us might end up with Yumi as a girlfriend.

In a particularly interesting late-night conversation in the halls of Bouton, Eric and I promised each other that no matter who ended up with Yumi, the other one wouldn’t be jealous.

I thought for sure that Eric would be the one to “win” this game. I prepared myself for the inevitable, and decided that I would just let it be the way that it was; there wasn’t much I could do about it. Oh, well.

Eric had advised a slow, methodical approach in getting together with Yumi. But I had a different idea. I could tell that from a psychological and emotional standpoint, she was a very action-centered person, who wanted things to move fast.

So, that’s what I started to do, spending time with her by himself, without Eric or the other David. This culminated one night in a study session where Eric and I were with Yumi in a corner study hall in Bouton.

I spent a great deal of energy teaching Yumi how to properly pronounce English. As the minutes dragged into hours, Eric got tired and finally left. Here is his quote from a few days later:

“Man, I knew that it was all over when I left that night. You didn’t even need to tell me what happened, because I could see it coming.”

“No kidding,” I answered. “I didn’t know what was coming at that point!”

“Well, you just weren’t paying attention, then,” Eric answered.

“I guess not.”

After Eric left, the English tutelage lasted a few more hours. Finally, exhausted and ready to go to bed, I got up to leave. Before I left the room, (which incidentally was private and had its own lock,) I hugged Yumi goodbye.

To my surprise, neither one of us let go, but we started to rock back and forth in each other’s arms. Before too much more time had passed, Yumi and I had sat back down on the sofa, continuing to hug.

The exotic beauty of Yumi entranced me. After about fifteen minutes of holding each other, we started to kiss. At first it was hardly anything, just slight pecks, but at a very gradual speed it turned into an exhilarating experience.

This was a completely different person, a tiny, exotic goddess from the other side of the world, and as little as fifty years earlier, what I was now doing would have been considered completely taboo.

At the same time as the kissing picked up speed, a yellow-jacket (bee) that was apparently trapped in the room came and stung me on the arm. I yelped out in pain and flicked it to the ground, crushing it with my foot.

“I wonder how that got in here,” I asked.

“I don’t know…” Yumi answered. We both laughed and got back to work.

[“Do you think he understood the metaphor, Lucia?” Grandfather asked.

“Doesn’t look like it…” Lucia answered. I would realize much later the symbolic significance of the sting. Yumi would turn out to be the archetypal “spider woman,” not a “Madame Butterfly.” I would go through great pain of manipulation in this relationship.]

I collapsed into bed very late that night, after 5:00, only to have to be at a 10:30 class the next morning. But, I hardly even noticed the lack of sleep.

After 21 years of being alone, I had finally gotten together with an attractive, exciting young woman. I was high as a kite as I walked up to my friends Eric and Dave out by the Student Union Building at New Paltz.

“How’s it going, guys?” I asked, soaring in my own little world.

“Not too bad,” they responded. Then Eric said, “Hey, do you remember that I had something to tell you last night?”

[I thought back. Indeed, there was one point when Eric took me off to the side and said, “I have to tell you something very important, but not now.”]

“Yeah, what was it?” I answered, now quite curious.

“Well, I just don’t think ANY of us are going to hook up with Yumi,” Eric responded, shaking his head forlornly as though reality had finally set in.

I immediately burst out laughing, and conjured up a “catch phrase” that was thrown around all the time in my Experimental Psychology class.

“Yeah, but you know what? A theory must be falsifiable,” I responded, bracing my stomach as I continued laughing.

“What do you mean?” Eric answered somewhat confrontationally, expecting my response.

“Last night I just falsified your theory!” I responded, with an ice-cream smile.

“No shit,” Eric responded, looking off to the side with a somewhat dazed expression.

“Well look, you still haven’t heard what I needed to tell you.”

“What’s that?” I answered, with my triumphant smile.

“Well, I don’t know how to say this, but… she’s got a boyfriend.”

“Oh my God…” I answered. I felt the floor slipping out from under me. How could this cute little girl do that to me, lead me on, deceive me? “Are you sure about that?”

“Yeah, it’s some soccer player from Japan. He moved to England recently to study there, and apparently they still have a long-distance relationship.”

 “Well, I guess she’s got two relationships now,” I answered in disgust.

Tangled up in a storm of turbulent emotions, perched precisely halfway between triumphant ecstasy and catastrophic defeat, I went into the music studio, a part of my Computer and Electronic Music class.

Drawing off of my numerous experiences making music with Jude, I knew that if you catch an intense emotional state at just the right moment, you can transform it into music.

And that is exactly what I did, spontaneously composing a piece that illustrated well my juxtaposition between joy and despair. It still stands out as one of my finest pieces of electronic music.

As things with Yumi continued, I got the lay of the land and realized that she and her old boyfriend were essentially a done deal. She had already been dealing with the fact of his loss, but didn’t quite want to admit that this is what was really happening.

Nevertheless, Yumi set a Nov. 7^th deadline. If her boyfriend did not call her or send her a gift on her birthday, which was that day, then it was officially “over” for good, and I could then adopt the title of “her boyfriend.”

(Never minding the fact that we had already done most of what you could do between two people, becoming quite heavily involved with each other and madly in love.)

November 7^th finally came and I bought Yumi a big ice cream cake as well as several nice gifts. Nothing came from Yumi’s “boyfriend,” no call and no card.

It took two more weeks of stony silence on the issue for me to break through Yumi’s walls of denial, and when she finally admitted it to herself, she cried and convulsed for hours while I held her in my arms.

Soon afterwards, we consummated the relationship. I still have the piece of paper in my wallet where Yumi wrote a dedication to the event. It says, “Dear Dave, You’re my boyfriend! I’ll give you all my love…”

The next morning, I had a very interesting dream, where I was having great difficulty trying to reassemble a small electronic device that I had fixed.

The difficulty putting the screws back in place had a definite connection to the tension that I had felt the night before from my lack of experience and the fact that she was a full foot shorter than I was. I took Yumi out that day and bought her a bouquet of a dozen roses.

Soon afterwards, our sexual interactions would become much more comfortable, and less like a surgical procedure. Yumi had asked me why I had such a serious facial expression that night, and I hadn’t even been aware of it until she had said something to me about it.

After our relationship became sexual, the fights that we were already having became more intense. I became aware, more from my outside psychological knowledge than the inside swirl of emotions, that Yumi and I had a “dysfunctional relationship.”

What I was not willing to see was that once again, all the familiar habit patterns of self-indulgence that typified my marijuana addiction were again surfacing.

Eventually, I would rate my success upon how many days I could go without crying. Every time that she tried to manipulate my emotions, threaten breakup or do a million different things to make me feel bad, I would collapse into tears.

Never before had I felt such tremendous highs nor such catastrophic lows. It scared me half to death to be in the middle of all of it, and to have another person be able to have such a profound effect on my emotional state.

I took Yumi home over Thanksgiving break, directly after we had consummated the relationship. Both of us went absolutely nuts, “doing it” as often as twice in one day. Then, it was back to school, where we needed to covertly sneak in our sexual acts between the comings and goings of my roommate at the time, Artie.

But Artie seemed to understand and was fairly cool about it, with one notable and unfortunate exception recorded in my personal journals. Let’s just say that we needed to refrain from fooling around if Artie was in the room with us at the time!

The stress and strain of all the highs and lows in this relationship started to get to be too much for me to handle. My body was actually physically deteriorating from what I was going through.

This was also caused by my poor diet, filled with grease from the various items at the Food Court. I had read the channeled book “We, the Arcturians” by Dr. Norma Milanovich, and now I knew that the ETs wanted you to eat a very specific diet.

Even though I had never given credence to any other channeled literature, there was something about Milanovich’s Arcturians that seemed very strangely familiar to me.

I vowed that I would heed the suggestions of the Arcturians, and I had already largely gotten away from meat and dairy, preferring pasta dishes and soymilk instead.

I felt compelled to eat this way to satisfy the demands of the Higher Forces, and it was indeed quite a change. But I was still eating a lot of sugar, as well as other greasy and fatty things. It would be quite a while before I could completely “do the ET diet.”

The deterioration of my body was also caused by my intense practice of jazz drumming, sometimes two hours a day in the drum practice room of the music building. This caused the greatest stress in my lower back.

It was compounded by the horrible quality of the dormitory bed I was sleeping on, which dipped in the middle like a Moon crater.

Since I was sleeping flat on my stomach at that time, my back spent all night being compressed, with my neck tilted far off to the left, resting sideways on the pillow. Any chiropractor will tell you that this is about the worst possible position that anyone can sleep in; the spine is twisted in two different places.

As the crushing sorrows of the passionate fights with Yumi continued to compound with the stresses of approaching finals, I finally collapsed under the pressure. It had started before this one point, as I noticed all the muscles on the left side of my back were locking up, making it difficult to stand up straight.

But generally speaking, a little stretching would go a long way, and the problem would subside. I had largely forgotten about it on the day when I arched my back over my chair while talking to someone in the Food Court.

I had been trying to get my back to “crack” in order to release a little pressure and feel better. I did indeed get a cracking noise, but all of a sudden it felt far worse. Much, much, much worse. Uh-oh!

I managed to stumble back into my room in Bouton Hall. The pain was incredible. My back had completely locked into a clamp, forcing me to lean to the left and pitch forward when I walked, like a crippled old man.

The pain of trying to stand up straight was unlike any other pain I had ever felt in my entire life. It was only comparable to one time when I had slipped and fallen in the driveway while taking out the garbage, my back landing and arching over the side of the metallic garbage can.

I hadn’t been able to sit comfortably for two weeks in the hard-backed school chairs after that happened. And now, the pain I was experiencing even made my garbage can incident seem like child’s play. I collapsed to the ground in my room, with my back up against the wall, not knowing what to do.

Shortly thereafter, Artie came into the room. I stood up and tried to act like nothing was wrong. However, I was in such pain that I had to prop myself up against my desk in order to remain standing.

“Are you okay?” Artie asked. Artie was a year younger than I, very sensitive and caring. He also was a boy genius and had strange, UFO-related experiences throughout his life.

He also had luckily been privy to some leaked classified information that had expanded my knowledge base somewhat, involving the discovery of a football-sized, egg-shaped extraterrestrial module in a well-known Northeastern river.

The module had photographed certain events there, such as a naval blockade in an early American war, where a chain had actually been extended across the river to block incoming ships. The man who found it could not cut, burn or smash the dull metallic object open, and there were no visible seams, buttons or external markings on it.

It sat on his kitchen table, and one day his son happened to blow a dog whistle in the house. The egg suddenly unraveled open on spiraling, invisible seams, revealing its inside contents. Many different picture frames of the area from all different periods of history were stored in Rolodex fashion within it.

He excitedly reported his discovery to the Feds, not quite knowing what it was, and it was immediately confiscated with no questions asked or answered.

“Yeah, fine, man, I’ll be just fine,” I answered. I tried to move to the left, and the pain of my back almost sent me down to the floor.

“No, you’re not,” Artie said. “You need to go to the Health Center right away.”

“Get the hell out of here, man, I’ll be just fine! I just need to rest my back a little bit. You see?”

I tried to stand up straight and stretch out my arms. The shocking jolt of pain again sent me pitching forward, propping myself up on the desk. I tried not to cry out, but the pain was incredible and I couldn’t help it. “Aaah!” I cried, covering the trouble spot with my hand.

Now Artie was getting a little angry and defiant. “Dave, you need help, right now. I’m taking you to the Health Center.”

Now wincing in pain and trying not to moan, I reluctantly agreed. We went to the Health Center, only for me to be told that my problem was too serious to be treated there. They recommended that I go to Vassar Hospital’s emergency room as soon as possible.

I realized that this is what I was going to have to do, but I didn’t like it. Artie couldn’t take me, because I had a class. So, I had to go back into my room, collapse on the floor and basically call around and wait for someone to show up and take care of me.

I played “The Sounds of India” by Ravi Shankar to try to keep myself from going crazy. It gave the whole event a sort of religious, ecstatic overtone, as I considered this the most sacred music I owned. I realized that this was obviously some major life event that I was going through.

Finally, Yumi arrived. She was horrified to see the pain I was under. Without too much delay, she had gotten hold of David, one of the three original guys who hung out with her when all our fun had first started. He had a big van, and agreed to take me, the other David, to the hospital.

My hospital examination showed no displaced vertebrae, and this surprised me considerably. I thought for sure that something was wrong with my backbone, but everything was perfectly straight and normal.

So, the doctor gave me a prescription for heavy codeine pills as well as Flexaril, a muscle relaxer. I knew that Codeine had a narcotic, druglike effect on a person’s consciousness, and didn’t like that fact. I had vowed never to intoxicate myself with any substance ever again, and had consistently followed that promise now for over two and a half years.

I knew that these drugs were not cures, only masks designed to numb the pain. The real cure was the doctor’s insistence that I sleep on a flat floor with my mattress. If I could have gotten in touch with a massage therapist and received intensive muscular treatment, it probably would have been better.

But instead, I was left a gibbering, incoherent shell of a human being, stoned out on drugs and still in excruciating pain. I spent day after day on the floor of my room, unable to do anything except sleep from all the heavy drugs.

I could hear people talking about me, but when I tried to respond I couldn’t talk. My body was working much slower than my already hindered mind. I wanted to get off these drugs as soon as possible, as they only made the experience worse.

Throughout this whole time, Yumi and her friends were saviors, giving me constant rubs with Ben-Gay ointment and keeping me company, even though I really didn’t say much. Showers were extreme agony for me, unparalleled by anything I could have ever imagined previously.

At one point, I stared at myself naked in the mirror opposite the shower stall, as I again lurched forward in pain, reeking of the minty smell of Ben-Gay. I whined with the sounds of a defeated man.

For the first time at that moment, I felt like I could understand the significance of the story of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. I did not consider myself a practicing Christian, but in that moment of utter and total pain and collapse, a pain unlike anything I had ever felt before, I could understand the story. I cried profoundly for the suffering of Jesus in that moment.

“Why does God make the spiritual teachers suffer like this? My God, why did they have to do that to Jesus?” I wondered loudly in my mind as I cried, my tears mixing with all the water. There was no immediate answer.

 

HINTS OF THE BIG PICTURE

I managed to recover from my pain with just enough time to do late make-ups on my final exams and papers. There was a great deal of stress surrounding Yumi’s return to Japan, and the time that we would spend apart.

I was actually glad to see her go at first, so that I could get a break from all the insanity. I had crushed the rest of the pills and flushed them down the toilet, ready to be done with the whole affair.

I went home that winter, and my mother was continuing an ongoing campaign of hers to make me self-reliant. So, that meant that she and her boyfriend were going out to eat every night, and very little food was left in the house.

If I wanted anything to eat, I needed to pay for it myself. So, I had to ride my bike in the snow to pick up groceries and things. I made a special bike trip through slush and snow to get some oranges, because I felt like I was really getting a terrible cold.

I was blowing my nose all the time, as an incredible amount of mucus seemed to be generated. Day after day, the results started to have greater amounts of clotted blood in them, until it was looking quite serious.

My nasal passages were literally raw with pain. Also, at the same time I started noticing that I had so little energy, I could hardly even stand up. Before too long, I was spending every day in the same position, sprawled out on the living-room couch.

Finally my mother realized that I needed to go to the doctor and figure out what was going on.

I had blood drawn, and was told a day or two later that I had the Epstein-Barr virus, Mononucleosis, or Mono, known as “the kissing disease.”

I also found out that if you didn’t fully get rid of Mono when you first got it, it could lead to an even more serious and ongoing condition called “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.” I was literally so weak that I couldn’t get up from the couch without an extreme level of effort.

I certainly did not want to end up with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and asked my mother what to do about it. The doctors basically said that there was nothing they could give me; it simply had to run its course.

I had written a letter to Yumi that I never actually sent, which detailed a dream that I had at the time about my illness. In the dream, there were all these very long worms that kept coming at me from all directions in the midst of a dark forest.

The best thing I could do to stop these worms was to simply reach out and grab them as they got close, and throw them away from me. However, the worms were quite resilient, and it seemed that as soon as I threw them away, they would just come right back.

It was a pretty scary dream, and I knew as soon as I woke up that it was a diagnosis of my current health condition. The worms may well have represented the viral infection that had worked its way through my body.

Thankfully, my mother was in touch with a holistic healer and chiropractor who had been practicing medicine for many years.

The doctor told my mother to immediately buy me the full range of vitamins and minerals as supplements, and to take two or three times the normal amounts. I started to do this, and in a seemingly miraculous amount of time I started to recover — much faster than what the doctors had originally told me. I even amazed myself at my unusually speedy recovery.

I went back to New Paltz, eager to be back together with Yumi. Despite all the pain that we had been through together, there was still an attachment there, and not having Yumi around had only made me feel more alone.

I was glad to be in her “delightful” company yet again. I had basically forgotten how terrible things had become there for a while. Again, the patterns of my self-indulgence with addiction had holographically resurfaced in a different form.

Unfortunately, Yumi did not have such a warm reception for me. She had just been through the Japanese “Graduation” ceremony, which occurs on the nineteenth birthday. This was an elaborate affair, where all the women dressed in 10,000-dollar kimonos that they might have been saving money to buy for all of their lives.

The Graduation ceremony gave Yumi a chance to see all of her old friends again, after a long absence. They not only went to the ceremony together, but they spent lots of time together on the outside, rekindling old friendships and romances and going out to dance clubs.

So, when Yumi came back, I felt as though I was sorely in need of companionship. Yumi, on the other hand, felt sorely in need of being back in Japan! I took it as a personal insult that she didn’t seem to want to be around me, and she would whine and complain about how much she wanted to be back in Japan. It only intensified the struggle between us in the relationship.

Despite our constant carping at each other, Yumi did have something very interesting to reveal to me when she came back. I knew that Yumi’s family was rather wealthy for Japanese standards, living in a country-style suburb of the city of Gifu called Gifu-ken.

I knew that they were still actively practicing the Shinto religion, and regularly attended their local temples and observed Shintoist rituals and rites. One of these rites involved opening all the doors and windows of the house on a certain day of the year, leaving out food and drawing a hot bath.

It was believed that the ancestral spirits of the family would enter into the house, eat the food on the etheric level and take a bath on the etheric level. No one else was to use the bath or the food, as it was only for the ancestors.

I knew well the heavy involvement that Yumi’s family had with the Shinto faith, as well as its practitioners. She had already told me the story about this incredible female shaman-priestess that her parents would consult.

Apparently this person was very well known in the upper echelon Shintoist circles, and her psychic accuracy level was so high that in her old age, it had become quite expensive to get consultations with her. However, Yumi and her wealthy family had worked with this woman for many years, and over time they had grown into a very special, almost familial relationship with her.

Yumi had used an object with me when I got sick that the woman had given her. It was a paper-thin solid-gold circle wafer, about two and a half inches wide and laminated in plastic.

Slightly raised inside the circle was a perfect triangle, and it was formed from the straight, stylized geometric branches and central stalk of a tree. She told me that I should keep this object in my pocket, and it would help me to heal myself. I had no idea if it really had done anything, but I did have it on my person for several weeks.

According to Yumi, this woman had made hundreds and hundreds of stunningly accurate predictions. She had already given me what appeared to be a much more mundane example, which occurred when she went to the woman with her four different choices of prospective college campuses that she could take through her foreign-exchange classes.

The woman was very insistent that Yumi had to take New Paltz, New York over the other choices; this was the only proper decision that she could make. We had both speculated if part of the reason for this was that it would have brought us together, although it also satisfied Yumi’s wish of being close to New York City.

Yumi also told me that the woman had informed her that she could learn to be just as accurate a mystic as the woman herself was. Every time Yumi and I would have this conversation, I would tell her that she was crazy not to become this woman’s apprentice and to learn to do these things on her own. But she was adamant in telling me that she was scared by the whole idea.

She was still very caught up in her big dreams of being an avant-garde hairstylist working in Paris with the world’s top fashion models. To her, this world of glamour meant everything, and now that she was in America and right near New York City, she was feeling it more than ever.

She also was spending about eighty dollars every three days and frequently traveling to New York on her own. I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to be in the city, and we never once went there together.

Yumi had snapped a torrent of photographs of us together, and they were all printed two-by-two, one set taped on my wall and one set in her purse. When she had gone back to Japan, she had visited with the woman and told her about me.

She explained to the woman a little about the work that I was involved with, my UFO research and what our relationship was like. She told the woman about how dedicated I was to reading these books, and how I felt that there was a massive spiritual reason for the existence of extraterrestrials in our skies.

Translated into English from Japanese, the conversation between Yumi and the woman apparently went like this:

Woman: You have picture of this man, yes?

Yumi: Yes, I have picture.

Woman: May I see picture of this man, please?

Yumi: Sure. [Fiddles around in her purse, grabs a photograph and hands it to the woman.]

Woman: This is him here? [Points to picture.]

Yumi: Yes.

Woman: [Concentrates for a moment, suddenly looks to Yumi with serious facial expression:] This man going to be very famous.

Yumi: [Surprised:] What do you mean, famous? I don’t understand.

Woman: [momentarily pausing:] Spiritual leader. This man going to be… very famous spiritual leader.

When Yumi told me all this I brushed it off and didn’t think anything of it at first. It was just another one of those bizarre synchronicities that had happened in my life, mirroring my sighting of the streaking meteorite.

Yumi seemed more enthusiastic about it than I was. And yet somehow, this psychic priestess had spoken a hidden thought of mine, something that I had always believed without ever really knowing why. I didn’t bother to spend time worrying or thinking about it, as there was no way for me to know if it would ever actually be true.

All I knew at that time was that I was completely fascinated by recording my dreams and conducting my research, and that was where my true passion was. I wondered if I might be able to do something with it career-wise later in my life, but I was never quite sure. The words of the priestess did serve as an encouragement for me to continue my work.

In the meantime, my roommate Artie had decided to move off-campus for this semester. But, he didn’t want to lose his meal plan, so he “kept” the room, even though he was never there.

This meant that with no extra charge, I ended up with a “single” in what many people considered to be the “coolest dorm in New Paltz.” So, I pushed the two beds together and Yumi and I both spent most of our time living and sleeping there with each other.

This produced an incredible parallel to the continuing increase of my usage of marijuana during those troubled years of my life. We ended up “Doing the F&F,” or the “fight and fool around” routine, if you catch my drift.

Our co-dependency was so all-consuming that we were constantly around each other when we were not in class. And yet, on a fundamental level I wanted to break the cycle, so I could get back to my fastidious book-reading endeavors and spend more time with my other friends.

 

YUMI SPEAKS FROM A DREAM, PART ONE

This extra closeness obviously led to even more personality differences, but it also led to some interesting and unforeseen results that were quite extraordinary.

These results seemed to have been precipitated in cases where Yumi had fallen asleep and had gone into a rapid eye movement (or REM) phase while I was still awake, usually reading one of my books.

The first time that one of these events happened, I was busily reading Aliens Among Us by Ruth Montgomery. This woman had “channeled” most of what was in the books, by sitting down at the typewriter, going into trance and letting her fingers do the walking.

I wasn’t sure if I could trust any “channeled” literature, (other than “We the Arcturians” by Dr. Milanovich,) but I gave this particular book a shot. The bizarre conclusion that she reached in this book was that the “Walk-In” phenomenon needed to be taken seriously.

She explained that a “Walk-In” was a person whose normal soul essence had essentially left the body, allowing a new, extraterrestrial soul essence to “take it over.” This certainly bore similarity to the story that I had developed in my recent screenplay for Jude, entitled “Those Who Have Gone Before.”

The people in Montgomery’s book described massive and sweeping personal changes in themselves, claiming that after their “Walk-In” experience, they were like a completely new person. I thought that the idea was interesting and might apply to me.

But, I thought, if something like this was true about me, then I most likely would have been that way ever since birth, not as a result of some sort of “soul fragment exchange.” I knew that the events after my sobriety were certainly amazing, but I could also see that the clues had persisted throughout my entire life.

There was nothing in Montgomery’s book about a person like this. More than a year later, I would learn that there was a name for this — it was called a “Wanderer.”

“God, I wonder if something like that could really be true,” I thought to myself as I sat in my chair with the book, while Yumi slept.

Before I even had time to completely finish that thought, I noticed that Yumi was sitting up in bed! I hadn’t made a single noise that anyone could have heard in the room, and yet she was sitting up straight, turning her head towards me and opening up her eyes. I couldn’t understand what the heck was going on, and was more than a little disturbed about the whole thing.

“(—,) wa?” Yumi asked me. (I cannot remember what the original word that she said was, although I know what it means in English.)

Then, she seemed to notice what she was doing — that she was sitting up in my room talking to me. She looked around with a perplexed expression, then suddenly seemed to be influenced by an unseen force that caused her eyes to draw closed. She quickly fell back into bed, and then remained quiet.

I frantically scribbled out the sounds of what she had said to me. From my extremely limited understanding of Japanese, I knew that the word “wa” at the end of her statement meant, “Aren’t you?” So, it appeared that she had asked me some sort of a question.

I could hardly wait to ask her what it meant the next morning. I told her the word, and she excitedly revealed that it was indeed a true Japanese word. She didn’t know how to translate it into English, so she brought out her Japanese-English dictionary.

“The word is ‘shining,'” she told me.

“Oh my God!” I said. “So what you said was, “You’re shining, aren’t you?”

“Yes, that is correct,” she responded. Neither one of us could believe it.

I thought at the time that this was a definite synchronicity that could not be argued with. It appeared that in some higher level on the dream plane, Yumi could see me as I read my book, and there was an aura of light around me.

Perhaps this was a manifestation of the hidden psychic ability of Yumi’s that the old woman had referred to. The deeper implications, which I couldn’t really accept, were that these mysterious forces had answered my unspoken question about whether I was like the people in Ruth Montgomery’s book, Aliens Among Us.

The “answer” seemed to be that I was indeed a “shining” being of Light — something like what I had just been reading about.

 

“TWO BULLETS”

I was reminded that this was not the first time that a “dream communication” like this had happened. When I was in my junior year in college, I had been having difficulty with my original overweight roommate that I started the year with.

(I ended up moving out of his room into someone else’s, and then from there to the room I had for the rest of the year with my “roommate from hell,” the guy who triggered my study of Buddhist and Hindu literature.)

My initial roommate had reminded me of myself in high school, before I ever lost 85 pounds through dieting and went from fat to thin. While I was home on vacation, again during the Thanksgiving break, I went to visit my friend Jude, and slept overnight.

While I lay there in my air-mattress bed on Jude’s floor, I started to go into a waking dream. In this dream, the roommate was a horribly menacing figure chasing after me. I had a gun in my belt, and knew that if I really wanted to, I could shoot the villain and stop the chase.

But, something inside of me wasn’t quite willing to cut off the character, which represented my older habit patterns of behavior that I was still struggling with. So, I had to just keep on running, faster and faster.

At this same moment, I heard a stirring in the room. Again, this was a waking dream, so I was still somewhat conscious of my surroundings. Suddenly and without warning, Jude started to moan. And then, to my incredible surprise, he began speaking…

“Shoot him… Just shoot him… Two bullets…”

I was so shocked to hear that Jude was dreaming the same dream as I was that I was suddenly wide-awake, my heart slamming at my ribcage! I stared at the ceiling and dared not even breathe, as I waited to see if Jude would say anything else.

Time continued to tick past, and nothing more happened. Somehow, I was able to wait until the next morning before I told Jude what he had said. I was so tired that night that all I could think of was sleep, and I knew full well that if I told Jude right then, in our enthusiasm we would have made it an all-nighter for sure.

Jude was quite surprised that I was able to keep it to myself and actually get back to bed afterwards, but this was definitely not the first time that something strange like this had happened to me.

And now with Yumi, another example of the same thing had just happened. I wondered how my own consciousness was able to manipulate others’ minds while they were asleep.

It reminded me of those telepathic experiments that I conducted on my friend Eric, (not the same Eric as my friend in New Paltz,) all the way back in second grade, when I was reading Sherman’s book.

If we remember, at that time I told Eric to wake up at a certain time in the morning and think of gold, through telepathic suggestion. Eric indeed woke up in the middle of the night, felt a presence in the room and immediately checked his gold watch to see what time it was. Not bad for a seven-year old psychic.

 

YUMI SPEAKS FROM A DREAM, PART TWO

A few more weeks went by, and the forces must have realized that they had caught my attention. Once again, I found myself reading late at night while Yumi slept.

Her classes started a lot earlier than mine, and thus the late-night hours were about the only times that I could get away from her to do my research, which was still just about the most important thing there was in my world.

As I sat reading in the same chair, once again Yumi sat up in bed and turned her head towards me. This time, I was ready, and hung on every word she said. I would write down whatever she told me, as closely as possible.

Yumi had a big smile on her face this time. She leaned forward in the bed with one hand out in front of her, as though she were holding something in it. The other hand seemed to stroke this invisible object.

I wondered if it might have been a book. It was all so strange and sudden that I could hardly even think. Before I had any time to wonder what was going on, Yumi began speaking.

“Kon-no waraji ro, katan-da ke do,”  she said, with that huge and very bizarre grin on her face, as she stroked the unseen item in her hands.

Then again, she seemed to notice that there was something strange going on; she was in a weird, square room with a white-skinned man who had strange-looking blue-colored eyes, and had no idea how she had gotten there.

Then, just like the first time, a bizarre energy seemed to suddenly turn her off like a light switch. She pulled the “object” back in and collapsed back into the bed, pulling the covers up over herself in a very mechanistic motion.

I frantically scribbled down the syllables of what I had just heard her say: “Kon-no waraji ro, katan-da ke do.” Unfortunately, I did not save the napkin, as now it would be very valuable to me.

I could hardly read any more as I waited for the next morning, when I could find out what in the heck she said. I knew it was going to be “good,” I could feel it. I was able to get a small amount of sleep that night.

The next day, almost immediately upon awakening, I asked her what she had said. I didn’t write down the language in the proper Anglicized version, known as “romaji,” so I had to read it to her, sounding it out almost exactly the same as how I had heard it.

“Well, okay, what you said was “Kon-no waraji ro, katan-da ke do.” Just like that.”

Yumi looked quite perplexed. She didn’t seem to know what to say.

“Well, all right, come on now, what in the hell does it mean?” I asked.

She responded, with a very puzzled look on her face.

“It means, ‘Look at these new sandals I just bought.’ Very, very strange.”

“Look at my new sandals? What the hell is so strange about that?” I asked. Is that all it was? All she ever wanted to do was go shopping, and now she was buying stuff in her dreams and trying to show it to me!

“No, David, wait a minute. The word I used for “sandals” was “waraji.” Warajis are very ancient sandals. No one has ever owned or wore a pair of warajis for at least seven hundred years.”

“Jesus Christ! Seven hundred years!”

“Yes. And I said to you, “Look at my NEW warajis that I just bought.”

“Well I’ll be god-damned! What the hell do you think this means?”

“Maybe we had past life together, desho?” (“Desho” meant, “Huh?”)

Clearly, a proposition like that was still a little too much for me to accept. I had wondered about past lives from time to time, but had never really given it much thought. I did remember that when I was still very young, I seemed to remember a past life that featured World War Two and where everyone was driving old-fashioned looking cars, but it was never very distinct.

To Yumi and her Shinto system, reincarnation was par for the course, and she had suggested such a possibility with seriousness. But, despite my skepticism about the whole thing, soon after this event there would be yet another one, equally interesting.

 

YUMI SPEAKS FROM A DREAM, PART THREE

This time, I lay in bed next to Yumi, half-awake and half-asleep. She was resting one hand on my leg, and was fast asleep. When I tried to move my own leg, Yumi started patting it gently.

“Teru, teru, Obakun,” Yumi said to me.

I was too tired to write it down, so I memorized it. I never knew what the heck she was saying, or whether it meant anything important or not. The next day, I asked her what it meant. This time, she was genuinely perplexed.

“Well, I’ve never heard the word “Teru” used in common speech,” Yumi said. “But, I imagine that maybe at one time, it was a short form of ‘aish- teru,’ which means “I love you.””

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I answered. “What about Obakun?”

“That sounds like family name,” she responded. “-Kun is a ‘cool’ way to say “Mister,” usually for younger person. So, it means Mr. Oba.”

“So the whole thing means “I love you, Mr. Oba.” I’ll be damned! It sure does sound like a past life, doesn’t it?”

“Kowai!” she responded. “Kowai” meant something that was strange or bizarre or scary.

 

SUBCONSCIOUS MEMORIES RESURFACING

 A while later in the semester, Yumi and I were having sex at a time of the month when we really shouldn’t have. I was moderately uncomfortable about the whole thing, but tried not to pay attention to those feelings.

There was obviously a big, noisy party going on in the room next door, where an alcoholic young man lived. There had been lots of weird things going on in that room from time to time, most likely some heavy drug use as well.

I had been able to successfully induce them to leave the room in the past, through telepathy. The drugs seemed to lower their resistance to my subconscious “remote influencing” experiments.

So, right in the middle of the noise, there was a sudden, loud crash against the wall, and it was the obvious sound of broken glass.

Soon after this came the lowering of the stereo and the sounds of the voices in the room, obviously very alarmed. Yumi and I both grew quite concerned about this. I threw my clothes on and went outside to investigate. Nothing could have prepared me for what I would see.

Walking out of the room was my neighbor as well as my neighbor’s friend, both of whom had beards and long hair and were very young.

They were both literally covered in blood, and seemed to be leaning on each other for support. They obviously were highly intoxicated. They made their way into the bathroom and hardly noticed me on the way there.

A short while later, I went into the bathroom to take a leak. After doing this, I went over and asked the guys, totally wasted and lying against the wall by the sinks, if everything was okay. I couldn’t possibly have been prepared for the response I got.

“Get the f- out of here, man. Just get the f- out of here. You didn’t see a thing. Nothing happened. Just get your f—ing ass out of here right now.”

“Well, are you all right?” I asked, trying not to be easily intimidated.

“Everything is fine. Now you just get the f- out of here.”

I was so shocked by their attitude that I did just that — leaving the bathroom and pretending like nothing happened. For some reason, I didn’t call anyone or do anything about it. I had no idea which of the guys were injured, how they were injured or whether they were even going to live. All I could see was a mess of blood on both of their white shirts.

But, since I lived right next door to the guy, the power of the intimidation took hold, and I took no action. Later on, I would discover that my neighbor had smashed his beer bottle against the wall and cut his hand.

He did eventually end up being spotted, taken to the hospital and given stitches, as these guys walked the dorms without even changing their bloody clothing!

As I talked about the whole thing with Yumi, I couldn’t help but feel the bizarre coincidence of what had happened. The timing of this event, along with our sexual misadventure, was just too strange. Why, indeed, was my now-sexual relationship with Yumi showing up somehow connected to this horrible, bloody accident? What was I being told?

A few weeks later, I had a dream that Yumi had been murdered, possibly even twice — (that seemed to be normal enough in the dream.) I was working harder than anyone else in the dream to find out who the killer was, as I really wanted to solve the crime.

I was led to a variety of crime scenes, and at each one there were various clues that could be pieced together. The strange thing was that I could prove that I myself had been at each one of the key scenes!

I kept going back and checking, and there literally was no single other person who seemed to fit the case better than myself! Right before awakening, I was left with the bizarre conclusion that I myself must have been the murderer!

I awoke, feeling that this had to be an interesting metaphor for the relationship as it now stood. However, I did not understand why my dreams would implicate me as a murderer, when everything that was going on in the present had to do with her taking an unfair advantage of me.

There was really no room in my mind to think about the possibility that this might have been an actual retelling of a past-life event. I still wasn’t even sure if such a thing as past lives really existed, although I was becoming more convinced that they might be a reality as my time went along with these strange synchronicities coming through Yumi.

 

YUMI SPEAKS FROM A DREAM, PART FOUR

Towards the end of the semester, Artie stopped by to talk, and Yumi ended up going to sleep in bed. I told Artie about the idea of Ascension, (which I had now encountered in books such as Ruth Montgomery’s,) the importance of the extraterrestrials and how everything fit together into the “big picture.”

It was an exciting conversation, and Artie was totally fascinated. Suddenly, Yumi sat up in bed again, still fast asleep. Slowly and deliberately, her head turned towards Artie and me. By now, I was used to this, but Artie was obviously scared to death. Yumi began to speak.

“Shining, wa?” she asked, looking directly at me. Then, just as suddenly, something seemed to “turn her off,” and she collapsed back into the bed. Artie looked at me with wide eyes and a big, goofy smile. He didn’t know what the hell to make out of this sudden, bizarre incident.

“Jesus, now her subconscious mind knows the word for “shining,” so she doesn’t have to say it in Japanese!” It was obvious that once again, an outside spiritual force had manipulated her consciousness to give us an important and timely message.

We were “shining” with Light. It would prove to the be the last time that any such message of this type would come through, before she returned to Japan for good at the end of the semester.

 

DAVID’S NEED TO STAND UP FOR HIMSELF

I had many dreams that indicated my own need to stand up for myself in the relationship. The fights were absolutely devastating to me, and it seemed as if she created nearly all of them to meet her own emotional needs.

I tried to treat her as nicely as possible, but whenever she wasn’t in a good mood, it was somehow my fault, and she would create a distraction in order to start a fight. Then, once the fight was in progress, she would change the subject to other things that I had done in the past!

The inevitable conclusion from these fights was “You don’t love me.” I would then have to somehow “prove” that I loved her, and I was never sure how to do this, since I loved her all the time, without conditions, regardless of the things that went on between the two of us.

One of Yumi’s favorite “tricks” was to induce long bouts of cold, stony silence. I literally felt like throwing up when she would do this. No matter what I said or did, she would just sit there and sullenly stare at the wall.

The more I panicked and tried to talk her out of it, or explain my position, the worse it got. Then, eventually it would end up like a sizzling stick of dynamite, with both of us being silent.

Making it as dramatic as possible, she would eventually storm out of the room, leaving a lingering, unresolved tension that would hang in the air like a stale mist.

Finally we would have to deal with the issue, and she would often excuse it with nothing more than one or two sentences. She told me that she never held a grudge, and that once we were done fighting she never wanted to talk about it again.

Then we would have sex afterwards, and she felt that the tension-resolution cycle made the sex a lot better. I couldn’t understand why she needed to play this insidious game.

The only thing that made the sex better to me was the relief that I didn’t “lose” her. In that extremely limited sense, she was right about it being better, but you paid the price in blood.

 

DAVID DREAMS OF HIS MISSION

There was one dream in particular that I had during this time, which was highly dramatic. I found myself returning to this same house over and over again, and each time I would run up the stairs, into the bathroom and then make a precipitous jump through the bathroom window to a ledge on the other side.

Even though it was highly dangerous, for some reason I felt compelled to keep doing it over and over again. After about four times, I realized that if I was willing to go through the rest of the house, there might be a way for me to get to the other side without making the dangerous jump.

Just as I was about to run up the stairs again, I stopped and walked into the living room, quite to the surprise of the young African-American girl who had been watching me each time.

“Hi, I’m David Wilcock,” I said to the girl, slightly out of breath. “Do you mind if I take a look around?”

“No, that’s okay, David. In fact, we’ve been expecting you already for quite some time.”

I was puzzled. “What do you mean by that,” I asked her?

“Well, I’m really not supposed to say anything about this,” she responded, “but the extraterrestrials are working here right now to build up this house, and they know that you’re here.”

“Come on, give me a break. You’re telling me that there are extraterrestrials in this house right now?”

“Yes, David, there are. If you walk over into the far hall to the left, you just might see them while they are working.”

“This is too outrageous to believe. I’m going to go over and take a look for myself.”

I walked down the hallway and took a left like she said, then went down another long corridor. At the end of the corridor there was a waist-high barricade, and I went over it.

Going into an adjoining, unfinished room, I looked out of what was going to become a window later on. There to my surprise and amazement were about eight Grey-style extraterrestrials, all doing construction work on this house!

They seemed to be bathed in a brilliant, deep-blue light, and their skin was also somewhat blue. They were erecting a massive chandelier in the room as well as several other fancy touches, like a black-marble bathroom with golden fixtures. It was quite stunning to watch them work.

I was aware of the danger from the forces in the government around observing the behavior of these extraterrestrials. None of the neighbors surrounding this house were supposed to see what was going on.

And yet, there was a building to my far left, and in it I could suddenly see a man watching them, as equally amazed as I was. And then quite abruptly as I watched, men in military fatigues came up to the man with machine guns and led him away at gunpoint.

I very quickly left the area, not wanting to be spotted by the same forces. The ET’s seemed to keep on working regardless of this government presence.

Then, when I went back into the main room, I ran into a woman who I recognized as a wealthy and prominent friend of my father’s. To make a long story short, this woman was extending me an opportunity to work at their facility — which would ultimately mean that I might be working with the extraterrestrials.

There was a part of me that really wanted to say yes, but then in the dream I seemed to remember that I had made a promise to pick up a different Oriental female friend of mine in a little red car.

I knew that this Oriental female was my girlfriend and we were in love, and she would be very upset with me if I did not meet with her on time. So, I forlornly agreed to pass up the opportunity to work in the house, trying to feel excited about my imminent reunion with my girlfriend. The woman seemed very disappointed, telling me that they “really needed me” there at the house.

As I prepared to leave, I noticed that the television was on. It appeared to be some sort of horror movie, taking place in a long tunnel that was fashioned out of cobblestones.

Flaming torches were evenly mounted along the walls of this tunnel, about every fifteen feet, and in between each set of torches was a body, mostly decaying and chained up by the wrists. As I continued to watch this scene, suddenly I found myself directly in it!

I could feel the oppressive heat and darkness in the tunnel. It was as if I was in some sort of purgatory in hell. And at the very far end of the tunnel, there was a longhaired male figure also hanging in chains, who looked remarkably like Jesus!

I suddenly heard a terrible voice echo through the hallway.

“Solomon,” the voice cried out. “You realize now that my power has superceded your own. You will do as I say.”

I turned my head quickly and realized that the evil one was cloaked in flowing black cloth, many small pieces of it. He clutched a scepter in his left hand that came up to a stylized skeletal claw hand that held a crystal ball.

His face could not be seen, but the prominent feature was that his head was a dressed-up horse skull with big horns at the top. As soon as he uttered this terrible sentence, he thrust the scepter forward, and the scene changed back to Solomon.

Now, I felt like I was even more a part of the scenery, and I was now hovering in front of the chained spiritual figure.

Suddenly and without warning, a series of perhaps thirteen thick, two-inch metal bars popped through Solomon’s body, causing blood to gush out!

The bars were at all different heights and angles, and they went straight through, causing Solomon to cry and wail pathetically, like a small child. The horse-headed demon continued talking, and suddenly I realized that I was now super-sized, holding this human in my hands and carefully trying to stick pins through the human’s flesh properly.

I was trying to make sure that I did each puncture exactly right, but as I drove the needles through, I would feel the rush of incredible pain within my own body.

I was shocked awake with a thought that was more of a psychic impression than a physical sentence, but it translated into “You are the one who is stabbing yourself.”

I knew that this had to do with my relationship with Yumi and my need to stand up for myself. Furthermore, I realized that it was saying that Yumi’s insistence on having all of my free time was now standing in the way of the UFO research that I was trying to accomplish.

For whatever reason, the forces in the dream made it sound like they “really needed me” in this bizarre house where all the construction was going on.

At the time I originally had this dream, I was not open enough to acknowledge the deepest possibilities of the message, which would be that the extraterrestrials had given me this dream and were telling me of their desire to work with me. Much more time would go by before I had figured all of this out.

 

DAVID “SNAPS”

I could see from the dream that it was telling me that I had to get away from Yumi. And indeed, more and more I felt like I just had to break off the whole thing. It was just so insidious, so screwed up, so bizarre.

There were certainly things that I did to annoy her, but they were a direct result of my own incredible frustration at her blatant and total manipulations. So, one day when it started up again, I had enough.

She had thrown up the wall of silence yet again, and I felt, in my own words at the time, “the disgusting curve of energy” come up from my feet. This time, the energy contained violence and rage.

After a “pregnant pause” between both of us, with her again refusing to say anything and staring at the window, I suddenly “snapped.” It was the only time in the history of our (present) interaction that this had ever happened.

In every other case in the past, I had been the epitome of kindness, patience and long-suffering. This time, I had simply been pushed too far, and the blackest rage welled up in me.

If she was going to put up that wall, then I was going to smash it down, with whatever force was necessary. We reprint my words here, with most of the obscenities edited out.

“God damn it, why won’t you talk to me! What do I have to do to get you to say something!” I had grabbed both of her arms and was shaking her back and forth as I screamed these words into her face at the top of my lungs. This was not David Wilcock. I never behaved like this before or since!

For some reason, that put Yumi over the top. She went into some sort of advanced panic / anxiety attack that lasted for almost 45 minutes. Her whole body was trembling seemingly uncontrollably, and she was hyperventilating, unable to breathe or speak.

I was scared to death and did not know what the hell to do about it, even though a part of me said that this was her ultimate acting game. I kept trying to calm her down, and she just kept on going nuts.

Finally, after such an extended ordeal, she started to come back. I asked her why she went so crazy, and she said that she didn’t know — it seemed as if she had no control over her actions.

Was this some sort of karmic memory, or another manipulative ploy? I tended to believe that the “ploy” theory was the better one, since it was more “falsifiable” than the idea of “karmic memory” from a possible murder that I had conducted in this theoretical past life that we had together.

The ultimate low point of the relationship came soon after this.

Another fight got started because I refused a sexual advance late at night. Yumi started slamming her leg down on the bed, and eventually got up into the room and turned on all the lights.

Then she was squatting on the floor for a while, perched like a bird, while I sat in bed. I knew that this was going to be a bad one, and had no idea what to do.

Anything I said only would lead to more defeat, increasing the downward spiral. Then, after more silence, she got back into bed, and she started screaming.

She was obviously using all of the American slang and curse words that I had taught her. The nicest of the words she said to me was “I hate you,” and her verbal tirade just went on and on.

I knew that things were rapidly getting well beyond the point where I could do anything to get out of this. I had no idea how to stop this fight. I had a test the next day and needed sleep very desperately. As she continued to scream and rage about all the horrible things that I was, I started to pray, probably for the first time with such an intensity as this.

“God, it’s me, David. I need your help. I have to figure out a way to stop this fight, turn everything back around as quickly as I possibly can.

I need to get at least six hours of sleep tonight if I want to be able to pass my test tomorrow. Please help me.”

I waited for a voice or some sort of answer, but nothing seemed to happen. God, or my own guides acting on behalf of God, had failed me yet again. But shortly after this, I started to notice a very real nausea in my stomach; I felt like I was going to throw up!

Suddenly, I realized that this was the answer to my prayer. I didn’t actually need to throw up, but if I ran into the bathroom and made it look like I did, the fight would probably stop very quickly and I could get some sleep.

These are the types of “solutions” that emerge when a person is pushed to such incredible levels of desperation.

But at the same time that the “solution” came to me, I had a very clear and very sobering moment.

“God, I want to make sure that no matter what I say or what I do, I will always remember the things that Yumi is saying right now.

I don’t ever want to be blinded by love and forget what is happening right this minute, and what I am going to have to do to stop this. I know that I will have to end this relationship, and once she goes back to Japan, that’s it.”

Yumi’s voice continued to echo against the walls as I said these things. “I hate you, you f—ing…”

I summoned up the energy to pull off my “survival move” by breathing deeply. Suddenly and frantically, I stood up right in bed and literally hurdled over the foot of the bed, throwing the door open and careening down the hall into the men’s room.

I knelt in front of the toilet, screamed into the bowl with vomitous-sounding inflection, and reached in and grabbed a small handful of water. I was literally so desperate at that moment that I splashed the festering toilet-bowl water into my face to make it look more realistic.

Then, I hit the flusher, and it exploded with noise and water.

Right after this, Yumi came rushing in to the bathroom. I spit twice into the toilet and flushed it again as she frantically tried to comfort me. The water droplets were running off of my face. She was obviously in a total panic.

“Oh my God, oh my God, are you okay?” she asked me.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” I groaned. Now it was my turn to be the actor.

I did end up getting sleep that night, although it took her getting her wish and ultimately “winning” first — we ended up having quick sex anyway, which was what the fight had gotten started over in the first place.

I actually watched the clock the whole time, trying to insure that it not stretch on overly long. I ended up doing well on my test the next day.

The Law of Karma seemed to strike soon afterwards, as a natural balancing act for what I felt that I had to do to get out of the fight. I had carried my quartz crystal into the shower with me, and had rested it on the soap dish as I washed my hair.

This was my only quartz crystal, and I had been feeling like it was important that I carry it. One of my father’s early girlfriends had given it to me back when I was still in junior high school. At one point in high school, while I was carrying it around with me, it had fallen off of my desk and I thought for sure that it would clatter and break on the floor.

Miraculously, it landed perfectly on the pocketbook of Elizabeth, the girl sitting next to me, and it never wobbled or moved — it just came to a dead stop.

And now, still enmeshed in the turbulent emotions of the dysfunctional relationship, I turned in the shower and my arm hit the crystal. It smashed to the floor of the shower and cracked into two pieces. I was utterly devastated.

Right away, I felt that I knew why it happened. The crystal represented my spirit body, and the relationship with Yumi was literally cracking my spirit. I could see this as just the next metaphor as the crippling back pains I had suffered in the same shower only a few months earlier.

All of my vital energy was being “vamped” out of me, and I was being reduced to acts of sheer desperation, due to my inability to have a backbone and “stand up” for myself in the relationship.

After this happened, I felt like the crystal was “dead,” and I didn’t want to carry it any more. The fracture plane was actually very interesting, though, as it had the smooth texture and consistency of water. That much about it was interesting.