[cajonnmu]

wow. thanks for sharing so much, dave. you and i seem to have some commonalities. why don't i unload in similar fashion for you:

when i was three (two?) i remember waking up in the middle of the night, walking to the cellar stairs, and floating (!) down. tried to float back up, couldn't do it, so i had to walk back up the usual way.

until i was a teenager, i refused to accept that i would never be able to fly. it just seemed so basic an ability, i couldn't conceive of not being able to do it.

when i was sixteen, the obes started. i would wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, vibrating, every molecule in my body seemingly singing, and i would start to rise slowly. i have always had problems with over-anxiety, and these seemed to remain in force outside the body as well as in, so i never made it very far. i would always freak out and --snap!-- back behind my eyes again. later, dark entities began to hang around during these spells, and completely turned me off of the idea as i was scared enough without them announcing their presence with screams or the sound of somebody urinating menacingly on my floor. (really! creative little buggers, these.)

finally, i awoke one night to the vibrations hitting me hard, against my will, and before i could reorient myself in my body, what felt like a tree trunk hit me from underneath and propelled me up and out -- and held me there! it let me go after i directed warmth and love toward it, and i fell back into the body, but was immediately pulled back out again. the second time i sent love its way it let me go and seemed to give up trying and left me alone to wake up normally. when i was falling back i experienced two simultaneous viewpoints - i saw, at the same time, both the back of my head rushing up to greet me, and the headboard, stationary, in front of my physical eyes.

that was it. no more obes for me. a year or so later, however, i woke up to a large entity in my room, sharpening butcher knives and talking about "cutting my cord." i was paralyzed, but flew into a rage and screamed at it that i was here "for service, not sacrifice!" this was before i got into the ra material. my artwork at this time became repetitive: people ripping open their own chests to let black demons fly out.

years later, after graduation, i was out on the porch, smoking a cigarette with a friend when i noticed a misty shape - the head and shoulders of a man - coming out of the dark towards me. i stopped mid-sentence to track it, scaring my smoking companion (who was familiar with my idiosyncrasies and deduced what was happening from my expression) and it disappeared after a few seconds. i went to bed that night feeling strangely that i would not wake up the next morning.

i spent my dreams that night traveling the world with a tall, silent man who always stood behind me to the right, and who never told me his name (nor did i at any point seem to think it necessary to ask him), greeting the newly dead and "orienting" them to their new status. i remember clearly asking one man if he had any regrets. to my surprise, he answered "no," which was a big shock, since at that time i thought that everyone held regrets when they died.

a few years later, i was meditating in my room. i suddenly felt a dark presence in the room with me. instead of feeling afraid, however, i felt like someone had connected a firehose to my back and was shooting water-energy, through me, at it. i stood up and began to speak to it with my thoughts. sorry. not speak. yell. i just went house on this thing and started lecturing it angrily about how it had forgotten its creator and where it came from. i felt like the angel of freaking death for those one or two minutes. nothing could touch me. nothing could come near me. sweat poured out of my skin on this cool, breezy evening as if i had been running in a sweater at noon in mid-august. all the muscles in my body were tense and shaking - but in a good way. i felt more than alive. i felt like a solar system stuffed into 75 kilograms of flesh and seconds away from bursting free.

eventually the thing faded away and the firehose slowed to a trickle, then shut off completely, leaving me feverish and covered in sweat.

i have been able to reproduce the vibrations, shakes, and sweating at will since. although i don't do it often. the last time was at a reiki meeting i went to. it was my first time giving energy, and the priest who organized the affair was behind me, "feeding" reiki energy into my back whie i was supposed to channel it into a man lying on the floor. since it was my first time, i didn't know that reiki is supposed to be a mostly gentle, passive affair, so i said to myself, "hee hee - wait till they see i already know how this works," and started charging up and feeding into the guy in front of me.

the sweat started running down my face and body, and the shakes came. once i pull the energy up out of me, it seems to take on a mind of its own and cooperate with me by pushing itself out. so i'm not always 100% in control of this. (which, incidentally, is the most thrilling aspect of it) after i had removed my sweater due to the heat and was shaking pretty visibly, the priest stopped me and told me that i wasn't supposed to force it.

"oh. whoops."

the cool thing was, after i stopped, i noticed that the priest had broken a respectable sweat on his face as well! that, and the shivers that came on after. i went from boiling hot to freezing cold in a matter of seconds as my body scrambled to reclaim some of the heat it had radiated into the room. i pulled the sweater back on as quickly as i had lost it minutes earlier.

i never fit in either. i have a habit of meaning to convey a really positive meaning to somebody, but then i say it the wrong way and they get the opposite message. or i say it too strongly and they get weirded out.

my greatest romantic/spiritual attraction was to a girl who lived with me for a summer. she was so nice and so polite that at first i thought she was a big fake and didn't like her. then i found out that she just really was that positive. then i realized that that's probably the same reason i weirded people out. anyway, i'll never forget the moment i really fell in it for her. there were a bunch of frozen hamburger patties in the fridge that my old housemate had left there before he left. i wasn't eating a lot of meat, and neither was she. so what to do? "i know!" she says to me. "let's go feed the homeless people!"

bam.that would have been the first thing i would have thought of and the last thing (i thought) that every other human being on the planet would have thought of. and she nailed it in a second.

from that point on we were like two sides of the same coin. the only problem? both of us were already involved with other people. we wrote letters to each other (while living in the same house!), went out and did fun, innocent kid stuff together, and had some really great moments, moments where you sort of start to feel "right" again, like you've found somebody from your own country, finally; but then she moved away with her fiance and i went back to school.

i did not adjust well to the loss of my new best friend. but all that is too long a story for here. suffice to say that the friendship ended suddenly some months after.

when i was a kid, i used to believe that i could only turn right and would avoid turning left by turning 270 degrees to the right instead. i would always step into a room with my left foot so that my right foot would be the last one to touch the previous room.

for the longest time, i felt unable to do anything selfish. things only worked out when i kept my actions oriented towards others. to the point where i'm still trying to make up, careerwise, for the extent to which i neglected to prepare myself in school for the future. i can't even count how many dreams i've had where i've died anymore.

i don't think you're falling because you're flying too high; it seems that your bad spells only come after you refuse to accept an opportunity that perhaps you should accept. the girl who made a pass at you, the contact from the cartoon publisher that (who knows?) may have led to a fun career. maybe somebody is trying to get you to turn around?

anyway, good luck. i know it feels like a bad movie sometimes, but hold on - i hear it ends well.