jenny's tribe's Blog
-
Bits of Golden Light
For a couple of months, long before Dad had even gone to a doctor, I started getting these messages when I walked in the woods: "Dad is going to die". They were startling to me. I thought, I don't want this! What's going on? I told know no one, but the messages kept coming and weighed heavily on me. Eventually, I told Jason because I felt like if I spoke them out loud, maybe they would go away. When we got the news from his first visit to his doctor, I told my sister about them, but I couldn't tell Mom. It would unburden me at that moment, but I didn't want to risk how it might have made her feel in her moment.
The night my mom told me that Dad was going into the hospital, I couldn't talk to him. When Mom called, he was sleeping. But as I talked to her, she felt so tiny, far away, and *alone* in that house. We were about to say goodbye and I said, "Let's say something to Dad. I love you, Dad". Mom said "I love you, Paul", then the phone crackled a bit and I heard "I love you". I didn't recognize the voice, it was deep, strong, familiar, yet not. It scared me a little bit. My own disbelief reared -- that couldn't have happened. I heard it again, "I love you". I didn't have the nerve to tell Mom at that moment, but I hung up puzzled and a little frightened.
Only moments later, bits of golden light appeared in the ceiling of my room. They were so beautiful and so strange -- this kind of thing doesn't happen in real life! Somehow their presence felt like my dad's. It felt like his spirit, his mind, his heart were in my room with me. "Dad? Is that you? You're going aren't you?" I felt grateful for the visit, but I cried and cried because I knew what this visit meant. I felt like I had cried it all out, but when the golden bits disappeared, I cried harder than before. Did this mean Dad was gone already? I ached waiting for the next day to call Mom, but willed the minutes into hours all the same.
The next day, a Saturday, he was checked into the hospital. He wasn't all gone, yet, so I immediately made my plans. In the days that followed, the sense of urgency to see my parents exploded. I could scarcely wait each day to call them at the hospital: I'm coming! Don't forget, I'm coming! I'll see you in a two weeks!... I'll see you in two days!..I'll be there tomorrow! Don't forget!
At that time, except for maybe Lori's intuition, no one had even discussed that Dad was clearly dying. No doctors, certainly not us the immediate family. But I knew and I felt shame knowing. Shame or fear, maybe, that I was bringing it on somehow.
My sister's family visited one weekend later. My brother, Wes, and I came down the next after. I got there in time!
Despite preparation from Mom, I was still surprised by Dad. The part of him that could engage felt very far away and I could see how his body labored just to breath. He couldn't really talk. Still, I felt supremely grateful to see him. The night after Wes arrived, the three of us (Mom, Wes and I) had a happy reunion, visited Dad.
We all started singing to him. We circled around him. I'd never really heard the words to "You Are My Sunshine" until that very day as I choked down the verses, then we all laughed at how we were all choking down the verses. He mustered up some energy, raised his head and joined a tiny, tiny bit.
Wes and I also tried to help him use the commode.
Struggling to lift a 200 lb water balloon -- you know each bit you pick up, the water flows out into another and you almost drop it -- was pretty much how difficult it was for the two of us to lift dad off the bed and into the chair. Dad's attempt at the commode was embarrassing to him. "Stupid, proud man!" he said to himself, but all of his organs where shutting down. Two of the final universal joys (peeing and taking a good crap) were lost to him and he felt silly.
But Wes and I were both embarrassed that between the two of us -- we exercise, we're strong! -- we couldn't move Dad around. We get him back in bed, at a slant no less, legs crumpled up...God, we're terrible at this! And apologize profusely to Dad.
Then went home to sleep.
At 3AM, the nurse called us. "You may want to come in" she said. We all got up like we were fresh daisies on a Sunday morning and got to the hospital at 3:30. We chatted around Dad, we chatted to Dad, then the nurse said, "do you want me to call hospice?" Yes, of course, we'd planned on seeing someone that morning anyway, so earlier is fine. We were calling hospice, yet no one had discussed what that meant.
The hospice nurse arrived. She explained a few things, and mom spoke of her worry that if Dad didn't eat and stand up, they would take him to a nursing home to fester hooked up to tubes or forced into painful, pointless surgery. The nurse said, "that won't happen, now, he's on hospice care and will stay here".
She also broke us the truth: Dad was very short on time. Very short.
We discussed logistics started calling people. And I got Wes and Mom to chant something I'd gotten from an American Indian book of prayers and rituals:
"You are a spirit,
I am making you a spirit,
In the place where I sit,
I am making you a spirit"
Mom and Wes ran out of steam, but I kept chanting it to Dad, trying to look him in the eyes when I could bear it.
We had to make some tough choices pretty soon. The hospice nurse could make him more comfortable, but because of his lungs, the medicines would also most likely put him into a coma. At that point, Dad couldn't speak so I said, Dad, I think it's the right thing to keep you out of pain, but if we do that, we may not talk to you again. I don't know if that's okay. Dad didn't appear to hear or respond at all. That moment felt like a ton of concrete on my heart and mind. I had *no* idea if this was the right thing for Dad. I had no idea if he was okay with our choice for him. Was this the right thing to do?
The first dose of the medicine, the nurse said, "here we go". Shocking all of us, Dad said "Wes!" as he reached out his hand. Then he struggled with "Jeanne!" and he held out his other hand. We all circled around him together, holding hands, as the nurse plunged the needle into the IV.
He seemed to sleep peacefully for a little while, but one dose did not last long.
The second dose, we gathered around again and...I can't remember if it was a few seconds or minutes, but my mom sat up from her chair -- she was not facing him but said, "He's gone!". The nurse tried to calm her, hold on. Give him a moment. But it was true. She felt his life pass away.
The week passed quickly between that moment and the memorial service. I got angry at Mom and Wes for something pointless (of course). I got my period the following day (of course). It was still good to be with Wes and Mom. We'll probably never have a week together like that again in our lives.
Not long after Dad died I had a beautiful dream that didn't feel like a dream for Dad was there and I felt him strongly and separate from my own thoughts somehow. All the kids were moving Mom into a bungalow. In the midst of the move, Mom abruptly took off in the car because she had a lot of errands to do before the party started. We looked at each other, what party? Then my father showed up, white hair, glasses, blue pants and a sweater -- his uniform -- but the sweater was covered with bits of shining golden star-shaped button-like things. Hard to look at because of their brilliance, but so beautiful. Then people started arriving. Dad walked to each of the men with me and started handing the men these star bits. He said that it was to help them find their own worth. Some of the men were very happy to see them. Some of them men looked at me with big eyes, incredulous, and I realized "Dad, not everyone can see you since you passed." We did the best we could to deliver these bits of courage to his friends. I woke up feeling greatly comforted. -
Living with Pigs
Things started going wrong with the apartment that fall: leaky roof in my closet that took my landlord almost two weeks to even call me back; gas bills got high even with no heat on; the dryer was taking longer and longer; light bulbs were blowing a lot in the kitchen and back entrance; toxic mold growing outside the shower. And when Katrina hit and blew out tons of natural gas lines, I freaked! $200 a month to freeze in the winter was the before situation. The projected price increases would make it more like $350-$400 a month to freeze. It was like living in the Arctic Circle in a three-season tent.
Needless to say, I started calling the landlord a lot around that time. When's the leak going to be fixed? I think we may have an electrical problem because the light bulbs in the back keep blowing. There's some black mold growing in the shower that I can't seem to get rid of with bleach. Can you come take a look? The roof shingles are curling all over the roof by the place where the leak showed up -- do you know when you might complete the roof work?
Finally, I got a phone call from him. (Up until that day, I was leaving message after message to no avail.) He was very angry, but somehow not quite so angry as to get up the nerve to call me at a time when I'd actually be around to answer the phone. He called me at work very late one night. Of course, even though he had my home phone, he thought maybe I'd be working late on a Saturday night. Good call.
"I must protest [protest? what is this, the Constitutional Convention?] at how much you call me. If the place is falling around your ears, that's one thing. But it's not, so if you are that unhappy, give your 30 days notice!" That got me scared. Oh God, what had I done? I called him immediately -- I wasn't trying to make trouble; I wasn't trying to create problems. When I called, I started to leave a rambling message when the line picked up. Hello? Dave? I repeated my apologies and repeated the observations about the roof, the leaking closet, the electrical issues, the dryer problems, after each pausing to ask, what do you think that might mean? or what would you suggest?
I felt horrible about making him angry. I hung up from that call feeling as though I'd made peace, but for that moment I felt completely trapped. I'm never going to leave this dump! But upon reflection, I realized that the incident actually turned out to be just the ticket I needed.You see, I'd just gotten a new roommate. There were lots of red flags about him I'd deftly ignored. Red flags like he'd never lived outside of his parents home before and was 29 years old. Red flags like, he had rats for pets and told me that he would need instruction on how to clean. He did claim to be neat and clean and that instruction would be how to make sure *I* was happy with things. That bought him a little time, I guess, because I swallowed it hook, line, and sinker. Oh, he cares about how other people feel! Wow!...What a maroon!
Red flags like he lived 90% of his interpersonal relationships over the internet, worked at home two days a week, no less. So, there's a lot of work crammed into that remaining 10% of life. And while he never actually talked to anyone much, he was perfectly happy starting fights over IM. Well, who isn't?? It's easy to vividly live out your wild confrontation fantasies when youre typing something to someone who's not in the same building.
So, while it was to me, it will probably come as no surprise to you, dear reader, that he turned out to be pig. And I mean, bona fide, rut in the dirt and eat the wrappers of the trash you neglected to pick up from the floor pig; that old mayo sandwich's been collecting ant, dust, and mold for three weeks before you finished it off kind of pig. The kind of oblivious pig who really believes that other people don't notice bits of garbage lying around the toilet, counter, or in the fridge if they -- the other people, that is -- didn't put it there. The kind of Zen pig who pretends that every repeat experience is new and unknown. Oh really? You mean, when I don't specifically know that I bought something I should assume that it's not in the fridge for me to eat? Okay, I can do that. Well, how many times do you think we had the Oh, really? conversations about food in the fridge, picking up his crap from the common areas, washing dishes, taking out garbage, and trailing rat cage shit-n-chips all through the apartment because he couldn't feel the bag leaking as the crap hit his socks in the winter and toes in the summer??
And there were the things I never had the gall to bring up. Like the fact that when I opened the front door at the bottom of the staircase to our second floor apartment, I could always smell when he was home. I assure you, it wasnt cologne I smelled, either. Of course, I don't actually know if the sinus pain of bumping into a person's personal cologne cloud would be worse than the disgust of bumping into a cloud of armpit/butt-crack stench while standing at least 100 feet upwind.
Of course, being a pig couldn't possibly be the top of it all. He had to be a shamanic pig. He told me he was a shaman when I interviewed him, which seemed really interesting at the time.
And I was kind of surprised at first glance. No, I was actually very surprised that a person who looked like they never ventured outside and did 90% of their communication with the rest of the world via keyboard would be interested in the natural world, much less going outside on a regular basis. But I think I had more imaginative expectations of what the definition of a shaman was in the modern world. As I would later find out, the title of shaman actually turned out to mean that he had taken one $1500 course in shamanism given by a recently divorced, atheist Jew out in Gloucester, who'd gotten her certification over the internet from AuthenticNepaleseShamanCertification.com. Okay, I made the .com site up, but the rest is true. His shaman teacher didn't seem much like a shaman. She seemed more like someone who really made out in a divorce agreement.
But as you've probably figured out by now, I'm really not the type to notice any sort of clues the Universe sends to tell me to run until I am awash in some kind of sea of Really Bad. I was still trying to be open and tolerant and cool. Oh God, the number of regrets generated from being concerned with appearing cool!! But I digress.
My boyfriend and I each got worked on by my shamanic pig roommate. You know, that's kind of the whole goal -- to have people pay for you to shamanate on them for money so that you don't have to have a day job. So, early on, before I really started to get hit with all those red flags I'd ignored successfully prior, we got shamanated by my live-in, shaman-via-the-internet shaman... a strange and rather cool experience, but not without its moments.
I, for example, told him that I wanted to know what the next step was in fulfilling my life's purpose. That would be the focus for my shamanation, as it were. For a few days beforehand, we thought about what natural objects he'd use to divine some answer for me. Then one day we decided to have a little ceremony. At that time, I hadn't gotten the full breadth of his dirty pig-ness, so I was still in that limbo land of wondering why I found this person so disgusting when something cool like being a shaman was in play. So, here we were trying to get the great oracle that is the Universe tell me its secret plan it had in store for me with my new friend Dirty Shaman Pigman.
So, Internet Shaman Pig told me to get a pen and paper and write what he said down. And when he got to three things, stop and tell him, so that he wouldn't go on. He then blindfolded himself, chanted a bit, all the while caressing a piece of rose quartz that was to be the object from which my fate was divined. He chanted rhythmically, speaking to the rock.
What is the next step in fulfilling Jennys life purpose? What is the next step in fulfilling Jennys life purpose?What is What was your question again? Oh yea, I remember. -- What IS the next step in fulfilling Jennys life purpose?
He suddenly sat bolt upright and whispered urgently, Write this down: a crow (what-is-Jennys-next-step-in-fulfilling-her-life-purpose)...a long-brimmed hat (what-is-Jennys-next-step-in-fulfilling-her-life-purpose)...and ah-oh, I'm just going to say it: a piece of pizza.
I'd figured that meant he was hungry, but it turns out that was a useful bit of information. Okay, I don't actually know what the piece of pizza was for, because I basically forget what it all ended up meaning, but at the time, after he explained what these symbols were for my question, it seemed relevant and not like he needed to have dinner.
So, even though a piece of pizza as a part of my big, what-are-you-going-to-do-with-the-rest-of-your-life message wasn't exactly what I would call a powerful or compelling object, per say, in the end it did seem to fit something that made me feel good at the time. What that was, I don't remember now, but that could be because this one moment of something interesting and unblemished-ly positive was awash in a sea of genuinely bad moments dealing with this dude. Or maybe, I forgot because I'm a still bitter about what a pig he turned out to be. Of course, there's always the possibility that I don't remember because it was simply too unimportant and uninspiring to remember. But that said, I do remember feeling happy and laughing after that session.
In any case, I soon grew extremely cold to the idea of him doing anymore of this shamanation work with me. I mean, in my humble, unschooled opinion, this guy was a bad shaman. I don't mean bad not-good-at-it shaman, as the piece of pizza incident might imply. (As I said, at the time the pizza symbol while not exactly the romantic cool image I had hoped for, was somehow relevant to the whole message). When I say a bad shaman, I mean a misguided, dangerous sort of bad shaman.
I remember a conversation with him where we were talking about energies, powers, strange things, when he got on to why he'd wanted to become a shaman. I remember him saying, almost unconsciously, something along the lines of, so that I can use my powers to get people to do what I want. I don't have to be a TV show shrink to see that red flag! That gave me pause.
Later in the same conversation, he talked about how a close friend had gotten involved with someone who seemed like a real leech. It sounded like an awful situation, but Im-a-shaman didn't seem to care much about the pain his friend was obviously going through. He was completely focused on how the friend hurt him by not being around to hang out unless she was there, so he was intent upon punishing his friend. Well, that sent my bones cold.
I suppose the jury's out on humans getting any special powers or anything, but I just don't want to be around people who pursue the ability to control situations and punish people.
So the manipulative shaman stuff was a pretty glaring red flag to me. And the battery of pigish-ness continued. Some of the highlights you haven't heard about were:
- "Oh I figured out the reason why the dishes still were greasy after I cleaned them. Because the water ran so fast that it took the soap right with it! Can you believe it?!" Yea, I can believe it. Too bad your not a good enough shaman to get a water energy to come do your dishes and clean the bathroom for you. Of course you may need some other kind of energy to come and vacuum up all the hair you leave in the sink after you shave and the pubes that hang out after you've eliminated. I don't even want to think about what exactly was eliminated in the process.
- "Oh, the reason why I left the rat turd on the kitchen floor was because I thought it was a zipper head that broke off." Rat turd or zipper, why not pick up the f*king thing and throw it away!! (Yea, I know, I'm still ignoring the most important part: the rat turd part. Can't think about it. Happy place, happy place, I'm in my happy place!)
- "Oh, the reason why the bathroom wasn't clean after I cleaned it was because I didn't know that cleaning the bathroom meant cleaning the sink and toilet." I mean it would be easy to confuse the look of clean, clear, and free of debris with, say, the look of smearing a greasy pork chop covered in bits of long and curlies and beard, wouldn't it? Oil is clear after all, and who's going to notice hairs unconnected to a body?? After hearing one too many complaints from me, my boyfriend scolded, "I don't care if it's not politically correct, I'm going there. People with rats are dirty!"
- [Upon me moving out] "Oh, I made a talisman for you. It's for protection, I took several journeys before I found it and bound it to this piece of wood I painted. Now, you may have some trouble with it, so let me know if you doIt's a fire energy. [sticky sweet smile]" Well, I immediately felt a bad vibe about that!
For the rat turd incident, I'd pretty much had it up to my eyeballs, so I got ballsy that day. When I realized what the hell that black bit was, I waited. I waited until manipulate-by-magic-pigmate was home. I picked up the rat turd, knocked on his door and said sweetly, I've got something for you!
You do? I hear a heavy grunt of him getting up from whatever he was doing. What? And the door opens. I plunk the piece of shit down in his hand and say, I believe this is yours.
What is it? But he caught on and practically ran to the garbage using more soap then I'd ever seen anyone use to lather up his hands and arms. It looked like he borrowed his technique from an emergency surgery or post-forensic exam on a particularly filthy body scene. I waited for him to splash his face as I pondered this turn of events. So, he was only a pig when he knew I would clean up. Interesting.
Why did you do that? You could have just told me to pick this up!
I just wanted to make it vivid, so you'd remember.
For once, he was the flabbergasted one.
So, back to the landlord. All the while living with shaman-pig.net, stuff was going seriously wrong with the shit hole I was living in. (No wonder it attracted pigs! What the hell was I doing there?! Ever since visiting a few months after I moved in, my dad had been bugging me to move out of that dump!) So after calming the landlord down, I thought about it. And finally a message from the Universe got through to me. This was just what I needed to move out without drawing any venomous vengeance from Mr. I'm-a-shaman-so-that-I-can-control-you-pigman.
That night, I laid my cards on the table. This just isn't the place for me any more. I don't want a landlord who thinks I lie about problems. Pig Shaman tried to talk me out of it, but I was good. Calm, self-assured, sure of what I was going to do. For a few days, he tried, but to no avail.
He didn't relish moving again, so he was going to think about whether we should just vacate or if he wanted to look for a roommate. I started packing that night. I didn't even know where I'd land, but I was going to get out of that dumpy freak house and I was gleeful. Later, God smiled on me again because after a week or so, Pig Man decided to move out, too. That would just make everything neat and tidy or at least I thought so.
Awhile later, about a week before I moved out and two before the lease was up, a realtor called me to see the place so that he could write a description. I met him at the door, showed him around a bit, then took him down the back. When we went into the basement, he immediately said "I smell gas. Do you smell gas? "
I smelled something funny, but kept ignoring it Ill be outta here soon, I thought. Just let it go, I chanted silently. I wasn't thinking straight, I just wanted to get out.
"Well, I smell gas. You need to call the gas company. They'll jump right on that. Gas leaks are serious." So, I did. A guy came out, started looking around and got pretty concerned. He told me to call the landlord. I'd just left a message when the guy broke the whole story to me: he was shutting off the gas off because there were nine leaks in the basement alone. A week before Christmas, dead of winter, and we were going to get cut off.
My landlord hightailed it over and calmly talked to the gas guy. They shut him down and he began calling people to get the situation taken care of. Everything looked okay, then I made the mistake of asking him what the situation was.
The situation was this: you should have called me, now they are turning off the gas, I have to tell the other tenants and you've fucked up my life! Well, needless to day, I felt bad. I'm sorry, Dave, I stumbled. I didn't even think of calling you. The realtor said I should call the gas company, so I did. I felt bad. As much as the thought of screwing this greedy f*ker is appealing, I didn't even think of that at the time. I only thought about poisonings and explosions.
Of course, moving out wasn't as simple as I'd thought. The roommate and I agreed to a day and time to clean up the place. When that day arrived, I found the apartment filled with shit yes, some figurative shit, but undoubtedly some real shit of the rat kind mixed in there, too. Well, we had to return the key that night, so I started shoveling his crap into bags and cleaning, letting the built up rage pour into getting the job done.
It was then that I found out a few more interesting things about my pigmate. For one thing, he had an opened, but as-of-yet-unused box of Trojan larges. Doubtful, I thought. But with all that hair, and God knows what kind of crazy self-enhancers this dude might have purchased from Laos on the internet, who knows? For another, he had a 15-inch stack of black and white printouts of internet pictures. They were all the same type: tiny naked men perched on the tongues and lips of huge super model heads. I'm not kidding. He also had as stack of old Victorias Secret and Fredericks of Hollywood catalogs carefully stacked in a brown paper bag. Poor man's porn, I'm told by the experts. Poor mans porn, indeed!
I piled all that along with the obvious garbage, socks, books, wrappers, paper clips, and rat treats (seriously, no euphemisms now, treats purchased from a pet store for rats) into big bags in the room at the top of the staircase.
He'd intended upon us having a ceremony to give me the fire talisman, but when I saw the thing for the first time, I knew it couldn't be good. So, I completely circumvented that, and told him we needed to start getting his stuff packed up and out of there. Not to worry about the cleaning.
Well, I'm mad that you cleaned without me. I said that I would help.
Thats okay, really. I just want to get this whole nightmare over with! I thought.
Turns out, he showed up late and thought we could clean the whole place in an hour so that he could attend some shaman thing with his new roommate, who also showed up to help him move out his remaining shit. When he started to get antsy about the time, he asked dumbly, we can leave stuff here, right? Well no, we can't leave stuff here, idiot! That's when I realized that I would be suckered into helping carry all this shit back to his place.
Yes, I played the nice card one final time, stuffed my car with the least offensive of his crap, drove it over to his new place and left him, talisman in hand, calling my boyfriend for advice.
"...and he said if I have any trouble with it, I should call him. Its a fire energy."
"WHAT?!? GET RID OF IT! ITS CURSED!" came the ever-even-tempered words of wisdom from my dear, sweet love.
In the sanguine poetry of that kid Ralphie (you know, from "the Christmas Story" speaking of Santa Claus?), at zero hour it does not pay to be a scoffer. So at that moment, I spoke to the talisman. You are free, you are no longer bound to this object. I do not want you to be imprisoned. You can leave now. I got out of my car, dropped the apartment keys into the drop box, and left the talisman on the curb, asking the Universe to safely deliver me from this evil and let someone who may need such a thing find it, or not, as the Universe thought best.
Now it was almost over. The final tie between me, shaman-pig.net, and Dave the slum lord was that tidy sum of $1150 for the security deposit. I just needed to wait it out.
As I found out later, Dave came to look at the apartment the next day, but I never heard from him regarding the security deposit directly. I gave him the 30-day legal limit to get back to me, but once that passed I started calling. About three weeks of calling finally got him off his butt I guess, because at that time I got a letter and a check in the mail. Just like the failure to follow the 30-day time period law, he failed to provide receipts and claimed $340 in damages for spackling, painting and supposed door damage. I took it, sent pig-man his half, and put it behind me.
Truth be told, the damages were totally bogus in my eyes. In my state, painting is normal wear and tear which a tenant cannot be charged for. And the door thing he conjured up? I'd started calling about that at least one year prior to moving out. Some old glue finally dried too much on a cabinet door, and the glued part split off again. Several phone calls but never anyone out to look at the thing, even though I tried to pester. Yes, Dave was what one might call an unresponsive landlord.
But God was smiling upon me throughout that hellish journey because I found a tiny studio not too far from work that I absolutely *loved*!! It was NYC small, but cozy and wonderfully suited to one person. And my new landlord was someone whod actually been a landlord for 30 years whod had tenants staying for 10 or more years. She actually knew how to do it!
Even though Dave was a completely irresponsible jerk, my gut feeling about him wasn't that he was a bad guy, or at least any worse than the average get-rich-without-working moron. Rather, my true thought is that he was just naïve about how much work an investment property was actually going to be. He was planning on bilking as much as possible and assuming that whatever tenants complained about wasn't actually an issue. After all, he renovated the place himself. He was a business (or should I say bidness) man in contracting and knew such things.
Out of morose curiosity a while back, I called the realtor to see if the place had rented. It was then found out that Dave had lost his other tenants shortly after our move out. Within a few months, the whole dump was put up for sale. Dave remained greedy, trying to double his money on the purchase price. It's not sold yet, as I write this.
As for Mr. Piggy Shaman.Net, I havent heard much from him, although I occasionally have vivid nightmares where I discover that I've moved into another dump and accidentally got him as my roommate again. I wake up crying and screaming, what the hell happened? I thought I got out of that?!?! -
Flying with a snow flake
Easter Sunday Night. I was feeling sad and I've been wishing for a boyfriend for a while. I felt very alone. That night I had a marvelous dream where I didn't feel lonely anymore. I perfectly rectangular snowflake-shaped thing was given to me. It was very flexible and very strong. I rolled it into a tube and used it to fly all around. My previous flying dreams felt a little uncontrolled. I always had fear of falling, in particular, fear of running out of whatever energy was propelling me. But in this dream, this device gave me complete control and I flew all around the place I was. At some point, I stopped flying around and I no longer had the device. I saw a very familiar child in this dream. Dark-haired, but I don't know if it was a boy or a girl. I tried to explain this thing, saying it was like a snowflake.
This dream filled my insides and I didn't feel any loneliness at all when I woke up.
-
More blue
[The "you" here is my best friend, Missy.]
I woke up this morning around 3am, I guess. I couldn't get to sleep. My ass hurt, my calf hurt, my head hurt, etc. I was doing the usual attempt to *force* myself to sleep by shutting my eyes tightly until *they* hurt, then remembered you telling me about the writing incident with Shari's guide. I thought relax, enjoy the wakefulness, let it happen. Let's see if someone will come talk with me.
So, I was starting to relax my muscles limb by limb, piece by piece, and feeling really good. Then someone started rustling my blanket above my left hand (which is next to a wall). This has happened a few times before, but for the first time, I thought, "Wow, I'm actually awake for this!" I was very scared, but started getting excited instead. I felt the whole bed start to vibrate. In fact, it seemed like the whole room was vibrating. The HEPA filter I run at night seemed to get louder and louder and I thought that the whole room was filled with light from that thing, except that my eyes weren't seeing the light. It was like I could see with my body all the energy fields of all the objects in the room, and felt the motor of the filter pushing out a lot more energy than anything else in the room.
The vibrating got very intense and I felt like I was going to fly into pieces in all directions, so I tried to kind of lower my energy output. Then everything settled and the tapping started again on my left hand. I said, "Gramma, is that you?", because the psychic had said that I have a female guide who's been with me a long time watching over me and Lori thought it might be Gramma. I didn't get a response, but it was then that I felt that the room seemed packed with people, even though I wasn't seeing any bodies. There were just all these minds hanging around sort of pushing up against my consciousness.
I felt a sort of whoosh and saw blue waves of energy swooping down into my left side, scooping down then swooping up on the right side of my body, and I thought that I was being dragged out of my body. Even though I didn't feel any person jumping in, I was kind of concerned that someone was trying to jump into my body. I didn't like this and sort of pulled myself back, but I was thrilled at the idea that maybe I could control coming out of body. I'm not sure what was happening here. But then I realized that the spirits who are out there "guiding" are still attached to life on earth, that they just have to keep meddling. None of the guides really know what's best for the whole system, they act on the interests of an individual.
I started hearing a lot of sounds in my mind. There were lots of moans and sadness expressed and for some reason I thought this was me from my childhood. There were words and voices, but I can't remember any of them. But the room, just felt incredibly crowded, packed with people. I was pushed into some sort of waking dream -- but I'm positive that I wasn't sleeping before it started -- where I went to talk to you because I thought you would understand what was going on. At first though, I popped out of my body and was suddenly scared so I hid in my roommates' room next to their bed where the dog usually sleeps. I thought that Julie got up and I was afraid that she saw me, but then I thought that she wouldn't because I didn't have a body, so she would just ignore whatever I looked like. Then it dawned on me that I didn't really have anything to be afraid of except that I wouldn't find anyone to talk to, anyone else, I mean. I found you and was trying to describe the person tapping on my blanket and waking me up, but I found that I couldn't get the words out. I felt like I was going to get in trouble if I told you in this dream. Well, that doesn't seem right, reading it. But for some reason I couldn't speak about what was happening. When I woke up this morning, my alarm was an hour ahead. I didn't realize until 1/2 way to work.
Go figure.