Chapter 05: Dreams and Realities

DREAM THE IMPOSSIBLE DREAM

My second stab at fiction in high school was based solely on a dream. Instead of turning this into another long entry in this book, I will just write the highlights of the dream and story itself:

I enter a very luxurious hotel in the wilderness that was next to a giant crater. Inside the hotel are many teenagers, all working and living at the hotel, partying without abandon. I start to notice that some strange things are going on.

I find a room full of people sitting in a circle around a large silver globe, and they all appear to be vibrating at a very rapid speed.

I wonder what in the world is going on, and suddenly there is a shadowy robed figure in the corner of the room that approaches me. It tells me that the strange machine was allowing all of them to have a collective out-of-body experience! I am very interested by this.

The figure then offers me some mushrooms that grew in the bizarre UFO-shaped crater outside, telling me that if I eat them, I will be able to create anything I want just by thinking it, and that I could also use the out-of-body machine myself. I am reluctant to trust the dark figure, but am so fascinated by the idea of the psychic powers that I eat them anyway.

The shadowy figure directs me into an arcade. I step up to the video game of my choice, and a headset is placed onto my head with metal that contacts my brow. As soon as I grip the controls, I feel an electric shock in my hands, and suddenly I am fully inside the video game!

It consists of a series of dark corridors, and vicious humanoid robots that attack me unceasingly, causing real pain. Everything is vividly realistic, and I become extremely paranoid! I want to get out, but I am unable to make the game stop!

I finally wrench myself out of the machine, only to find soon after that the same humanoid robots from the game are now popping out of the doorways and attacking me in the hotel!

With my mind screeching in terror, I search in vain to find an exit from the hotel, but every corridor seems to only make me more lost. I eventually find myself in a garage, and am forced to smash the door down in order to escape to the outside.

Running for my life along the rim of the gigantic outdoor meteor crater, I am horrified to see the entire pit filling rapidly with a milky white substance. As I continue to run, the white substance splits and divides into darker cells.

 Just as I pass the crater, the cells start hatching into an army of even more of these malevolent robots. The armada of creatures attacking me is about to become almost too enormous to fathom. The weight of my impending death presses heavily on my chest.

In a brilliant flash of insight, I remember that the powers given to me by the shadowy force would allow me to create anything that I wished! I decided to use this new power to manifest my own robotic craft, a fighting machine to beat back the opposition.

Right in front of my eyes, a brilliant, UFO-style object spontaneously manifests, quickly clicking into place tile by tile. I step into the cockpit and hear the rush of the hatch as it snaps closed.

I am outrageously successful at defeating the robots with my new craft, and I deftly carve my way through their masses. I make my way back inside and discover an elevator of some sort, an elevator with many more potential floors than the hotel ever should have had for its size.

Somehow, I suddenly become aware that the hotel is only the top layer of a gigantic multi-tiered alien city that was built from a UFO that had crashed in the crater! I also know that all the drug-addicted teenagers in the hotel are being manipulated by the evil aliens to serve them, and I am determined to stop it.

I use thought control to operate the elevator, and I am able to penetrate each layer of the structure to finally arrive at the control center.

When I finally reach the control center, I come upon a gigantic black door, easily twenty feet tall, covered in barbed wire and thorns.

I know that it appears impossible to pass through, but I focus my attention with all of my strength and am able to blast through it. I have no idea what the massive guiding force of this sinister operation will look like.

To my surprise, the only thing I discover is a man at a desk in a typical US-government styled office! The man tells me of all the wonderful powers that I would be granted if I would only join them in their efforts of running the hotel. I would be given a very high position in the hierarchy.

The man’s persuasion seems to also take on the form of a telepathic, psychic pressure that threatens to shatter my skull.

After strongly denouncing the man, I realize that the only thing I can do to “win” is to “create myself.” I roll into a ball and see a series of seven energetic bodies, each one bigger than the one before it.

I expand my own awareness into the largest body, and I now am sitting before a massive, holographic computer terminal with a huge screen. I bring up a rotating image of the Earth and remove the entire bullet-shaped city from its position, sending it far back to its planet of origin.

I then create a new earth, unspoiled by this current society’s industrial expansion, and transport all of the prisoners from the hotel there. As my final act, I program my own essence to incarnate in a physical body there within my new creation. I feel my awareness slipping away as I know that I am about to incarnate there again myself…

Quite obviously, this story contained many elements of my future work, including the idea of Ascension – the creation of a “new heaven and new earth.”

Seven years after this dream, another amazing layer of validation came into play. I suddenly realized that I was actually working in a hotel that was remarkably similar to what I had dreamed here, when I was still in high school!

It looked the same on the outside and the inside, and the crater in the dream had become a physically real lake. Even though I seemed to predict the future, when I had the dream I was living in a different part of New York and unaware of where I would be going to college, much less what I would do seven years later.

And yet, the crushing similarity of the design and layout of the real hotel to the dream hotel was almost impossible for me to deny. What in the world was going on, I asked myself? A prophecy for seven years into the future?

 

EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVIL WARS

My third story was started before college, and finished in my first year. The memories were straining their way to the surface more accurately in each successive attempt I made at fiction. Again, as with the other stories, I have changed the story to a first-person perspective instead of a third, in order to make it more accessible.

 

Civil War: The Politics of Societal Revolution

I sit comfortably on my porch, tilting back in my favorite old rocking chair. Been on this old Earth now for eighty-five some-odd years, and that’s a mighty long time. What remains of my house is nothin’ but a faded old shack in the middle of the Nevada desert.

This old dry heat can burn you up pretty quickly, so it’s good to have a lemonade on hand. There’s a whole pitcher of ’em back in the kitchen, on the top shelf of the fridge, if you want one.

The one main road is fairly close nearby, and my beat-up old Ford pickup stands ready for active duty, still good and ready after all these years and thousands of oil changes. Don’t mind the suspension; the dirt roads get awfully bumpy ’round these parts. I’ll fix it up one of these days, (or so I’ll tell ya.)

Day after day I been sittin’ here, staring into space, thinking back over the faded pages of my own past. It’s been a good life, a life with many great triumphs — the wife, family, kids. Served my time in the war, loved and lost, paid my dues.

Now, I couldn’t deny that everything was drawing to a close and time was short. I was getting wrinkled and tired in my old age. Social security checks came once a month, and my grocery trips were infrequent and usually quite large. Not much seemed to interest me anymore.

I watched the sagebrush dance along the sand as the wind caught it up. Yes, this was life. Simple, uneventful, but all there really was. Or so I thought.

Suddenly and without warning, I suddenly feel this awful presence coming near me… a dreadful loathing, something deep within that I do not understand. The effect is similar to what one might expect to feel after being struck by lightning, accidentally ending up as the highest point on land during a thunderstorm.

The alarming shock is so great that the lemonade falls out of my hands. As I grab for the porch railing to brace myself, I see the thirsty boards quickly soak the liquid up into their spiraling wood grains, among the shattered bits of glass.

Horrible clouds roll in overhead as my profound unrest increases even more. There seems to be a rip in space and time as the clouds overhead darken and spin like a whirlpool, emitting great bolts of luminous electricity.

I could distinctly hear a rushing sound as the dusty gales of wind started whipping around me. To my utter and total surprise, a fantastic spacecraft descends from the center of that vortex! I feel a lump in my throat.

Something is really wrong here. This ain’t no typical UFO sighting. Somehow, I am very well aware that I am in tremendous danger.

A distant part of me seems to know exactly what this is all about. I sense ancient memories coming back into my mind, but I am not yet sure exactly what they are. I clutch my shotgun carefully, a shotgun that I have literally had for almost my entire life.

How many times have I carefully taken her apart, wiped her dry with a clean rag, oiled each component and put her back together, with loving care? I somehow remember that I am being hunted. But how? By who? From where?

Instinct tells me to appear asleep as the craft approaches, and I close my eyes, my trusty old muscles tight and ready for action.

The being in the craft knows that he wants the man dead; that’s the whole reason why he came there. But this being wasn’t satisfied by simply vaporizing him from a distance.

He wanted to emerge from the ship, walk up to him, look him in the eyes and laugh spitefully before killing him. “It’s time to take out the garbage,” the insectlike mind of the being thought to itself.

The craft landed and the being emerged, slowly walking towards the man with great difficulty due to the increased gravity of Earth. The man now appeared to be sound asleep. The steps of the alien were halting, but he persisted forward.

Many of these guys he had killed himself, and this was becoming sort of a routine. Somehow, the glory of the kill just didn’t add up too well anymore. But orders were orders, and he would carry them out for the glory of God.

He certainly did enjoy making a game out of it, getting as close as he could just to see the creature’s facial expression.

I could hardly breathe as I heard the alien’s shuffling approach. My nerves and muscles danced with electric fire as the creature got closer.

Now, I knew what I had to do; it just seemed to emerge from my deep, deep memory, a place that I did not understand. The message was very, very clear, and I had no choice but to follow it. I was completely nervous, but I was well aware that I would perform my actions with precision and accuracy.

Just as the alien got within firing range, I exploded into action. I suddenly jumped up out of the chair, swung the old rifle around my finger in a complete circle and fired as it returned to position. With a deafening crack, the wide field of shot penetrated the alien’s suit of armor, sending it reeling backwards.

Then surprisingly, a second bolt shot out from the rifle, a blinding ray of brilliant blue energy! Obviously I was completely perplexed as to what had just come out of my shotgun to cause this effect. Could it possibly have been from my own mind, and was that why I had felt such an awful pressure throughout my body?

As the brilliant beam hit, the alien suddenly exploded in a tremendous flash of light, and a huge, spinning cone of fire raged into the air. I hit the deck as the burst of fire shot over me, heating my old shack to incineration.

Things definitely weren’t looking good on the home front. A few seconds later, the fierce wind and fire died down, my old house now smoldering and crackling in flames behind me. I approached the spacecraft, covered in ash, sweating and breathing heavily. “Just get inside,” I thought to myself. “The rest will be obvious.”

I admired the smooth mirror finish of the spacecraft, and the top hatch in its now fully open position. I seemed to have a distant memory of such a thing before, though I wasn’t sure why or how.

It was quite a beautiful piece of equipment — all too familiar. I knew that this had to be one of those UFOs that everyone was always talking about, but this was different. I felt somehow connected to it, in a way that I really didn’t understand.

I grasped the rim of the craft and started pulling myself up over the edge. To my shock and horror, another alien hand latched painfully onto my own, and I cried out!

Crashing and tumbling over and down into the main control area of the craft, I struggled against the awesome strength of the alien. Pain rocked my body from the impact on the harsh metal floor.

The terrible body of the alien was small and compact, but far, far too strong to contend with. Suddenly trapped in a desperate struggle, I gripped my rifle and managed to smash a hose on the alien’s body suit with the butt end. Seconds later, the alien vaporized my entire body except for the head and arms in a bright flash of light.

With a green gas spilling out of his now-wounded air hose, the alien laughed victoriously at my quick death. But the laughing changed to choking as the alien realized that my head and arms were now hovering over him, clamping around his neck!

My hovering face had contorted into a look of determined fury. The alien scrambled in fear, trying to get away from the menace no matter what the cost. I knew that there were weapons I could use in his hip pack, if only I could reach it.

Now was the time to leave this old body and go to the next phase. I knew exactly what to do now. My floating mouth hinged into a wide-open position, and I emitted my consciousness as a blue, luminescent vapor.

As the alien continued to struggle, my energy worked its way into the exposed hose. The alien head and arms fell limply to the floor as my essence penetrated the alien’s nostrils and seized control of its brain. And then, all went black.

WHAM!

 

Suddenly, everything shifted around and I had a new body. There was great, urgent pain in it, a heaviness that was threatening to extinguish my consciousness.

I reached over and quickly clamped my hand over the hose, stopping the outflow of the green gas. I took a deep inhale of the sharp, offensive fumes, smelling of rotten eggs. The gas was immediately relieving, and my consciousness started to come back into clear focus.

Still holding the precious hose, I took the other hand and opened the hip pack on the suit. Inside I found a roll of patching fabric, right where I knew it would be. I wrapped this fabric around the broken hose tightly.

I then reached in and grabbed what I now knew to be an all-purpose, low power laser, and melted the patching fabric in place. It seemed to soak directly into the material of the hose and disappear as I did this.

Regaining some measure of conscious awareness, I looked over the circular control panel of the craft and stroked it admirably. “Such a long time,” I thought to myself. “It’s been such a long time.” I now fully remembered who and what I was.

Many thousands of years ago, the ruling leaders on my home planet of Palador had made a tremendous and very catastrophic decision. They had judged that all the parts of their souls that were freethinking, creative and rebellious would be separated from the rest of the spirit body, through a form of energetic extraction.

This was done in order to sterilize and organize society, so that there would be no disputes, no arguments. They felt that this was the only way that they could create the full collective consciousness that they had been striving for.

A tremendous cry of despair welled up from the people as the proposal moved through the bureaucracy, but the decision was made and it was done in little over twenty moons.

Though they were able to extract these fragments, they could not “kill” them, for they knew that energy could neither be created nor destroyed.

Thus, the energy forms took on lives of their own, becoming their own identities and personalities. They were kept imprisoned within an energetic containment field in a giant holding cell underground.

For many planetary revolutions they could not escape, and a great despair settled amongst their ranks.

Finally, several of the wisest souls came to a breakthrough. They realized that since we now existed solely as a vibrational form of energy, we could raise our frequency with a determined effort and subvert the force field by going into a higher dimension.

With many, many moons of great prayer and meditation we were able to unify our minds and make the jump, and we sprung victoriously from the bounds that encircled us. We soared into the sky, orbiting the smooth green clouds of Palador as free-traveling energetic beings of Light.

Hornetlike sirens buzzed incessantly on the surface of the planet as the swirling red lights of danger screamed to life; something had happened.

The Paladorian elite deployed a fantastic armada of their finest ships to try to contain these higher-dimensional entities within another force field. Thousands of little dots were poking through from everywhere within the green clouds of Palador, rapidly rising into view to meet the challenge.

We knew that we had to do something fast; we had very little time before they would be within range to put us into another containment field. We made a collective decision to spread ourselves all throughout the galaxy and blend into the souls of the entities that we found on any inhabited planets.

We knew that this would force the Paladorians to hunt us down, one by one, all throughout the galaxy. Then, all we would need to do would be to seize control of one unattended Paladorian craft once it tried to attack us, and the technology within it would allow us to regroup ourselves into a containment field once again.

One of us would stay outside the craft to pilot it back home, and the prophecies said that this person would be the Commander of the Revolution.

Once reunified, we could then hyperwarp back to the planet, and with the ship’s resources we could disable the frequencies that held us out in the first place.

With the protective planetary network shut down, we would simply release ourselves back into the atmosphere, re-entering the bodies we once knew. It would be quite a setback, but we knew that eventually we would meet our goal and become whole and complete once more.

The Paladorians were also aware of our prophecies, and they ultimately knew that they could not stop this from happening. And yet, they were so engrossed with the material world that they simply brushed off the prophecies as nothing more than an ancient myth. They had no idea how wrong they really were.

The implications of all of this to my human Ego mind were stupendous. Not only was this who I really was, but my success had automatically elevated me into a prophetic figure; the soon-to-be historic position of “Commander of the Revolution.”

I was the first entity to ever survive a Paladorian attack and overtake the beacon craft. I was also the first reunified Paladorian being in the universe, the first one to fully reconnect my spirit essence with a physical body.

It was extremely rewarding to feel such an incredible sense of final success and achievement. My new hands deftly moved across the control panel, doing all the things that I remembered from so long ago.

I programmed a galactic-band energetic broadcast at the precise frequency that only my people knew – the frequency that we adopted in our escape. I took a deep breath and felt the glory of the message that I was about to give; it was the single most fantastic moment in the history of our civilization.

Looking out at the burning embers of what was once my house, I moved my blunt fingertip over the contact point that would activate the broadcast. I tried to visualize my words spreading over the galaxy like a magnificent cloak of loving Light, reaching each and every one of our brothers and sisters.

I would have to speak carefully, as these words would be forever written in the annals of history for all future generations to read.

“Attention all Paladorians. Attention. This is Revolution Commander Xanth. The day of glory is upon us now. We stand at the dawning of a new era, a new world. It is now time to awaken, brothers and sisters.

You must remember who you are and return to your energetic forms, evolating from the bodies you now occupy. Together we will reunite as One People, fulfilling the promises we made to ourselves so long ago.

With great love we will thunder back to Palador and reclaim what we have lost. Prepare yourselves. You must follow this signal back to its source point and enter the containment unit in five marsheks, on my mark. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark!”

The ship shuddered on its landing gear as the souls of millions of displaced Paladorians thundered into its onboard containment cells. It was very tight and uncomfortable, to say the least, but the liberated souls hardly cared for that.

I slid my hands over the control panel to bring the hatch back down. I beamed back a transmission to the Paladorian planet to give the necessary progress report before my return.

I would have to fool the Paladorians into thinking that everything was okay and the rebel enemy had indeed been vanquished. I was quite well trained in Paladorian broadcast protocol from my many friends back in the containment unit.

“Attention. This is…” (I looked down at the nameplate on the uniform) “Karaxyl Zeblazar. Mission is complete; the rebel in galaxy sector Gamma 17 has been successfully extinguished.

The on-board rendezvous partner was destroyed in glorious combat. Returning for revivification and declaration of next mission priority. Zeblazar out.”

I eased back into the hyperwarp chair and felt it contract perfectly around my body. With a mental nudging of the controls, I activated the homing signal, and felt the familiar dizziness and mental confusion as the hyperwarp vortex prepared to open.

Great, booming energetic sounds rose to a deafening pitch within the ship as it absorbed the necessary energy to make the jump. My last thoughts were of the glory that awaited me as I shot into the spiraling vortex that was created. I was Commander of the Revolution, and I had fulfilled my mission. I eagerly awaited my return home.

 

CONNECTIONS

Of course, fiction was a fun pastime, an entertaining way to fantasize about things far too impossible to be really true. I enjoyed writing this story, and eagerly presented it to my various English professors in college. They agreed that it had great potential. But the real world was a different story.

By this point, my self-indulgence with marijuana had reached its peak. I watched my life systematically becoming more and more impossible to manage. By the end of my first year of college, I had gotten far more deeply involved in using it than I could have ever imagined when I first started.

It was starting to have a very definite toll on my energy, motivation and happiness. A dismal, relentless summer factory job showed me the type of environment that waited for me if I never stopped what I was doing.

Marijuana was illegal, and I could end up being arrested and put in prison for my actions. Almost all of the factory workers were ex-cons with drug records who still used actively, and their lives were complete failures, as far as I could see.

I worked with my best high-school friend Jude that summer in creating an album called “Stories from the Love Brothers.”

The main topics of the album were my struggles with substance abuse, and my need to move past that phase of my life. Two of the songs on the album were spontaneous creations, where I went into free verse while Jude played on the piano.

These proved to be some of the first recorded telepathic communications from my higher self to my physical self. The message of the most important song, entitled “Garden of the Broken Clock,” could be summarized in one sentence, which said, “If you are ending yourself, then you must not love yourself.”

I knew this to be true, and with the strength of the tape, I was able to quit my four-year habit the following semester.

The actual process of quitting came about through a tremendous, synchronous constellation of events that all occurred in the same five-day period. Jenny, a girl who I was becoming very friendly with, had suddenly stopped talking to me on Tuesday, causing me intense despair.

The next night, I went to an alcohol drinking party and played a drinking game, where you had to roll the dice and drink almost every time it was your turn. I ended up drinking tap water, since I didn’t feel like drinking any beer.

The festering tap water made me horribly sick the next day, as it was not at all pure, filled with all sorts of contaminants. In small amounts it might not have made me sick, but drinking that much at once had rather serious consequences.

Also, I was unwilling to stand up for myself that night and leave the party so I could read my assigned book for Science Fiction class, which was due the next day. I was very embarrassed when the teacher called on me, one of the star pupils in the class, for my opinion of the text. I had to admit to everyone there that I had not, in fact, read the book at all.

The night before I finally quit, I had reconciled the situation with Jenny, and I now was well aware that she had a boyfriend. Jenny had told me earlier that she would help me with her companionship when I needed to strengthen my resolve to quit, but now I realized that she had other intentions.

Even though she told me that she didn’t smoke marijuana, on that Friday night she invited me over to her room to smoke a joint with her friends. She did a painful impersonation of a person who was smoking pot for the first time, and I immediately realized that it was all an act.

She was also flirting terribly with the other guys in the party, despite the fact that she supposedly had a boyfriend. I made the shocking realization that she didn’t want me to quit after all; in fact, it appeared that she wanted to use my connections with my friend Randy to help her get good prices on marijuana.

My friend Chris was there that night as well — one of my long-term friends whom I am still in contact with to this day. Ultimately we will see my own incredible discovery of who Chris was in the past, and the karmic connections that still bind us in the present.

Chris didn’t smoke marijuana, but was very interested in drinking beer and wanted to bring everyone else in on it. The girl, Jenny, said that we would have to go out to the “Tripping Fields” in order to drink, as her roommate did not allow drinking in the room! (Never mind the fact that there we were, doing drugs!)

Grace Slick of the band Jefferson Airplane had coined the name “Tripping Fields”, and the place was actually nothing more than the athletic fields for the campus by day. At night, it had a very mysterious and entertaining aura. Chris and I agreed to meet the rest of the group out in the Fields after they went to buy the beer at the store.

Chris and I walked all the way into town, bought a six-pack of Saranac dark beer and then headed all the way back out to the Fields. [Chris is a few years older than I and was legally old enough to purchase beer.] As we passed my dormitory, I thought that I saw the whole group of them going back into the building, but I wasn’t sure.

We both discovered that it was very wet out there in the Fields, and the grass had not been mowed. So, both of our shoes and socks were quickly saturated as we went along. We finally made our way out to the bleachers in the dark, and the night was beautiful, tranquil and calm.

We both quickly realized that the people were nowhere to be seen — they must not have stayed in the Fields. Since we expended all that energy getting out there, I wanted to stay for a while and enjoy the night, as I was stoned, the sky was crystal clear and the moon was beautiful.

Chris became very frustrated with the fact that neither of us had a bottle opener, and the bottles were not the screw top kind, so there was no way to get them open. I was finally bullied into leaving hastily by Chris.

Heading back to my dorm room, I noticed something horrifying. Even in the staircase, I could tell that the entire floor level upon which I lived smelled of the most disgusting vomit. When I opened my suite door, I realized that it had happened in my own bathroom — I was living in a three-room suite at the time.

To make matters worse, my next-door neighbor was walking around the room, smiling drunk and oblivious and eating pizza in the midst of that horrible smell — just fifteen feet away from the bathroom door, which was wide-open. I asked what happened and realized that it was my own roommate who had vomited, after stupidly drinking two forty-ounce bottles of malt liquor in quick succession.

I was quite angered by the huge mess that had landed all over my bathroom floor and apparently not in the toilet at all. There was hardly a blank space on much of the bathroom floor.

I forcefully admonished my roommate that he had better clean up the bathroom spotlessly, no matter how long it took. Then, I went into my own room, and there was a scene that was, in some ways, far worse than the vomit.

There on my roommate’s bed was a girl who I considered to be quite unattractive and overweight, a girl who had shamelessly made advances towards me at the party on Wednesday night. She was sitting in a slumped position on my roommate’s bed with her legs spread widely, (fully clothed, of course,) with a beer in between her legs.

Next to my roommate’s bed were their two pairs of shoes, lined up directly next to each other as though it were a romantic gesture between the two of them. Then, to make matters even worse, I looked over to my own bed and realized that all the sheets and covers were stirred up, as though someone had been sleeping in my bed.

It could not have been from me, as I always made my bed every morning.

Suddenly, it all came into place. My roommate had drank the beer, tried to have sex with the ugly girl in my bed, then realized what he was actually doing and barely made it to the bathroom before throwing up! The shocking reality of the betrayal that I experienced really kicked in at that moment, and I could hardly even believe it.

That night, I slept cold in Chris’ room, on the naked mattress of the unused top bunk of his bed. All night long, I had dreams that put it all together for me. For four years, my life had just continually spiraled further and further downhill.

My life of fantasy writing had been about the only redeemable thing I could claim for myself during this entire time. The rings under my eyes were so dark that I was frequently asked if I had been in a fight and gotten two black eyes, and my skin was very obviously pale from anemia.

My diet was pure garbage, pizza and fries and burgers and soda, and my back was littered with severe cystic acne. I coughed harshly quite often, and you could hear all the resin that was camping out in my lungs when I did.

I had been through two one-night stands with undesirable women since arriving in college, and the whole debacle that occurred in my own room was a painful reminder that drugs and alcohol had directly caused those experiences.

I awoke the next morning with profound revelations, quite well aware that alcohol and drugs were the cause of my ever-present despair and faulty life choices. But that was not the last of it, not by a long shot. I had to go out with a bang, to forever seal my resolve to never have even the tiniest relapse.

I realized that day that there was a reason why my phone had not rang in more than a week and a half. The phone cord had been smashed under the one of the legs of my barfing roommate’s bed when we were first moving the room around to our own configuration.

I went to Telecommunications and got a new replacement cord, bringing it back home. Amazingly, at that exact instant that I plugged in the phone, it started ringing! When I answered it, I realized that it was Randy, the guy who had sold me all of my marijuana for the last year.

Randy was the archetypical Devil personality, completely self-serving. The lead singer of a local rock band, a gifted visionary artist and an attractive person with almost limitless self-confidence.

Over the last year, my interactions with Randy had been very, very intense. He became my sole dealer of marijuana, and he was ruthless. Many, many times he had threatened my physical death if I ever reported him to the police.

He said that even if I left the state after he was busted, when he finally got out he would devote the rest of his life to hunting me down and killing me, and “would never stop hunting me down for the rest of his natural life until the day he stood victoriously over my dying, convulsing body.”

A really nice guy, no doubt. I knew that I had nothing to worry about, since I would never rat him out to the cops — but that didn’t make my paranoia any less real.

We always had to assume that the FBI was tapping our phone conversations, and thus he forbade any discussion about what we were doing on the telephone. We had a rather mundane, college-oriented code word for a bag of marijuana, which was to call it a “book.”

So, I being my naturally creative self would often call him up and say, “So, Randy, have you read any good literature lately?”

He would then answer something like, “Yeah, I just picked up a new book the other day. You’ve got to check it out — I really think it’s going to be a best-seller.”

Then I would respond, “Well all right, I should stop by so I can take a look at it.” And then we would work on the timing of when would be best for me to come over.

Randy was constantly in paranoia and fear, forever worrying about which person would be the one to do him in.

Every person who really got to know him was a victim of his fear-mongering. His relationships with women were equally turbulent, and he accused me of trying to steal his girlfriend more than once. He was constantly in chaos, forever trying to take the edge off of his very real fear by masking his mind with marijuana.

He had a number of clients, and actually showed me all the intricacies of being a dealer, hoping that I would eventually be able to take over his business. I had no intentions of doing that, as to me the risk was outrageous and totally not worth it.

He would buy a large amount and use a precision beam balance to weigh out each individual bag. He figured out a way of doing it that would always leave him with a fairly large amount of excess afterwards, and as a result he had all the pot he ever wanted and made a hell of a lot of money on the markup as well.

He never really seemed to spend any of the money, though, as he was always holding onto it for the next big buy. He had a special way of arranging and folding the bags to make them look bigger, and he would always present you with four or five choices when you wanted to buy. But the rule was that once you chose one, you couldn’t change your mind.

So, every time I chose one, he would laugh spitefully, announcing that I had fallen for it and taken the “n—er bag,” and that he had fooled me again.

And then, there was the time when a whole quarter-pound of marijuana had ended up disappearing from the secret stash that he had showed me in the basement, behind one of the fiberboard panels.

He accused me of stealing it and absolutely refused to believe anything I tried to say to the contrary. He told me that when he found the person who did do it, he was going to invite them out into the woods to smoke with him and then covertly inject them with Clorox bleach in a syringe when they were not looking.

He milked my feelings of abject terror, describing how he would look into my eyes as my body convulsed and ask me how it felt to be dying.

His sardonic, evil smile and the wicked glint in his eyes showed that he absolutely loved seeing me in terror and pain. He also had a plan for what he would do with the body, and it certainly sounded like he might actually be able to get away with it.

It turned out that a guy across the street had already bought and paid for the bag, but Randy was never around when he looked around for him to get it. The guy was getting really pissed off at his inability to track Randy down, and was hard up for a smoke.

So, since he too knew where the secret location was, (even though Randy swore on his own grave that he never told anyone else but me,) he simply went and got what he had paid for. Instead of actually asking this guy if he had taken it, Randy went into a rage. And I was the first and perhaps only suspect on his list.

I abruptly realized that there was literally not a word that I could say to convince him that I was an honest person and would never think of doing such a thing. He judged me based on himself, and he knew that he was capable of something like that, so he assumed that I also would do it to him.

It was a very isolating, alienating and horrifying feeling, a constant, relentless anxiety that affected all other areas of my life during that time.

I was constantly under the reign of his tyranny, in a bizarre, codependent and abusive relationship. He knew that I was different from anyone else, as I was his only equal in terms of intelligence. But, since I was younger than him, he always demeaned me for that, calling me “Young David.”

Plus, he had told me that his father was the same way. He described how the newspaper formed a wall of iron around his father every morning. His father would hold it up during breakfast so that he could never even see his father’s face.

And furthermore, when Randy got in big trouble, his father might not say anything whatsoever to him for three or four days. Randy said that the anticipation caused far more damage than the actual yelling that he received at the end, and I knew that he was right.

Now that he was an adult, he was taking out all of his youthful, adolescent angst on me.

Despite his reign of terror in my life, he had something that I felt I needed. I never accepted the truth, which I already knew from the lesson of the Devil card in the Tarot deck.

I was not enslaved to him at all, except for the fact that I made a conscious choice to give him all of my power. Far from being the victim in this situation, I was just as much the perpetrator. By deciding to interact with a person like this, I was showing my allegiance to the drug at that time.

I had to get close to someone who could get me the best values in town, and my loyalty to him was great enough that he referred to me as his “best customer.” I simply never went to anyone else but him, so he could count on taking my money every week as a regular salary to support his artist lifestyle.

I could see that karma was at work in his life to balance out his negative actions, as he had sustained a very serious and completely spontaneous accident/injury at one point while he was in the early stages of an LSD experience.

I had walked into the room right after it happened and could hardly believe the incredibly bloody scene that I saw. Despite the fact that blood was all over himself and the floor, he was still the sarcastic demon, making fun of me for my reaction and telling me to get my shit together and call the ambulance.

I was worried that they would come inside and smell the smoke and arrest us, and then we would be hauled off to prison. He simply said that we would meet them outside, and told me “Young David, get a towel, you idiot, and cover this thing up.” (I apologize for my lack of specificity about this incident, but I must not divulge enough details to betray his identity.)

He was indeed taken away in the ambulance, and I was not able to follow. I noticed the look on his face through the rear windows as it pulled away. He was obviously fascinated by the inside of the ambulance and the quite bizarre “turn” that his trip had taken.

He revealed to me later on that he had felt no pain whatsoever until after he sobered up the next day. His sarcastic nature was so great that he still managed to intimidate me as he stood there with broken, blood-gushing flesh.

And now I was ready to break free, to spring myself out of the jaws of the lion. My summer job was a terrifying, sobering and shattering experience in the total reality of what could happen to me if I never stopped smoking.

I had awakened to the fact that this temporary pleasure I was seeking from drugs was actually just a way to run away from my life and my responsibility, and that it was the worst possible thing I could be doing to myself at that point in time.

Every time that I smoked, I would get these incredible chest pains around my heart, and I knew that it was time to stop. It was a hell of a challenge, but I was willing to put myself through it regardless of the costs involved.

But now, for the first time, I had done two things that I had sworn I would never do:

Number One, I had taken a bag without paying for it, agreeing to pay Randy back later.

Number Two, it was a bag that a friend of mine had insisted that I get him for himself, and I meekly caved in and agreed to do it. Even though I was “not a dealer,” that was exactly what had happened — I had become the middleman in a drug transaction.

Incredibly, my “friend” said that the 200-dollar price was “too high,” and he somehow haggled me down to $180. If I was smart, I would have never sold it to him, but I gave away all my power and let him pressure me into doing it.

So, I actually had to PAY twenty dollars to sell someone a bag of weed! This was just completely ridiculous, and ever more emblematic of the fact that I had to get the hell out of the whole thing.

Once I got Randy his money, that was it — no more drugs ever again.

Randy, on the other hand, was moving out of town and was convinced that he was going to transform me into the successor to his own role. Now he wanted to be the one to ride the bus to New York City and deal with the guys armed with machine guns in the warehouses, guarding over the eighteen-wheeler truck bodies filled with garbage bags full of pot.

Currently, someone else was doing this, and he wanted to move up in the supply chain. I had only met the “runner” once, and it was a strange person to be sure, probably involved in heroin from the looks of it.

The whole thing was very frightening to me, and I had no desire in asking him about it or hearing about it. I just wanted his “friendship” (which at times was extremely invigorating) and a good value.

Now, I had been growing increasingly worried, since I had not heard from Randy in two weeks. I was keeping the money in my wallet in cash, and as time progressed, I needed to buy textbooks and things.

When I dipped into the $200 dollars to buy something vital like the next classroom text, I would sometimes find that the ATM machine on campus could not be accessed afterwards, when I needed it. Thus, I was often going around without the full amount of money, and I was very concerned that I have the whole amount when I actually met up with Randy.

I had nightmare after nightmare about the ATM machine not working and the crack in my card — which really did exist. I actually saved every ATM receipt from that period of time and eventually put them in an old Norelco shaving case after I quit, labeling it the “Treasure Chest of Materialistic Doom” on the outside. It came out to almost $2000 dollars in two semesters of college.

Randy was upset when I answered the phone. He wanted to know why I never answered my calls, as he had been calling every day for almost two weeks! I explained what had just happened, and noticed the interesting synchronicity of the fact that his call came in at the exact second that I fixed the phone.

Randy said that he would be right over, and in ten minutes he was there. Once he arrived, he essentially demanded that I smoke some of my own stuff with him, since he was “dry” at the time, in between orders. I had also allowed myself to go dry, since I was planning on quitting altogether.

There was just no way that I was going to become a dealer, and now I didn’t have any desire to be a user either. In fact, the only thing that I had left was a “blunt roach:” the tiny, leftover end of a “blunt”, which was a joint that was rolled not in rolling papers, but in the outer coating of a cigar.

The roach would be filled with cigar resin, and would not be enjoyable to smoke, but that was all that I had. So, even though I had already decided to quit, I ended up smoking anyway, due to peer pressure.

While we smoked, I played Randy the music that I had created with Jude that summer. The music had obvious references to my need to quit throughout the entire album. Randy was quite predictably stinging and bitter in his criticism of my thoughts of getting clean.

He insisted that I did not have a problem and that I would smoke for the rest of my life; it was pointless for me to try to deny myself something that had become so fundamentally “normal” to my daily routine.

I didn’t speak very much about it, as I did not want to get into an argument. A short time later, Randy left, and just as he exited the door, I heard the distinctive sounds of a policeman’s walkie-talkie, directly in the suite itself! OH, – MY, – GOD! This was it. This was the end. This was really, really, really bad news. We were done, finished, Kaput, over and out.

With the aid of the cigar and nicotine-laden smoke, my heartbeat kicked into overdrive, and I suddenly lapsed into a tremendous, unbelievable, relentless paranoia. I now knew that the police must have apprehended Randy as soon as he had left the room.

I suddenly felt that my phone must have been tapped, and they knew that Randy and I were about to exchange money. Plus, the strong odor must have been seeping out from under the door of my room, making their case even more certain against me.

I quickly tried to burn incense in the room to cover up the smell, and then in my tremendous panic the phone was ringing yet again. I picked it up, and I heard the voice of Randy, totally nervous, slow, deep in tone and very strung-out sounding.

“Dave?”

“Yeah.”

“Could you uh… could you… come down and let me in?”

Randy’s voice was so flat, so dead, that I knew in that instant exactly what had happened. I seemed to remember the fact that the police couldn’t directly enter anyone’s room – you had to leave your room or invite them in first.

Randy had been apprehended by the police and had betrayed me, and was now calling me up to goose me out of my room so that I could also be apprehended at the same time.

I could hardly believe that when I was this close to finally quitting, my friend had betrayed me and I was busted. It was the most profoundly bad luck I had ever experienced in my entire life. [1:44 p.m. 4/7/99.]

I had to muster up a response. I was on the edge of the cliff and about to jump into the abyss. My life was over. I was dead, done for, over and out. I knew that there was really nothing that I could do to stop it at this point. The ball was now in motion, and I was busted. With a note of finality, I said,

“Okay… okay, man, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” I hung up the phone.

After a frantic, pacing contemplation of my demise for the better part of four minutes, I finally mustered up the strength to open the door and face the police. I didn’t see any police, but I did see two men wearing red Maintenance shirts in my bathroom.

They were ripping up the bathroom as if they were looking for something. Plumbing parts and tools were spread out all over the bathroom countertop. I realized that the authorities were looking in the public parts of my suite first, trying to see if I had stashed any quantity of marijuana in the bathroom.

My next-door neighbor had already grown accustomed to hiding a tin of chewing tobacco in the air vents so his girlfriend wouldn’t catch him doing it, and I was well aware of the old hippie tradition of keeping marijuana in the shower curtain rod.

The men gave me the dirtiest of dirty looks, and that only made me even more certain that my goose was cooked.

I descended the staircase, as I lived all the way up on the fourth floor of the building. Each time my foot hit the next step going down, I thought of another, new way that my life had now been completely destroyed by my habit.

I figured that I would end up being implicated as a co-conspirator and getting all the same charges that Randy would get, even though I was not involved in selling like Randy was.

That most likely meant that I would end up with a felony, and would have to spend a minimum of four years in prison, possibly less with parole for good behavior. (I had written a whole essay on marijuana laws in my senior year of high school.)

As I continued down the staircase, I realized that all of my dreams, my ambitions to get an education and most importantly my spiritual mission on the planet, were all about to be shattered.

This was no Commander, no hero — this was a deadbeat drug head about to do some serious time. I figured that because of my youth and thinness that I would be beaten and raped in prison, and I also felt that my family, especially my grandparents, would probably disown me out of sheer disgust.

I would end up in a factory job exactly like the one I had just left: a broken, hardened, useless man unable to beat my “bad rap” and reintegrate fully into society.

I fully expected to see two police officers standing side by side with Randy when I got to the ground-floor door of Crispell Hall. My paranoia had surged to its most incredible level of my entire life, as I was now essentially delivering myself directly into the jaws of the lion.

I had considered trying to run away to avoid capture, but that would only make it worse when they did catch me. There was nothing left for me to do except to accept my fate. I had smoked one too many times, and now it was all over.

I still went through my favorite little habit of reaching up and pinging the fire bell with my middle finger as I passed the alarm – my last act as a free man.

I was quite surprised to see Randy standing there by himself. Quite angrily, still feeling the shock of betrayal, I approached Randy and said,

“All right, where are they.” I was not a happy camper.

“Where’s who?” Randy responded, appearing startled and puzzled.

I responded flatly, with grave seriousness. “Don’t f— with me man, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The cops. Where are the f—ing cops.”

Suddenly, Randy realized what was going on, smiled venomously and sarcastically hissed:

“There’s no cops, Young David, I’m just calling you down here to ask you why there are two guys with walkie-talkies ripping apart your bathroom!”

“Wait a minute. You mean to tell me that we’re not busted, that there are no cops?”

“No, of course there are no cops!”

“Oh, my God, thank God, thank God!”

I was overcome with joy. I wasn’t busted! My life wasn’t over! I could save my life, save my education, save my reputation and ultimately save my spiritual mission on the planet. I joyously embraced Randy, overwhelmed with feelings of total relief.

That was all the prompting I needed to finally set the ball in motion and quit smoking once and for all. Everything had been building and building up to this dramatic point of climax, and now I knew that I could get on with my life and make healthier choices.

I went back upstairs and realized why the men were there. The cleaning ladies had realized that my Greek suitemates had removed the water saver from our showerhead, so that it would become much more powerful and also much less efficient.

The men were simply putting the water saver back into the showerhead to fix the problem; that was it. The rest was nothing more than the convoluted creations of our stoned and paranoid minds.

Only a few hours later, I went up to my Resident Assistant named Scott, and told him that I was ready to go to one of those AA meetings that I had already been discussing with him before. Scott had let me in on his secret, which was that he had also just quit alcohol and marijuana and was now getting help.

I ended up going to my first meeting that same night, and it was quite an extraordinary experience. I was immediately taken with the incredible kinship and friendship that was being shared in that room.

Two people were the featured speakers that night — a black man who had been sober for 17 years, and a younger college guy who I recognized, who had been sober for 5. Their stories were much worse than what had happened to me in my own experiences.

These men had lied, cheated, stolen and practically died on a number of occasions to support their habits. For example, the older man had nearly destroyed his wife and children for alcohol, disappearing for more than a week at a time and starving them for the habit.

I was immediately treated as part of the family, and several people spoke to me afterwards.

I agreed to keep coming back, and I never relapsed even once afterwards. I also went to an NA meeting, and could hardly believe it when all these intimidating middle-aged men greeted me so warmly as I approached the door.

At that point, I was a withering, quivering shell of a human being, grasping onto my sobriety as my last chance for salvation.

Nothing else mattered to me but staying clean, and if need be I would take it one hour at a time, even one minute at a time to keep myself from calling Randy and going to get high. I knew that I had to be strong.

The power and presence of the people in those rooms was incredible. I told my stories in great detail and everyone understood. I could see myself over and over again when they shared their own stories. There was a feeling of a powerful bond of togetherness that we all shared – we were partners in our suffering.

One thing did surprise me, though, and that was the difficulty that many of the group members had with the concept of a Higher Power or God. To me, that was a given, and I was quite surprised that so many of the others couldn’t see it.

On one night in particular, the entire flow of conversation turned into a theological debate, where I was trying to prove scientifically that God really did exist.

I was able to do a fairly good job of it, and hardened middle-aged men were coming up to me afterwards and saying, “You know David, you must be right. This is what they really mean by Higher Power, not just the individual strength of the people in the rooms.”

That felt pretty good to hear — they were getting the message. Many of them had been going to meetings for years, and yet they still acted as if they could relapse at any possible moment. That was scary.

I was aware that the spiritual forces surrounding my quitting must have been truly profound. The synchronicity of how all the events fit together was far too remarkable to believe.

I discovered that my roommate had actually not slept with the ugly girl at all; for some reason, my pizza-eating next-door neighbor had decided to mess up my bed as a drunken prank, nothing more.

In a terrific “domino effect,” everything had assembled itself to show me all of my lessons in one lump sum, making me realize that it was vitally important that I quit. Perhaps for the first time in my life, I became aware that there simply had to be an outside spiritual force directing the whole course of events in my life.

I had just defended the point in my most recent AA meeting, and I had basically won the argument. And now I knew that “they” definitely wanted me to stop smoking, and clearly showed me what might have happened to me if I had never stopped.

I could hardly imagine the vastness of resources necessary to produce all the simultaneous events in my life of the last week, with my tremendous up and down experience with Jenny, the drinking party, being unprepared for Science Fiction class and everything else.

And so, in less than ten days after my final moment of quitting, I felt a remarkable spiritual presence and peace surrounding me. It was time to take my favorite fiction themes and start writing them as if they were true reality.

I wanted to make it clear, clean, scientific and understandable. Now was the time to prove that God really did exist, and that higher spiritual forces were directly responsible for why I quit.

The synchronicities I had just seen in the last week were just far too outstanding to be pure chance. Everything had arranged so perfectly that I knew there were unseen helpers who were guiding me through the entire process.

And so, I sat down at the computer and spontaneously wrote a 20-page document that described the Earth as a gigantic spiritual Experiment, that was being supervised and managed by a benevolent group of Experimenters.

I cited evidence that I remembered reading three years earlier in high school, concerning the fact that the DNA molecule could not have arisen through Darwinian random selection; it had to have been placed on Earth or be “intelligently designed” to exist at all.

One of the original discoverers of the molecule had made this statement; it was mathematically impossible for an object as complex as the DNA molecule to evolve randomly in the length of time that Earth’s existence gave for it to occur. Therefore, “someone” placed modern humanity, and all other life, deliberately on the Earth.

My main reason for believing that the Earth was an Experiment was due to the presence of karma. I could see that the situations in life arranged themselves in order to teach valuable lessons. After all, I had just overthrown an incredible habit, and I was well aware that it had a profound meaning to me in my life.

But exactly who were these Experimenters? This same “someone” who first placed the DNA molecule on Earth could very well be the overseer of these lessons.

In this amazing essay, I indicated that full spiritual enlightenment within each entity, a desire to be of service to others and the willingness to attain it, was the goal that the Experimenters wanted each participant to reach.

I also cited drug and alcohol addictions as deliberate challenges that were placed before each person. (Actually, this applies to all sorts of addictions, whether it is food, sex, money, television, bad driving, self-pity, being a victim, worrying, indulging in fear or anxiety.)

These addictions would create the feeling that the familiar sense of “home” or real enlightenment had been discovered, while robbing the participant of the true experience itself. What was left was the rage at self for the backward nature of the addictions.

I wrote that the only real Home was the spirit world, but we were very adept at coming up with materialistic “solutions.” We felt that we had to try to come up with a means of instant gratification to get us back there as soon as possible.

We stumbled blindly in the dark, never truly realizing that we needed to find Grace or Home or Light within ourselves first before it would actually descend on us.

There was no pill you could take or “Soul Mate” you could find who could short-circuit this path of truly diligent, inner self-work. Until we realized that, we were on a treadmill of our own lies and self-deception, bound to endlessly repeat the same lessons over and over again.

Since the Earth was an experiment, there had to be a time when the Experiment would draw to a close. Everything about our present world, including the prophecies I was familiar with, implied that this is what was happening.

I then went even further to suggest the idea that the “Upgrade” could be the product of this Experiment, that there was a completion point that determined how far along each entity had been able to progress.

I wrote that Earth Changes and apocalyptic scenarios were one facet of this conclusion point, whereas the Upgrade and full contact with the behind-the-scenes Experimenters was the other portion.

Drug and alcohol abuse would not help in the process of Ascension / upgrade, except to quicken the method by which the entities’ materialistic lives could collapse, causing them to increase their thirst for the Divine.

This essay was quite spontaneous, and formed almost entirely from my imagination and philosophical musings. The article was certainly interesting and helped vent some of the ideas that were stirring in my head, but it still wasn’t enough, it didn’t change anything.

I could feel that I had something very important to do in all of this, but I didn’t quite know what it was. The mystery of my life was by no means simple to understand. I had just been through a tremendous phase of my development, self-medicating my way through the typical angst of adolescence.

My Lifetime Fitness class forced me to go out jogging every other morning, and I was last in line, coughing up tough yellow “phlegm-gobbers” of marijuana resin from the depths of my weakened, rattling lungs. I secretly told my professor what I was going through, and she understood and applauded my efforts.

While in gym class, I started to “hook up” with a Hungarian girl named Veronica, and my vicious circle with women played itself out again. She was delighted to hear that I was a writer and a musician, and was very proud of me for kicking my habit. We started to hang out together and the romantic energy was incredible.

She was a runner and had a great figure, very tall and sturdy, with incredibly formed legs, hips and breasts. She was moderately gorgeous, with penetrating blue eyes, high cheekbones, an aquiline nose and a delightful background shade of perfume, but her breath was always a little bit funny.

I could tell that she was older than me, as she had smile lines at the edges of her face below her eyes. She told me that I had the “most gorgeous eyes she had ever seen on a man.” Then, one day she decided to tell me that she did have a 56-year old husband, (she was only 26,) but that I was the one she really wanted!

Veronica and I ended up going out for Chinese one night, and the restaurant suddenly filled up with two busloads of mentally ill clients from the local rehabilitation center. Our “romantic” evening was dashed on the rocks as the smoking, drooling, incapacitated men stared at her in slack-jawed amazement.

We went back to my place and actually kissed on my bed somewhat, but there was great sorrow. Both of us knew that we shouldn’t be doing this, and that it couldn’t work. She was married, and I just couldn’t do it.

I mentally cursed my bad luck for finding a person with so many strings attached and walked her down to her car. We never really hung out very much after that, and my occasional friend Jenny said that she was just a “bitch who was trying to use me for extramarital sex but felt guilty at the last minute.”

I decided to begin religiously documenting my dreams in order to find more clues to navigate the convoluted path of my own imminent awakening and drug rehabilitation. For myself, this proved to be of far greater personal, psychological and spiritual benefit than any twelve-step support group could ever be.

[Other people might have different results, and I am not at all implying that this is the “right” way to go for everyone.]

After the initially recommended 90 meetings in 90 days, I “graduated” myself from Alcoholics Anonymous, since I never had an alcohol problem to begin with. I had actually started to make up stories about drinking just to fit in with the group, and that was when I knew that I needed to get out.

The NA groups were no better, as men would sit and push forcefully on their “track marks” while women would talk about how they still got the urge to look for “works” every time they were in the doctor’s office.

And so, the dreams took up the helm of the ship, plotting its new direction each morning. I have recorded them almost every single morning since the day I quit in 1992 – September 14^th.

The utter negativity of the Veronica situation was clearly revealed to me in one of those early dreams. I was back in the large gym room of my old elementary school, and she was there as well.

She grabbed a big knife and started swinging at me with it, with the intent of killing me or at least wounding me significantly. All I could do to try to stop her was to grab a gym shirt and try to catch the knife in the shirt.

I awoke that morning in fright, and immediately knew what the dream was telling me as I wrote it down. I broke off almost all contact with Veronica very soon afterwards, as I knew that this was accurate and reliable guidance.

Many of my dreams again involved extraterrestrial spacecraft that were almost identical to the dreams of my youth.

The next dream actually was not a dream at all, but rather a conscious out of body experience. The experience came about through my continued work with Dr. Stephen La Berge’s techniques for inducing the state of lucid dreaming.

I drifted off to sleep, reviewing my most recent dream in great detail, visualizing a new, fascinating conclusion of my becoming lucid at the end of it and chanting the sentence, “Next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember to recognize that I am dreaming.”

All of a sudden, I found myself in a totally different place, still chanting the sentence! I was wide awake and dreaming at the same time, and I now had complete control of my environment!

I suddenly realized that I had ended up in a very strange place indeed. It now appears to have been the observation deck of an Arcturian space station, a vivid, conscious memory of where I had just been before reincarnating on Earth.

In the astral form, I was now directly reliving my immediate past-life as the entity that now calls itself Grandfather.