And then ....

Before bed I rewatched an old lecture by Dr. Karla Turner. I firmly believe in her philosophy, and she was very good at uncovering information and asking questions no one else seems to want to approach. She had a good way of putting things, too, that kept you alert through her lectures. So I rewatched to refresh my memory, and my husband watched with me even though he truly couldn't care less one way or the other.

In the middle of the night I woke up with that invaded feeling you get when you're either being picked up or dropped off. It didn't feel like I had been asleep for more than an hour. I turned my head to look to my right and saw the little 3 foot tall black shadow. As my eyes adjusted, I felt a realization in the room that I could see it. And the black lump in the semi-dark winked out of sight.

I sat up. My husband mumbled, "Where are you going?"

"There's something in the room with us," I said. Yes, I was a little afraid. I hate nights like that. You'd think after a literal lifetime of it, you'd get used to it. But I guess I never will.

My husband lay in bed still as stone, unresponsive. After a moment I was able to go back to sleep again. When I mentioned the event to my husband tonight, he was noncommittal about the affair. I don't believe he'll ever take this matter as seriously as it should be taken.

I did wonder if Dr. Turner's lecture hadn't made me imagine the whole thing.

The session with Dorica Manu was hard to do, and that's a fact. I don't feel like going through the entire affair: most of it was keeping up the visualization of a talk show host room with a door and a mirror. Mirrors are damn hard to visualize because, to me, they're portals. Which means if I make one in my head, I'm making things that go with it. But I did this in order to call forth my soul, then spirit, then mind.

Interestingly, the technique we did - which is supposed to help me mold back into a single being with my memories intact - is very close to the technique I've been doing off and on while working out on the treadmill or taking a walk for a couple of years now. It's very effective. So I let Miss Manu guide me along and tried not to skip ahead. I tried to be patient when she didn't agree with something one of my inner parts said. I figure: she's been doing this with a lot of people and knows what she's doing.

My soul wouldn't come to the session, although I called with all my might. When she did show up, she was very misshapen and ugly. She was as tall as a building with knobs under her skin like huge calcium deposits or witch carbuncles. Her hair was stringy, and she wore Xena's outfit from that old show.

I won't come because I'm UGLY, she said - and that summed up my entire life. I'd been told I was ugly by everyone at school for 12 years. I was told that by my own mother, by my cousins, my mother's sister, random people at the mall. Either I'm strikingly beautiful or I'm strikingly ugly. Only once was I ever considered plain, and the man who called me that meant it to abuse and hurt so I will never know if he told the truth. He probably lied.

 Calling my spirit was more difficult. What I finally got was a mute pale and beautiful version of me. She wore flowing pale robes and had white hair. At some point Dorica had said something about my body or... something... but whatever the statement, my spirit's response was to point out that we trade bodies like snails to a shell. Dorica did not agree with it - and at this stage who can say which is which?

The third was the hardest: she wanted my mind. All of the dozens and dozens of spirits who'd stood outside the room waiting for their turn laughed. They were ALL my mind, and that was indeed funny. This was something else Dorica didn't seem to get quite - and as I ushered everyone into this room I'd created I wondered if it was because there's something else she knows that I don't or because she's never worked with a butterfly before?

We managed to get a few to merge, and they turned into a woman of fire. The woman then proceeded to make it a point to stand practically on top of me - and that's when I could hear what was going on in the room better. I couldn't before: I'm not clairaudient. I noticed the change, but I said nothing. I wasn't sure how the observation would be received.

When it was over, Dorica said there was more work to be done and mentioned she didn't quite believe the matter of the soul - cut herself off before she could finish. And I was left wondering: so... does she believe aliens made all that up I just went through, or that I made it up, that I'm lying to myself, what?

And, because the instinct is deep inside of me, I wondered what I had to say to convince her I was telling the truth so we could carry on and get the job done. Or at least to make her happy so we could do more. I didn't go for it, of course.

It's just too early to say anything one way or the other. But I know she's genuinely trying to help me - without shoving religion down my throat.

Monarch Migration

Maybe we're all so desperate in our daily lives for Hollywood action, we make up vague memories of spaceships, aliens and moving stars. I ponder that often as I go through my own life; a life that I'm told is neither boring nor typical. Even if you take out my own star traveling vehicles what's left is full of drama and bright conclusions.

But I'll tell you a secret.

Your life is exactly the same way.

The trick to it is not in any difference between how I get out of bed in the morning versus how you do the same. The trick is in the storytelling. For instance, I have a very hilarious story about how I almost burned my house down using the same cooking pot on the same burner of the same stove three separate times. It's a true story. It's fantastic. It's entertaining. And it could happen to anybody, and probably has. I merely make it sparkle with the telling.

I have more true stories from my life that are just as full of glitter, but people don't believe me. Such as the time I caught a catfish in my fishing net in the pond behind the house while searching for minnows. The way it splashed in my net and the glimpses of its black glossy hide made me think it was at least a foot long before it managed to jump to freedom. But the ditch was small, and my net was only a little larger than that. So no one, to this day, believes my story. It's the big one that got away.

There are even stranger things in my life people don't believe because they're too weird to be true - to them, at least. But it isn't that the events were strange or impossible; I just have no other way to describe them to you using this clumsy spoken language. But I consider when Turtle Island was first visited by the strangers from far away. "Strange clouds on the water," one villager said to another, describing their mode of transportation. These strange pale beasts rode in the clouds.

... or did they?

No. They rode on sailing ships in the water. But "strange white clouds" was the strange way of telling the tale.

But again, maybe we all just really want to be special that badly. Our media and the world around us is saturated with faked, air brush images of people who we're told are special. They look nothing like us, they act nothing like us, and this means we're not as awesome as they. Then some person stands forward and says "I was abducted by aliens." At first they're made fun of. Then they're believed. Then someone writes a book on their life and they're famous. They're special. And we think: man. Why can't that be us?

And then we fool ourselves.

"I think... yeah... pretty sure I remember that was me, too!" And yes, friends, we can make up memories and lie to ourselves quite convincingly. So much so that a lot of my day is spent wondering when I'm lying to myself and when I'm not. And I worry that I'm telling myself that lie, because I can't see my own sparkle for what it is.

But, and this is important, there is much in my life that is true. In fact I'd say the entire past 40 years really happened, if not more. I just gotta make sure I remember the true parts and dodge the parts I made up.

This blog - this book - might be career suicide for me. But my career isn't exactly the most successful anyway. Someone once accused me of believing I'm in a comic book - he was a jealous lover to a young man I thought was my best friend. I loved my best friend very much - the way I love all my friends - and the accuser was a very manipulative and angry man. No one understood my feelings for my friend - they thought I wanted a lover when I didn't want anyone close to me like that at all - and to this day I still get angry when I think of the little drama queens that came to me for gossip and said I was being led on. I wasn't being led on. I watched in silence in the corner as the two fought, as they almost came to blows, and even handled the police at the front of their restaurant while they threw pots and argued in the back.

"She thinks she lives in a comic book," was the rumor when the accuser found a way to get rid of me once and for all. "And she thinks she's trying to save my boyfriend from me, the evil!"

They laughed at me. They made fun. They thought it was hilarious, and that I was insane. But not one of them thought to hear about the time my best friend asked me to please help him to get out of there. To help him survive. To stay by his side, because he needed a friend.

I write comics, fantasy, science fiction, and whatever other story I choose to weave. I am in them as far as any good writer needs to be: I am the Great Creator. But I don't believe I am literally my own comic book character the way the FBI apparently accused me of when doing a friend's background check.

So then let this book, this blog, be another woven and fantastic tale. Believe or don't believe. Accept the truth of strange white clouds or assume inexperience means nothing less than a lack of wonder.

Know this: I lay in bed a year and a half ago. I was half-asleep. Then the music played. By the time I'd identified the song, I stood up out of bed wide awake. I was full of energy and driven with purpose.

There were two men standing at the door; they wore dress blues of some sort. To sum up the story, for I shall tell it entirely later, they realized I was aware and zapped the back of my head with a tazer.

I know it was a tazer because I woke up with the head wound the next day - and it's a scar tissue wound that didn't heal for at least a year.

It's kind of hard to dream a wound like that into existence.