Her

Discretion is Advised

*Triggers *Incest *Abuse

This is the one thing I never wanted to write about.

It’s a horrible thing.

I’ve written about nightmares before. They are something everyone suffers, yet certain conditions and even medications can make them worse. Certainly a history of abuse, physical, mental and sexual will cause PTSD, a condition known for the symptom of nightmares.

There are times, often strung together in days-long ordeals, when my dreams, already twisted to a distressing degree, are different. As in, worse than usual. The other day I had to endure everything about my son’s death again, only under different conditions and far worse since his overdose scene was built up by the interference of a woman. She taunted me, “you can’t save him, you gave him to me” and got to him, weakening every attempt both he and I made to stop what I, of course, knew was coming.

And so he died, but she would not let me go. She never just lets me go. Until my sleep is interrupted or on the rare day I actually seem to awaken by myself and feel like I’ve gotten enough sleep. The day before, I had seen my maternal step-grandmother.

She passed away under suspicious circumstances so long ago that I can’t even pin down a decade. There was some kind of family conflict when my mother went to her wake. My mother was not comfortable around her family. She rarely spoke to them and until I joined Ancestry I had no idea what that came from. I had an uncle I never knew was an uncle, but as a kid, I remember seeing him on the farm (a former plantation) near Burlington, North Carolina.

That place, she inherited after my grandfather passed away. It was dedicated to tobacco growing but I assume some kind of crop rotation must have been employed. Once off the freeway, probably a federal highway, there were rural roads to negotiate and and then a huge old mailbox signaled the time to turn left onto the driveway.

It was actually a dirt road. A long one which apparently no longer exists. The antebellum mansion stood white with dark trim, three stories of a horror movie set just waiting for a script and film crew. No haunted house in any film I’ve ever seen could touch it; while the parlor and kitchen were charming, everything else was a perversion of architecture and interior decoration. These rooms were perpetually dark, with old paintings on the wall of landscapes and English fox hunts that all had in common the garish and terrifying element of being too big, too dark and out of time. They would seem ordinary in 1850, but I looked at them and swear that no museum should ever display such cursed works.

I found out on Ancestry that it was my grandfather’s either by marriage or some other arrangement, and he had spent a lot of time in Kentucky, especially with my birth grandmother, his first or second wife. This is the connection my mother had with Daniel Boone, who was my sixth great uncle. But it must be told, that as a child, my mother lived a hard life. It is clear that her father was a hardcore alcoholic and, by interpretation of the few stories she told and the continuous drinking, her father had been quite abusive. While he married three times and two wives died mysterious premature deaths, I have found no documentation that he was ever questioned or in any way detained, it’s very easy to assume the worst. He represents to me the classic model of a cruel man, one familiar with the fact that drink, hard labor and married life never mixed well.

Having survived him, his third wife remained alone in that house for the rest of her life. All of the ingredients for a twisted novel were there; all anyone needed were the secrets that family held. Secrets so dark that I had never liked visiting her or that house.

By appearing to me in a dream, or by being conjured for the dream by my mind or by an external power, she looked young, thinner, restored and smiling. She said nothing. Her hair was dyed straw and red, and that wasn’t her or my mother’s natural color. It couldn’t have been either one of them.

I awoke with the impression that she was in Heaven, had come to signal my life’s end was near, and when the time came, she’d be there to welcome me.

Holy shit. I spend too much time with Death. I need to stop. Join Death’s Anonymous or something.

It’s a lie, a trick. A false comfort. Because I don’t believe she’s in Heaven. She never said anything religious, never went to church. And she was cruel. A hoarder. A prisoner in a mansion that should have been destroyed by artillery fire during the Civil War. Alone in an obscenity, she only ventured forth to shop the five-and-dime store in town or to purchase groceries. She could never have bought clothes; I never once saw her in anything but her black dress, and I believe she made it herself. Her size couldn’t be found in the backwater towns of the 1960s.

Not understanding obesity because my parents never taught us the value of kindness or seeing people’s physical appearances as a mere shell to hold, often, the most beautiful of souls, I remarked one day to a friend while she was visiting us, “My other grandmother isn’t as fat as this one.”

Through the open window, she heard me. She was, according to my mother, wounded.

I guess so!

Well, she didn’t pass up a chance to get back at me. She’d come up before the holidays while she was still able. She would show me catalogs with the most wonderful toys, and have me pick something out. I never got anything but a crisp, new, two dollar bill. Fucking cruel and done for the sake of being cruel.

***

Talking to my friend Margaret one night, it came to me why I had chosen the story of the 9 tail fox as the antagonist in my Halloween story, “The Last Soldier of Bravo Four”. The real point of the story was to point out that our veterans of war are humiliated. Then forgotten.

But at its core lay the timeless fear that men have toward women. A fear ageless, destructive and driving many men throughout history to control and dominate women. We all know this fear in one form or another; to cover it up, we do things that are deceitful, cruel, condescending and deadly.

If I continue with the story of my mother’s father, I must say, he was an abuser of women, a powerful influence on my mother during formative years, and whatever good she had in her heart when I was small, it was gone by the time I was in junior high school.

She never balked at being told by my father that they were going to “teach” us kids about sex. After 1970 when her body could no longer tolerate pregnancy, a tubal ligation signaled that my course in the studies of sex would graduate to the final stage; intercourse. She did not do this with any sign of emotion or desire: she was as if a mannequin had mounted me every time. She never seemed to have an orgasm or even breathe rapidly. It was pure, cold, evil. I had to fantasize about movie stars, nude models I’d seen in Playboy issues that my friends and I passed around, because I couldn’t stand the sight of her. But if I didn’t get an erection, my father would beat me, and I’ve certainly described what his floggings did to me.

***

Men already have an archaic, even primal fear of women. I have seen that this fear causes hatred. I dislike the word “misogyny” as a weasel word. Fuck, it’s time to be honest: the fear engenders a deep hatred. The hatred should be called out for what it causes: terrorism with women as the targets.

Watch a horror movie. Binge on them between doses of Valium. Pick them from any era. Hell. Choose from them all. You know what you’ll see? A graduation through the years of women characters becoming the antagonists as opposed to victims. The hag witch. Cannibals. Zombies. Evil queens. Demons, carnivorous aliens, serial killers. Man-haters.

Art, in paintings, literature and every other genre have actually always shown women in a way they should never have been depicted. Even the famous portraits of English Queens are far from complimentary, the various artists seeming to have used light and dark in every wrong way there is. Trouble is, art is influential to perception and even a biographer can’t be immune to it. See too much darkness, and your writing takes that on. Life imitates art, but the reverse is also true. Novels, paintings, photography, motion pictures.

Perhaps no novel ever explored the fear of women quite like Peter Straub’s Ghost Story. At the center of the the narrative is a woman. Of course, she is not a woman, and we’re never shown what the creature looks like in its natural form, and that’s brilliant. One victim, dying, kept repeating the words “Bee orchid”, a terrifying thought because no one can make sense of it (there is a real plant called a bee orchid but the dying man in the story was in shock and we know he wasn’t referring to any plant). We know only that it emits glowing green light visible under her hotel room door. But she keeps appearing, always as a woman or a little girl. Always with names used to intentionally frighten the story’s heroes, who, it turns out, aren’t heroic at all.

Her initials are always the same, first name beginning with the letter A, last name with an M. Alma Mobley, Anna Mostyn, Ann-Veronica Moore, Amy Monkton. But once, she appeared in the 1920s as actress Eva Galli.

Ghost Story remains the scariest book I have ever read, and my first time, it fucked with my head. I saw Fenny Bate. I had a friend who just started seeing a girl with the initials A.M.

Weird things happened. I thought I saw a former schoolmate whom I was later told was deceased. And things have never been the same.

Using Straub’s characters in my Halloween story, I found, made part of it scary. Because there really is a widespread myth in Asian folklore of the 9 tail fox, which can appear as a beautiful woman which will seduce and kill men. And in looking around the world for mythical creatures that could fit in a Vietnam War setting, I found that every culture extant has more than its share of dangerous monsters in the form of women.

Hell. Even the Patterson-Gimlin film of a Sasquatch crossing a dry gulch shows a female creature with human-like breasts which seem to sway as it walks (a nice touch, attempting realism, but I’ve never believed it was real, not 100 percent)..

And going back to Genesis, it was Eve who first listened to and then caved to temptation. While the story is suspect on its own, it, too, portrayed the woman as the cause of man being expelled from paradise. Nobody stops to think that Adam didn’t refuse her coaxing; it would seem that a story without a woman as the villain is not to be taken seriously.

I’ve watched things change. A mother in the 60s wore pleated skirts and was a housewife. But by the middle of the decade, younger women and girls in high school were wearing blue jeans and miniskirts. They were villainized in public, in editorials and churches, as men came to the conclusion that the end was nigh.

By the late 60s, women fought the male establishment with protests and bra burning. This absolutely terrified the average white Christian man. Authors like Hal Lindsey stepped up their writing about the certain imminent arrival of the antichrist.

It would have been ridiculous except for the fact that writers and evangelists gave unintended lease for hate crimes against women. And any time religion crosses a line of influence, extending too far into mixed cultures, bad things happen. Zealousness forms its ugly tentacles around everyday life. You know, mass hysteria, for lack of a better term, often begins with a paranoid or zealot, whether religious or not.

Women became more liberal with clothing, and drew fire for it. By 1976 I’d go to lunch while working through summer break and the shitheads I worked with would see a woman with revealing summer clothes and say, invariably, “No wonder there’s rape in this world.”

They were so stupid that sometimes I’d tell them to “shut the fuck up”, and I was serious. I didn’t want to hear that ever again. Halter tops, short blue jeans cut off and frayed and faded, belly exposed. Hell, I liked it. I never assumed a nip slip was a show put on for me, I never wanted to rape or even ask any one of them for a date; I simply saw beauty and poise, and a confidence like that was extremely helpful to me. I needed to see women in a way that was alien to me considering what I was put through by four sisters, an abusive mother and a cruel step grandmother. I had to be open to the real world, because somewhere in my mind I was aware that what I was going through was absolutely wrong, and I was aware of how I was being influenced.

My family was, it turns out, so dysfunctional that I’m in awe that we survived, that some have had extended relationships and loving, understanding partners, raised families and gone through hard times to emerge determined to make the best of the lives they had to lead first.

However. My older sister? She got mean, and I mean cold as ice mean. She’d do anything my father said while giving every sign that she was the one sibling not sexually abused. She was often funny, but mocked anyone and everyone, showing an inner disrespect for others’ feelings. She targeted everyone whenever her mood shifted to ultra mean. And so, a humiliation rivaling that which I received at my parents’ hands was constantly challenging my temper and the progressive views I had on the human condition.

Raised by ultra conservatives who fucked their children, I should not even be here now; the double standards alone should have driven me quite mad. And, for a time, I kind of was. I became an anarchist and a rebel. I’d already shat all over the purity of the Boy Scouts of America. Never earned a single merit badge and detested the thought of getting one. I pulled capers at summer camp, didn’t bathe, hated sleeping in tents, and in general did everything I could to show how much I hated being a scout.

The rebellion of course was one against authority. Anyone of leadership responsibility was a substitute for my father; a surrogate for my hatred, anger and sometimes, tremendous fear. It was safer to lash out at others. I guess, without kowing it, I found it cathartic.

In 1979, I fled home and stayed in Tampa for a while. My half brother was there. He helped temporarily set up an apartment, a studio, at the Bayshore Royal Apartments. I had a sofa and a used TV. It was difficult to do laundry, and I immediately began to degenerate. I drank as heavily as I could afford to, earning a bad reputation in what was then a prestigious building.

And then my father got my sister and a friend from college to come “visit” me. The friend’s father was cool and I liked him. But my sister didn’t meet me downstairs in the lobby. She knocked on my door. She took one look and curled her lip in her trademark display of disgust. The friend’s dad took us to dinner and Sea World. For the first time in many years my sister was nice to me. For the first time in months, I was at peace. The night was over way too soon.

Before they left, I begged her not to tell our parents what a sorry state she had found me in. I begged her. To know that I couldn’t make it on my own would be to give them power they didn’t deserve.

My time in Florida was always going to be temporary, but she would only agree not to tell them what I had turned into if I agreed to move back home. Once more, I was humiliated and defeated. Of course, she told them everything. She may as well have taken pictures.

It reminded me of a lyric in an old song. “Please don’t tell them how (my situation) you found me, don’t tell them how you found me, give me a break, give me a break.”

She told them. She had always told them everything. Brainwashed, bitter bitch, I thought. You’re gonna end up badly.

Given all of this, and more, I should have grown to be a woman-hating bastard. Indeed, my anger made me mouthy, sarcastic and mean. But I tried never to aim it at women. The times I had, I was marked by scars. It wasn’t me. It wasn’t what I wanted. Guilt and shame are the signs of good souls compromised by a hard life.

***

On the surface, it seems as if I should be a woman-hater. I’m not. I may look at nude models, but I’m not motivated by objectification of them. It goes deeper than that. Perhaps it’s a latent attraction my Christian upbringing suppressed while living a double life. It could be too that I am just plain traumatized but don’t want to be promiscuous. I never liked it when I was. I really don’t know. I wish I did.

With that all written out, to my utter embarrassment, I cannot escape the dreadful subject of Her. She who haunts my dreams.

She is a problem. A big one, and I’ve no defense with which to stave off the merciless torment she brings to my sleep. Forcing me to run, wander through shopping malls or streets from Hell, threatening and taunting me, sometimes posing as an attractive lover, she makes me invent new places or visit places I’ve lived or worked in. Always, when I awaken, I know that she was there. No other person in any dream has had the quality of being real. I temper this insight with the knowledge that I’m equally held prisoner by mental illness, compromising mood and analytical processes. Fear becomes unreasonably prominent, and it interferes with rationality; hysterical fear makes a person sick enough to suffer additional trauma, even when psychosis is not an element of one’s illness.

Doctors do not believe, as a rule, in the supernatural. They send you to a therapist who is no more able than you are to interpret your condition or its symptoms. In time, they can help you, but they’re mere guides; you have to make the journey to the truth. I’ve only told one person that I seem to have made the dream woman worse.

I’m writing a novel, and with many great characters I honestly think are excellent and plot twists worthy of Christian fantasy, sci-fi and horror, I believe it will sell. I’m going to break it into a trilogy, meaning it will be easier to read and that a publisher should be quick to make an offer. It’s the kind of story I’d buy after reading a brief back cover teaser. And I want HBO or Netflix; it’s meant to be a miniseries and the lead was intended for Johnny Depp. He wouldn’t even have to act. It’s perfect for him. Test readers liked it. All I need is inside help publishing it.

At the center of the first and second acts is a character of female gender but not a supernatural one. She comes from my interpretation of a legend, but engaged my own fear of women and failed relationships. Writing this character was meant to be a science fiction and myth combination and I hoped it would help me with my submerged, remaining fears. It did not.

But I have to tell you one last thing. It’s important.

While men are primordially afraid of and intimidated by women, it is women who are far more afraid of men.

Will they be passed over for promotion? Pawed at on the subway? Raped on a first date or by an estranged husband? Or die at the hands of an abusive boyfriend or husband? There are too many who live in fear. Too many suffering bigotry, threats, sexual advances they do not want, comments that follow them, echoing endlessly, random street violence and more.

The night. How peaceful it can be. Depending on where you are, of course. I feel great sympathy for anyone whose night is spent in fear of crime or any other danger.

Having awakened a little past midnight, I ate a sandwich and had a can of Coke. It wasn’t long though, before I became so drowsy that I was nodding while trying to negotiate the ocean in a video game. Next thing, I was in the supermarket we used when I was a kid. But the people who work now at my local store were there. And they were giving me shit at every turn. I was doing everything wrong and finally had words with a woman who works there, except it wasn’t really that woman. It was Her. And she called the police, who sent a cruiser which, as dreams have it, was there instantly. I was questioned, then let go. But I couldn’t find my blue Mazda anywhere. Late at night, not many cars were parked in the first place. Instead I found my older car, a clunker. Why was this here? An old, big family size sedan in tan or beige. A 60s model, an eyesore. I got in, thinking my (ex) wife had come to get the Mazda and left this piece of crap for me.

Then, in the dream, I went to sleep and woke up in the backseat of a similar car with two menacing men up front. I hastily apologized and made my exit. I canvassed the lot trying to find my car, and it wasn’t there. But then it was. Someone stopped me on the way out. A woman in some sort of stressed condition asked me for help. She held a white plastic cylinder with two places on top for connections to something. She wanted me to put it into an enclosed receptacle in the store’s heating and air system. I hesitated. I knew it was Her in a different body. She always does that.

She got me to do it so my fingerprints would be on the plastic. She was setting me up. She had no need of fear in leaving her fingerprints, as she’s got none of her own, always showing up in a different body. It was some type of poison, I knew, and anyone in the store would get sick. And investigators would find my prints, track me down and arrest me.

Next I found myself back in my old car, driving toward Mountain Road and Pasadena, where I grew up. I was married but living with my parents? Huh?

But I somehow got off the road and onto Maryland route 100, but immediately crashed through a barrier. I jammed my feet on the brake pedal but the overpass ended in midair, and my car fell down. There was concrete and rebar everywhere. I knew I was about to die.

I wondered if I should pray before I hit the road below. Too late.

Somehow I landed alive, the car on its wheels. “I’m alive!” I screamed, then tried to start the car. Of course it wouldn’t start. But then I realized it was still in gear. I shifted it into Park and it turned over, the engine catching finally, and I resumed driving, totally an emotional wreck. By the time I turned onto North Shore Road, it was very dark and I couldn’t see to drive. I switched my high beams on but an oncoming car made me turn them down. Then I had to stop because a woman (Her again, different body) had somehow lost her groceries, they being scattered across the road. I had to help her, aware in some way by now who she really was and when I had finished, I found myself back on the supermarket parking lot, again looking for my car, again failing to find it. The sequence began again, slightly different this time, with a father and son I’d seen there earlier back again, trying to tell me something in a taunting way. And then, I was back inside the store, trying to leave, but the exit was blocked by rows of empty shopping carts, and I had to move one line of them to get out. When I had done so with great effort, a guy wheeled another long line of carts back into the space. I ended up trapped. I often end up trapped, but this seemingly prolonged torture has me feeling sick. I’m exhausted. I’m depressed to a point I rarely reach. I feel as if I never slept at all, but really went through it all.

So: what to make of it?

The real question is, should I try to get anything out of it at all? Is there some point, a reason for such dreadful nightmares?

Some things to consider:

•I’m on psychotropic and somatic medicines, and they affect brain activity. However, it does not account for Her being in nightmares for decades before drug therapy.

•Diet, rather poor in my case, as I’m on a low, fixed income. Again, this fails to explain the decades of her being in my nightmares.

•The woman, Her, could be demonic. When a demon gets attached to a human, nothing good will happen. They don’t just haunt your dreams, either. They can get inside your head, blunt dreams and aspirations, keep you down, bring misfortune and ill health, impart its own negative thoughts, ruin you. I’ve heard too many stories and known too many people so affected not to believe this.

•Her existence is a product of the betrayal I felt as my mother became not a mommy but a cold and mean tormentor.

•PTSD, a mind injured beyond all hope of any normalcy til the day I die.

•Her continuing presence could be a product of fears, all accumulated through every decade of my life: abandonment, feeling lost, trapped.

Except that the anguish and terror at Her hands is far different from my average bad dreams. She imprisons and tortures me in ways I find worthy of a Stephen King novel.

Like all victim-survivors of severe abuse, I don’t get to know the answers to the questions I need answered.

We are, in the end, alone with our nightmares, trapped while they invade our minds, and even if you are blessed to be able to wake up beside someone you love, and even if you feel like talking about it, you must endure the terrors of sleep by yourself.

It has taken me 4 nights to write this post. Along the way, I’ve suffered terrible nightmares. For me, writing usually helps. This post has not. I didn’t even want to write it. That’s the problem with being an American Asshole. You just do stuff that don’t make no sense.

Nightmares Of A Different Kind

Look. I’m a wreck from head to toe and it was already bad enough before I got sick. By my count I’ve had the flu four times since Christmas, or the same one with relapses, I can’t really tell. The fever, cough, diarrhea, headaches…. Running nose.

But lately the worst by far would be the runaway nightmares. Not quite like PTSD nightmares, yet the same except they’re jacked up on steroids and LSD. Because they are vile.

Do you ever dream about being chased or trapped? Of course you do. Almost everyone experiences those, maybe not regularly, but at times in their lives when they are most stressed, or feeling isolated. Beyond that thin requirement, no one really knows why our own minds torture us so.

In fact….No one even knows why or how we dream. It’s the Undiscovered Country. We still can’t figure out why we get sleepy and then sleep, although case histories have informed us that going too long without it can induce a myriad of horrifying symptoms, one of the worst being hallucinations. Go beyond that and the person simply dies. There is a specific disorder, Fatal Insomnia, and like the name says, you get it, you die.

That would be merciful next to PTSD nightmares which are augmented by fever, as I am finding out on my own. I do have insomnia and sleep apnea, a seemingly unlikely combination, yet it is so. And since Christmas, I don’t remember any nightmares being as fucking traumatic as those of the past week. They’ve been during deep sleep, however brief, and they’re some of the worst I’ve ever had.

I’ve talked about dreams before. In my post “Bolero Hats and Thunder” (see my archives) I described a particular nightmare that had prophetic elements to it. Oh, I lived to tell the tale. That’s not really all that good. The demon comes back.

Don’t start thinking I’m being hard on myself here or saying something controversial because I fancy myself some asshole who’s been through enough to know everything. I only have one reason I want attention. That is so you or someone you love never ends up like this. Early intervention with PTSD can ease some of the suffering. I recommend regular therapy whether single or in trauma groups by experts you must personally vet. I also recommend talking to your doctor about possibly taking certain medications and absolutely you must consider exercise and diet. See a dietician who can access your records, don’t rely on web sources and, whatever you do, please don’t buy snake oil from TV ads and infomercials. Those should be banned by the FCC. Nothing about them is proven. “Doctors” who endorse these fucking products are quacks. Remember what’s at stake here. Your mental health and your physical health are not separate things. This is your life we’re talking about.

I have no answers for PTSD dreams. The syndrome is an actual physical condition: post traumatic stress disorders cause multiple symptoms in people including eating disorders, panic episodes, flashbacks which can lead to a dissociative state of mind, resulting in the mental reliving of incidents that may have happened long ago (studies by hospital trauma teams have turned up a disturbing connection between PTSD and serious accidents in the workplace and on the highways because of “distraction” by episodes of dissociative states), nightmares and sleep disorders, coronary disorders including heart attack, blood pressure disorders, digestive system disorders including IBS and IBSD, severe depression and severe hypomania which resemble bipolar disorder but really aren’t, and behavioral changes of each end of the spectrum, notably a disinterest in sex or a promiscuous and risky hypersexual lifestyle. There’s more, but the combination of any of these are different in all subjects; no two people are alike.

Articles, books and papers by professionals have tried for at least a century to lay out what PTSD is and what causes it and how to cure it.

In ancient times warfare caused the same psychological effects as it does today. By the time of Alexander the Great, battlefields were strewn with bodies and body parts. Guts, brains, entrails filled the air with a stench any medic or close combat veteran or villager today knows and can never forget. The night would bring sieges of battlements by crude artillery, or it would fall silent except for the screaming and piteous cries of the dying. For some, one battle was enough. Others took longer. To even think PTSD wasn’t real is to overestimate humans then compared to now. What always happened was something recorded as far back as ancient Assyria. That’s not even considering what happened before. Hunters wounded in a violent battle in prehistory by a mammoth or an even worse animal trying to claim the kill would never be the same. It would not be called “PTSD” until late 1979 when Vietnam veterans were in- country one day, on a jet the next, arriving home in 48 hours. We can assume a little about veterans of earlier wars. Post-World War Two and Korean Conflict veterans were treated at Veterans hospitals stateside, and depending on their symptoms, kept for the rest of their lives or released. Others went straight home. One distinct difference between 1941-1945 and what followed is that returned soldiers could proudly wear their dress uniforms and be welcomed home by adoring crowds even in small towns. To some this and the travel time on a ship to the states could have been a help in transition. Buddies supported each other, some listening, some talking, but even with that, heroes always had problems. Artilleryman Frank Cunningham once had to take a Thompson or an M-1 Garand and charge a Nazi machine gun nest. The MG-42 was the heavy machine gun feared by allied infantry and artillery alike; it spat bullets at such a high rate that charging a position was considered suicide. The troops called it “the zipper” and there was rarely only one. A fixed gun in a bunker window was called a “murder hole”. The weapon had only one weakness: the assistant gunner had to change barrels because the rate of fire made them overheat. While the change and reload time could be fast, it did give infantry time to find better cover, or, in Frank’s case, time to get close and toss a grenade and eliminate the position. He was awarded a medal, one of several.

In a report I once read, the authors claimed that mild cases of PTSD cleared up on their own or with minimal professional treatment. I dismissed it out of hand then and I still do. MRI studies have shown that there are actual changes to the brain and they’re not just real, they’re permanent injuries. Some images show profound changes while others seem minimal, and yet no matter what, the subject suffers from the same range of symptoms. That means that a dramatic change has taken place which disrupts everything down to the interruption of neurotransmitters and how they are used by their receptors. That’s really tragic. Soldiers come home different. Storybook marriages end, sometimes messy, sometimes deadly. Victims of domestic abuse, from battered spouses to sexuality abused children lose who they were. In the case of protracted emotional and violent physical abuse accompanied by sexual abuse, the surviving child will, at the instant of the first abusive act, cease to develop normally. Development is arrested and a new child evolves and continues to do so in progressively dysfunctional ways long into adulthood, even after the brain has finished development, in the late 20s. This is due in part to learned behavior, which is collectively known as personality disorders, of which there are many elements within each that can combine to defy any certain disorder being named. The resultant diagnosis is “Personality Disorder, Unspecified”. And it’s damnably maddening to treat just it is for a patient to cope with even if he or she understands the mechanisms involved. Later I’ll put it differently: the symptoms of personality disorders and PTSD often appear to be the same.

IN YOUR DREAMS

When he came home, no one really noticed anything about him that seemed to stand out. Frank Cunningham married, had one child and never spoke of his experiences in Europe under Generals Bradley and Patton. A few times, he told his daughter a small story. She became a nurse and came to know he had to have nightmares and other problems. So strong was he that there was never anything again that he was afraid of. That’s also a symptomatic response to the hell he endured and witnessed. After a war, what is there to be afraid of? Once, as a political figure, he threatened infamous mobster Crazy Joe Gallo, the man who was suspected of taking part in the public hit of mob boss Albert Anastasia, head of the Anastasia crime family. Crazy Joe even hired a black hitman to assassinate Joe Colombo, the head of the former Profaci crime family, now the Colombo family, after Colombo drew undue attention with his pronounced activities in Italian-American civil rights, as they knew it was a scam he used to make money from donations while calling out the FBI for carrying out biased operations to target Italians as gangsters. Colombo was shot at a rally and paralyzed, and died 6 years and change later. Between these incidents, Crazy Joe once badly frightened a schoolgirl when she was going home from school. When Frank Cunningham heard of this, he waited for Joe Gallo. When next he saw the mobster, Cunningham somehow put the fear of God into the man. He was one of very few Crazy Joe ever backed away from. To put this into perspective, Joe Gallo was as evil and dangerous a man as any other gangster in the Mafia’s heyday. Being a rogue and having earned his mob sobriquet, he was a loose cannon, and as such, perhaps one of the most dangerous men in New York. Gallo was shot to death while dining in Little Italy in 1972. He went out shooting and bravely drawing fire to himself by charging to the front door to protect his family. Now picture a man who towered over him one day and made a man like Crazy Joe Gallo walk away. He never did fuck with a civilian in Cunningham’s considerable jurisdiction again.

That’s just one possible outcome of PTSD. You fear nothing. You’ll protect anyone no matter who threatens them.

Along the same line as fearlessness is something far worse and far more dangerous: daredevil, disinhibition, compulsive risk taking behaviour. The exact mechanisms for this are still being studied, but what we seem unable to agree on is that thrill seekers and professional daredevils have a different and opposite set of key instigators than risk takers. Complications of the argument are that dopamine and MAO are certainly involved. But what’s the difference?

Academically, I cannot say. I disagree with some conclusions based on my own experience. A thrill seeker can be labeled with a “personality type” which frankly I don’t have any patience for. I see them as people who like the rush of hazardous sports and activities, with personal injury avoided with skill gained by experience. Racing accidents, downhill skiing matches, cliff diving and extreme sports are never without casualties, but that is hardly anyone’s intent.

On the other hand the risk takers are without such concern, usually acting compulsively or impulsively; consequences and hazards are put on the periphery or completely disregarded. When still a fairly new driver, I loved driving fast. But I had neither the experience, and therefore skill set, to perform at high speed. I came very close to dying or killing someone else multiple times. It wasn’t as if I constantly drove insanely, but at times and under certain conditions, something came over me that I have never been able to describe. A warm summer evening, a good rock tune on the radio, girls watching from another car…. Who can tell? When the light turned green, I floored it. Nuts. Who can really tell me what the hell that was? Because I was fearless unless I saw the bright blue bubble gum machine on my bumper. I started to be more aware and made sure those 1977 Pontiacs were not in sight before letting whatever chemical that took over loose. Chased many times, but in a high speed chase, never caught. Why that was a point of pride shames me now but I didn’t care then. Oh, I didn’t want to be caught; the risk was the fun. I even lost choppers twice, and that’s almost impossible.

Along the way though, I racked up over 35 accidents, including totalling the same car three times. I know, I know. Sounds like bullshit. But it’s true. It was a ’93 Mazda 323, a tiny but tough car. Eventually I was just too scared, as my condition worsened, that I had beaten the odds for far too long. It wasn’t a question of if I would kill someone; it was a question of when I would.

But also, there were accidents when I wasn’t speeding, doing donuts, cornering or ruining tires by burning the rubber clean down to the steel belts and kicking up sparks in the night. The dissociation that hit me without warning also made me ram several cars in the rear. But the risky, uninhibited behavior wasn’t limited to driving. It fueled my sex life, it egged me into dangerous situations and I never seemed to learn my lesson.

Be careful; taking risks, mood swings and serious depression, feelings of being worthless, suicidal thoughts, dysfunctional relationship history and other symptoms of behavior can be diagnosed mistakenly as borderline personality disorder, or BPD. You have to be clear when consulting a doctor. The overall behavior involved with PTSD can closely resemble BPD. The problem is how you proceed with treatment and the incredible stigma of BPD as compared to PTSD. People who are diagnosed with BPD are shunned very often. Although the disorder is treatable and has been observed to ease with age while PTSD does not, word searches for it have sad questions. People ask if a BPD patient is dangerous, is sociopathic, lies constantly or if they’re even capable of love.

Any person is potentially dangerous, and there’s no use in denying it. How many times have you seen a reporter stick a microphone in some shocked person’s face after a neighbor shot and killed someone? Know what they say? “He was always so pleasant. He’d do anything for anyone.”

There’s no stone engraved that says only certain types of people can kill. Nothing, by the same playbook, says that a person with PTSD can’t perform a job, raise a family, be a good mother or father. In fact, people prove it every day. The same is true of schizophrenics, behavior disorder patients, those with OCD, autism and everything else. What remains to be solved and mitigated are the dark dreams of the sufferers of trauma.

We know so little of the brain and dreams, that nightmares are bound to be, as you’ve probably found out yourself, a mystery. Some sources claim a difference between stages of sleep and dream intensity. Some still cling to old school beliefs that people don’t dream except in the REM state, although we know by now that every stage of sleep can produce dreams. The data show several periods of dream sleep during a normal night, with dreams lasting seconds to perhaps even an hour. During the deepest sleep if a nightmare occurs, and people are awakened suddenly, sleep paralysis, that warm place which coming fully awake from is a long and frightful struggle, keeps one from moving or speaking. Experiences tell us of a history of”old hag attacks” during this time, when people feel a “weight on their chest” and see some witch or ancient demon sitting astride them. That would be fine if sleep paralysis alone could account for it, but it doesn’t even come close. The reason: a large amount of literature on the subject contradicts it completely. Not that sleep paralysis isn’t real. But cases go back as far as ancient history of other people witnessing the hag attacking someone else who was sleeping while the witness was awake. Last year I heard a first-hand account of such a case. A mother and daughter sharing a studio apartment: the mother, apparently unaware, slept. The daughter awoke suddenly and saw a hag attacking her mother. She of course woke her mother up and the hag vanished. What’s even more frightening is that the daughter swore adamantly that the “hag” was sucking energy from the mother’s mouth into its own mouth. Steeped in folkloric horror stories, this unfortunately seems quite likely to be very true. It explains why victims wake to feel weight on their chest and trouble breathing. Indeed, the realm of sleep is one of both delight and suffering. It also accounts for six to eight hours of sleep leaving one feeling sick and weakly lethargic.

AUGMENTED NIGHTMARES

There are many things that can cause nightmares to become so severe that they are actually traumatic in their own way. Factors such as health, diet, drugs (OTC, prescription and illicit), smoking, increased stress during the day’s work routine, the deterioration of a relationship, having a loved one gravely ill, financial situation and others all seem to play a part, like extras on a film set. You may not notice them, but they affect the quality of a film nonetheless. For a silly example, I give you Jurassic Park 2: “The Lost World”. It was a silly movie from the beginning to the end, but some of it had sillier moments than others. The extras made for some of the most hilarious bits, like when the T-REX was chasing its infant, carried in the back seat of a convertible by Ian Malcolm. On a street scene, some Japanese tourists are running away, in a tip of the hat to classic Godzilla movies. It’s so quick that if you blink you’re going to miss it. But all things considered, bit players are not so trivial after all.

Of all the bit players when it comes to PTSD nightmares, one of the most powerful is a low-grade fever. You don’t need much, but a fever tends to strengthen at night. When I’ve dreamt this last week, the result was always so bad that my attempts to stay hydrated during the day ended up with something getting drenched in urine during deep, dreadful dreams I couldn’t escape.

I don’t mind telling you this. These are things rarely addressed openly except for the distilled and impersonal websites that range from reliable information to medical myths. The internet is a digital minefield.

WHAT YOU DREAM MAY HAVE SIGNIFICANT MEANING OR NONE AT ALL, DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU READ

I’m a believer that for every nightmare, there are infinite possible reasons, and none are simple. If I agree that the human brain is still the real Undiscovered Country, then dreams are important. They do carry significant meaning, no matter what experts want to fight about. Leaving their quarrels behind is easy for me; I know that ultimately, they tangle so because they don’t know.

LABYRINTHINE TRAPS: RECURRING

My first nightmare of the week was memorable. Influenced no doubt because I fell asleep watching TV, and was surrounded by electronic devices which affect the level of ambient electromagnetic energy (which is claimed by various studies to affect the brain), I found myself with Rachel Maddow in some sort of after hours setting. She was a really funny, charming and somewhat eccentric. Or she’d had a few drinks. We were alone for a second and she was dressed in her normal suit. Then the fever and my PTSD kicked in and ruined my brief time with someone I admire.

She suddenly had guests and she was kicking back. Somehow she had long hair and let it down. She got wild, and began showing strangers large flip cards which morphed into gifs with sexual acts. Different kinds, all graphic. Then she turned into a full figured blonde who was evil and menacing. She chased me, and the building was old, very old, with once stained wainscoting and hardwood floors, all now gone to seed; scuffed and dust-covered. The hallways stank of old urine long ago soaked forever into the hardwood by pets. In a building with no air conditioning. I was running, trying to escape her. To escape it. This place was a true labyrinth, dark, dusty, no way out, one hallway turning a corner and leading to another. I never got out, but toward the end, the corridors shortened, there was little room to move, and yet several doors lined the dim scene. I knew that none would lead to freedom.

Of course, I awoke with wet crotch to find that the second airing, which begins at midnight eastern time, was halfway through. Rachel Maddow was calmly interviewing a guest. I turned the fucking TV off and went to the kitchen to kill the fever. A combination of one Alka Seltzer tablet in half a glass of water chased two Extra Strength Tylenol. Fuck a fever, I thought. Fuck Rachel Maddow too. I’m never watching her again unless I have a pot of caffeine-loaded Starbucks Veranda brewing. No offense, Rachel, mon ami.

Two nights later, weary from the constant coughing that had my intercostal muscles either sore or excruciating, depending on whether they were upper or lower, and again with a fever that rose as the sun set, I fought sleep. I drank coffee and took Tylenol. You think it helped, right? Cause you really want this post over already, don’t you?

No. It didn’t work out that way. Never does, for assholes. Why on Earth would you have imagined otherwise? Did you forget whose site you’re on? Shame, shame on you.

And this time it was even more terrifying than the first. A long time ago I had a 1970 Mustang Mach One. It was white with black GT stripes. I was traveling, not in the past, but some weird-ass future, a road somewhere in Columbia, when it turned suddenly into a dirt track with steep earthen sides, a deep cut into the ground, if you will. I got out to search on foot for the way out, as one wasn’t visible and had to be hidden in the repeated colors of piles and cliffs of clay and dirt. I knew I had passed a yellow diamond caution sign but the symbols on it made no sense. Why had the road stopped? Why had I continued to follow the way forward into a trench? What the hell was this, anyway? Was some tunnel being built? That made no sense; but I found myself climbing a less steep part of the trench’s side and was horrified. Huge “Safety Yellow” construction equipment worked at digging and moving dirt and typical Maryland clay. Menacing things, more than double the size of anything I’ve ever seen. At the top I also saw that so much dirt had been excavated that towering piles of it like mountains prevented me from seeing the way out. I slid down to return to my car and a guy in a hardhat said it was gone. I looked back to where I had left it and it was gone. Looking around I could see part of the right side under a new steep pile of dirt. The hardhat dude handed me a large manilla envelope and a red file folder and said to file a claim later, but for now get out of the area.

This began a frantic flight to freedom. First I found a shack for the construction company, entered it and found secretaries at desks like they were in a corporate building. What the fuck! Scared, but refusing to panic, I followed their directions through a door. I kept coming to places that got lighter over time, with a few windows to see the sunshine I had not seen at the beginning.

How long it all went on, I don’t know. Buildings seemed to connect through a single unmarked door. The doors gave way to new carpeted hallways and large spaces ranging from sparsely furnished and deserted to a doctor’s waiting room with sick children, all unaccompanied by adults. I got the hell out of there by asking a receptionist which of the many doors led to the street. I used the one she lazily pointed to as if she had to answer the question every day.

It went on and on. At one point I became aware that I was coming awake but I went right back to it. The next large space I found had a tall ceiling, full of big windows. The doors were big, leading out to wide, concrete steps and a concourse to a courtyard. All ultra modern, very pretty, but a dead end for me. I found that it was enclosed by tall stone walls with planters on top with ornate trees. I was able to hear traffic close by, but there was no way to scale the walls. They were at least a dozen feet tall.

I finally saw a highway through one section of a building but there was no exit. Two Russian women cursed me and said I was never leaving.

EVEN WORSE

Last night was a real ordeal. Fighting like hell to stay awake was useless. Somehow I found myself in a hybrid version of my childhood house in Pasadena and the worst house I ever lived in and still have nightmares about despite its demolition in early 2005. Parts of it were dirty and old, I found myself cramped onto a cot in a small modified section next to my older sister. For all intents and purposes we are enemies and have not spoken since summer, 1988. In the dream, we were close. A long time had passed and we were older. Our parents, now long dead, could be heard downstairs. Hurling curses and insults at both of us. My sister had a boyfriend but he turned out to be a real turd and left her. We were both desperate to escape the house. I climbed down an unfinished addition being built and I think I was scouting places to go for refuge. I’d seen the houses in real life but not since the 1970s because they’re in Greensboro, NC. But we weren’t there. We were in Pasadena.

Coming back with no ideas, I hugged my sister and cried. It looked like escape meant running with no place to go. I didn’t want that for her. But then it got really twisted. For comfort we became closer over time. Not in a good way, but not exactly crossing a line. One night I saw her getting dressed and holy shit, she had a penis!

What the hell? She’d managed to have a kid while being a hermaphrodite?

This wasn’t my sister! I knew who it was but there was no time to even cope. My parents were sex offenders but had passed some test and qualified to house orphaned children. They began taking up spaces until I had no choice but to leave. I frantically packed what I could in a backpack, but as the children settled in, they began to attack each other with extreme violence, including sexual assault and flesh eating. Before I could escape, I awoke, once again wet of crotch and deeply troubled. The sound of blood gushing through arteries filled my ears even as I gave up trying to forget my horror and revulsion. I took a half milligram of Klonopin, drank coffee, having washed and changed into my day clothes.

Interestingly I had not fallen asleep with the TV on. The power to everything was off. And chillingly, I awoke at the stroke of three, same as the night before: the third hour, the hour of shadows, or demons.

I have had evil spirits haunt my dreams and torment me many times. These experiences are not to be trivialized; they can do damage science denies. Have you ever heard of someone who died of a heart attack in their sleep and someone invariably says, “At least he didn’t suffer”?

How do they know that? If needing to find a restroom in a dream (as happened in the three dreams I’ve described) ends in either waking up a wet mess or making it to the bathroom in time and pissing for ten minutes straight, then demonic and torturous nightmares can certainly trigger a heart attack.

It’s a matter of contention, but the ancient Hebrews believed that nocturnal emissions (ejaculation during sleep) was a grave sin. Even the old testament relates the unlikely tale of a bride of several husbands who refused to impregnate the woman, “spilling their seed on the bed” or, in modern lexicon, “pulling out” instead. So God killed them.

So prevalent this belief in sin seemed that some scholars claim that the demonic succubus was invented. This was a female demon which sexually assaulted men in their sleep, thus accounting for the mess they awoke in.

Really? Like, everyone else automatically knew that a guy in their tribe or camp had a wet dream? Well, according to some interpretations of the law, he had to confess to it, and a succubus became the perfect reason to let him off the hook. Not being an expert on ancient Hebrews or their laws, I take the tale as true simply because incubi and succubi really do date far back to ancient times.

Then again, so do satyrs. The fact remains: there’s still so much we don’t know about the brain and the weird things it does. I’m so often amazed at what humanity has accomplished in the relatively short history it’s had on Earth. Pyramids that morons still claim humans could not have built, and therefore were erected by extraterrestrials. Angkor Wat, an enormous city surrounded by the largest religious structure ever built. So many wondrous things we as humans have done. Leaps in disease diagnosis and treatment, machines that can detect damaged areas of the brain, caused by great psychological trauma. We’ve sent men to the moon despite legions of idiots who say it was all faked by Hollywood.

Yet myths and false and dated beliefs are not going away anytime soon. We still don’t know why we dream. We guess. We do sleep study after sleep study. We can treat mental illness but not cure it. We can’t even cure the worst sleep disorder in existence.

All we can really know is what we experience and share. Eventually, who knows what we’ll find? Knowledge doesn’t come easily and usually not very quickly. We search. We learn from small clues.

All I know is this: mental illness sucks. PTSD sucks. Nightmares suck. Fevers suck. And PTSD nightmares combined with a fever?

Absolutely dreadful.

With the coronavirus spreading, let’s take a moment to remember that if you’re experiencing fever, you’re going to have your dreams change to black and terror-filled shit that no one should have to endure.

Of Bolero Hats And Thunder, And Nightmares That Come True

In the fall of 1993, something that has plagued me ever since happened. It started when I worked at a convenience store in Dundalk. Working swing shift, it was getting dark early and one day around rush hour, I had a line at the register. I saw a woman further back in the line, and something I can’t explain happened.

When I saw her, I felt a bit off. When she got to the counter I asked if I could help her. She said solicitously, “Yes you can.”

There wasn’t anything I could see that was remarkable about her. She was pretty but not beautiful. She had brown eyes and I had never liked many women with brown eyes. When I looked into brown eyes, I saw my father, no matter who I was really looking at. To this day I get triggered by brown eyes, which I find to be just one more pathetic thing that makes me an extraordinary asshole.

Yet, this woman did something to me. I would have followed her anywhere she asked me to go. I’d have done anything she asked me to do.

It was not physical attraction. Not infatuation. And it certainly was not love. What drew me to her I’ve never been able to understand. I actually had the thought that I would crawl inside her and let her devour my soul. All she had to do was beckon to me with a finger.

It was strange; she worked next door to the store for her father, who owned a pest control business. Yet I would rarely see her. One day she came in and asked if I could let her owe me for a pack of cigarettes. I was completely out of character when I joked that we could take it out in trade. But she didn’t bat an eye and said casually, “Okay.”

Months passed. I didn’t see her.

One night my wife and I went to the 7-eleven for a late snack. I’ll never forget it. I had a can of Vienna sausages in barbecue sauce. I would later blame this shit for the nightmare that followed, but whatever brought it on had nothing to do with mush made from pork and beef parts like cow lips and tongues. This was something else altogether, a dream so torturous and vividly detailed that, to this day, I remember it clearly.

The dream began weird and got worse. At some point in the midst of it I saw my boss’s van parked in front of the house. The woman, whose soul seemed to draw me to her so strongly, was loading my belongings into it. She had come to move me out. I felt as if I was supposed to be moving in with her, but then, the scene changed. Now it was dark and I was standing in the side yard. I was alone. A movement in the street caught my eye. A figure walked into the driveway. He was what I can, for whatever reason, only describe as a Mardi Gras clown. No funny makeup here; this was like something straight out of a New Orleans graveyard. It had dark clothing, Clown White covered his face, and a wig of red-orange hair, long and straight at shoulder length, came down from a black bolero hat. In his right hand was a sickle. When he knew that I had spotted him, he bent low to his right and made a deceptive motion as if cutting a patch of tall grass beside the driveway. I could feel that he knew I sensed his deception, but by then I was frozen in place with terror. He easily crossed the yard and approached me. His right arm drew back and as he got to me he swung forward, cutting my head off with the sickle.

At first the scream was silent even though I was suddenly awake. They call that sleep paralysis.

Then, after moaning through a closed mouth, I sat up and gave full vent to my horror with a primeval scream that woke up everyone in the house and, for all I know, a few neighbors as well.

That was no clown. It was a demon.

Within a few months, I was really kicked out of the house by my soon to be ex-wife. I remembered the nightmare. Was it prophetic?

Well, I didn’t really know. The woman with the brown eyes was gone. Her father had retired and closed his shop. Now I never even saw her white Camaro up there. When I looked for it I felt empty, a sense of loss.

I forgot the dream while trying to survive on the street. I still had my job but was homeless. And the brown-eyed woman was gone. She had not been the cause of the end of my marriage. That was up to my flirting around with another woman. Why I did that, I guess, was a search for genuine affection that I knew was not part of my marriage anymore. I was a broken and dysfunctional man who, since I was a boy, only wanted affection. But there had been so little of it…

The months turned into the hot dry summer of 1994. I was ghost hunting, working at the store, and staying with friends.

Then, everything upended again when my car was totaled. That was January 5, 1995.

That summer, one evening out of the blue, the brown-eyed woman showed up and asked if I was ready for my part of our “trade”, which I had forgotten about because I was being a sexist pig when I’d said it and only joking. Which wasn’t like me at all. But as she asked, I remembered and said, “Sure.”

She picked me up the next day for lunch. She took me to a waterfront restaurant in Miller’s Island which isn’t the island, but a peninsula ending in a place called Cuckold Point. Which was wildly appropriate, when I look back.

On a hot summer day, we sat at an outside deck table. There was no lunch, just a round of drinks. We chatted, but I began to get a grip on how scary this woman was. Her eyes never seemed to focus. She wasn’t there to initiate a sexual relationship. She would do it, but it was going to take time. I was mystified and mesmerized. Suddenly I wanted to be in bed with her. But it wasn’t right. She wasn’t right. Again, looking back, I realized she was on something. Not heavy, like heroin, but something. She looked at me and said, “I see the sea in your eyes. You’re a pirate.”

What the hell that meant, I didn’t ask. It was ridiculously stupid. I called her “Gypsy” just to make it even. She really didn’t see into me at all. I am not and never have been a fucking pirate. Hell, I was scared of deep water.

She took me to work afterward. In the parked car, I kissed her. I really felt it then: I would have followed her to Hell just for one night with her.

But at the exact second our lips made contact, a loud peal of thunder cracked the sky directly above us. There was no storm coming in. The sky was brilliant, cloudless, blue. A kid who lived nearby named Scott saw this, heard it, and burst into laughter. He was on the sidewalk in front of the car, walking toward the store’s entrance.

When I got inside, Scott was still laughing. He said, “That’s not a good sign, Mike.”

No shit. I didn’t take it as one, either. Rather, because of so many experiences with the supernatural, and given the hold this woman had on my soul, I saw it as a warning. Yep, I really did. Straight from God. That’s what I thought. That’s what I felt. But I was helpless before her. I wanted her. I’m sad to say, there was nothing magical about the kiss. This is a true story, not some B-movie. I cannot say what it felt like exactly; I just know I liked it.

And if the story ended here, I guess it would still be decent campfire faire. But it doesn’t end yet. It actually gets worse.

Because I was an asshole.

I was seeing a married woman. It was sexually intense and full of drama. And, still unmedicated, I was getting worse all the time and didn’t know why. We’d break up. She would stalk me. I’d awake at 3:00 am and have a sudden urge to look out of my bedroom window, and she would be in the alley below, parked, a cigarette glowing inside. Whether she or the brown-eyed woman was the more evil, I didn’t know. But the stalker I viewed as a mortal threat. She was a nutter, following me everywhere I went. Sometimes I got back with her just because I was too scared not to. She often involved her grown sons, and they chased, threatened me and convinced me that madness, the lethal kind, ran in her family. I feared for my life.

In October of 1995, I bought a used car. It was in the shop getting work to pass inspection. And one very cold night, the brown-eyed woman showed up. Wanted more “trade”. It had been so long since I had seen her that I was quite excited to go out with her. She said she would pick me up after I closed the store. But when I locked up she wasn’t in the parking lot.

Thinking I’d been stood up, I prepared for the cold walk home. Then I spotted her white Camaro on the hill where her father’s business had been. What was she doing up there? Oh, hell. I was adrift in a sea of insanity. Why question anything anymore?

I walked up to the car, saw her slouching very low in her seat and something finally hit me: she was married, just like my stalker! She was hiding inside her own car. In case anyone she knew drove by.

Of course she didn’t want to be seen!

It was dark on the parking lot. It was late on a Saturday night. Everything made sense. She was married. Took drugs. Was nutty. But I opened the passenger door anyway and slid in.

My heart immediately took a hammer blow. I couldn’t breathe. I was terrified that I would die that very night.

She was wearing a bolero hat!

The same hat the clown from my dream had worn when he decapitated me with a hand sickle!

And I should say right now that I had never seen a bolero hat in real life, only on TV. I’ve never seen one in real life since that night, either.

She barely sat up to start the car. There was no greeting, no small talk. No kiss.

She headed out of Dundalk, through the winding, wooded road to Miller’s Island Road. We found the restaurant closed for the winter. A pair of high beams lit the interior of the car as we headed back to Dundalk. I said, “We’re being followed,” and I knew who it was without looking. The stalker. The one I had been having sex with.

The brown-eyed woman knew how to drive that Z-28; she jammed the shifter down and gassed it, executing a perfect drifting U-turn straight out of a Burt Reynolds film. I told her who it was. She said “You’re mine, and she’s not gonna get you.”

She left the stalker in a cloud of smoke from peeled rubber and I was wrenched sideways in the seat.

That’s when I’d had enough.

While the stalker was still out of sight on that lonely road, I said, “Let me out. She’ll see I’m not with you and leave you alone.” She was almost emotionless as she stopped. I got out and ran far enough into the woods that despite the lack of foliage, no one could see me. I waited in the frigid dark until I felt safe enough to walk the road.

I never saw the brown-eyed woman again. Never.

As time passes, I don’t forget her. Or the dream. Or the bolero hat. And I’ve been convinced that something terrible would have happened had I remained in that car. The words “You’re mine” echo across decades.

I don’t know what that meant. She was married. I wonder if she meant something more sinister, if she really had wanted my soul. If she was married then she wasn’t a demon. A demon represented her in my nightmare though; I think it likely that one was attached to her. Drug use can facilitate such attachments.

Not long after that eerie night, something strange occurred to me:

I had never known her name. I know only that I courted evil. And death.

Sometimes dreams are a warning by a higher power. If the dream is especially disturbing. If it is particularly vivid and detailed. If a demon is in the dream.

And you’ll be wise to take it seriously. Do what your gut feeling says.

And if you see a woman with brown eyes, wearing a bolero hat?

Run like hell.

Demons In The Rearview Mirror

In late summer 1988 I was training to drive a truck. I had a class A learner’s permit. My trainer was my brother-in-law.

One sunny day we were going through Hanover Pennsylvania, on our way to Quaker Oats, when I got a sick feeling in my gut. I was passing a large gravel lot on my left. Billy didn’t notice it from the passenger seat. It was old, with dirt mixed in. On the lot was an old produce market. The kind mostly made of plywood, only bigger than most. Enclosed, not open.

I snapped as if going back in time, seeing the inside strung with rows of naked lightbulbs and wooden bins on 2×4 legs. I saw two men, and suddenly the lights were off, the building dark. The two men were dressed in overalls and one even had something like a straw hat. One was tall and stout, the other shorter and thin. While both were menacing, I can’t tell you which was worse. But both were dead long ago; I knew that much. They were drawing me, aware of my presence out on the road. As if they knew me and wanted to draw me to my death.

I also felt as if I had known them. I forced myself to snap out of it and drive on.

On the return trip, I looked, and could not find the lot again. Several more trips later, I still have never seen it.

And this is a weird enough story, but one thing makes it worse.

I didn’t mind small, open produce stands by the road, but had never, since I was a child, liked big, enclosed produce markets. A coincidence?

I can’t buy that.

Almost ten years later, after a few fruitless trips fishing at Liberty Reservoir, I bought a fishing map. I was looking for prime spots to angle for catfish. It was a funny place, and although beautiful, I always felt unsettled there. Kind of like I didn’t belong, and when you feel that way, you don’t catch anything. You can’t get comfortable enough to let yourself go and read the terrain. Choosing points where steep dropoffs were, after a slight shelf where bait fish would be, is impossible. You can’t tell the difference between those or sheer drops. Depending on water and air temperature and sunlight, it makes a big difference.

I bought the map out of desperation. I was looking to catch some prime catfish. The four pound range. But on previous visits I’d had some weird images, and worse, bad feelings, wash over me for no reason. Still very unaware of how sensitive I was, I had no frame of reference to reconcile these experiences with. Therefore I tried to ignore them. But one image kept hitting me: an old car, very old, driving on a dirt road, raising dust. There was a river beside this road. The car travelled with the river on its left, then turned right, into an unpaved driveway. The house had a screened in porch. It was an old house, with not much else along the road, but it was hardly alone. I saw other places, but none so clearly. There was emotion attached to the scene, very negative, feelings that I knew were not my own. Anger, misery, fear.

On the map, nothing remarkable stood out. I saw only that I had acres of ground to cover, multiple access points, and that locating likely spots was going to be a long process. Bank fishing where crowds seem to gather wasn’t a thing I liked at all. Those are high-pressure spots where fish can be caught in short stretches of time and then nothing remains. People making noise, eating and drinking, leaving a bunch of trash, taking illegal fish, that’s what happens on crowded banks. I wanted solitude. Quiet.

On the reverse side of the map there was another one. In this, the image was ghosted and overlaid with aerial photos like a Google Earth display. No gaps that I recall, although that’s not impossible. It made up an intricate view of the area before Liberty Dam existed. And sure enough, I found that same car parked in the driveway of a house that I was sure I’d seen in the vision of the car turning into the driveway. I’m sure I could look all of this up online, and refresh my memory, and give you more details. I’m not up for that. The impression I got was that people in the area were happy where they were, and had been forced to leave. Before the Patapsco River was dammed, it must have run through a beautiful, lush valley. It took years for the reservoir to fill. I had the impression that many people in the 1940s had resisted vacating homes, because the car I saw was definitely from the earlier part of that decade. I’ve seen cars like it in newsreel footage of the time around World War Two. It’s haunted or cursed ground beneath that water and I never cared which; I never went back.

I’d fished lots of places in Baltimore County, and had been on chartered boats out of Severna Park and Annapolis, trolling for rockfish (striped bass) on Chesapeake Bay. There’s nothing like it. A bad day on the water can sometimes be the best therapy; even going home with an empty cooler is fine with me.

But it wouldn’t be the last time I’d see into the past. And I hated it every time it happened. I thought I was going crazy.

One afternoon I was driving south on Belair Road, U.S. Route1. I passed a very old house that reached into my mind, and I don’t know how I kept driving without being in an accident. I was in someone else’s body, looking through a window. The sky was darkening either by dusk or overcast. I’m not sure which, as the details fade with time.

A woman I loved was outside getting into an open carriage pulled by two horses. She was leaving me. It wasn’t her choice, though. A big man in very old clothing, I suppose eighteenth century, with a hat not unlike a tricorn, and a long coat, climbed in beside her and took the reins. He had a smug look on his face and sneered at me. He had pulled some kind of trick to get her to go with him. I felt bullied and very frightened of him. He turned the carriage around in the half-circle driveway and left. And I felt so broken of heart that I didn’t want to live another second.

Actually, this happened more than once in the northern parts of Baltimore and Harford counties.

Seeing into the past always had a negative aspect in emotion, very intense emotion, always of anger or loss. It was never positive or particularly revealing, as I never gained knowledge of names or nailed down any specifics. There was no reason for the these events. They just left me sick, drained and depressed.

But I had not learned my lesson. I had no idea that I was a sensitive. I didn’t even know what a sensitive was. I had no idea why this shit was happening to me. I felt like I was just nuts. I had no idea what I was doing when one night, after reading a book on psychic abilities, I decided to do an experiment. The book had a chapter on astral projection. It instructed me to meditate to the point where I went into a trance. I was a skeptic but wanted to try. It said I should pray and ask for permission and an angelic guide, then go wherever I wanted. While deep in a meditative state, I would find myself “walking” down a long hallway. At the end would be a door. I would kick it open and be exactly where I’d asked.

I was vague and just asked for a visit to the past. That was a big mistake which followed the bigger mistake of doing this crazy shit in the first place.

It was freezing. I was on a dirt road that gave way to a brick pavement encircling a brick building surrounded by black wrought iron fencing perhaps 7 feet tall. It was a Colonial period government building, not huge, perhaps a town or city hall. I looked to my right and saw a dirt road running parallel to the direction my body faced, but behind the building. On the other side of the road there were big houses with big yards and big shade trees. What I could see of the homes told me it was all antebellum. I was definitely far into the past. The trees were green and full, but it still felt cold, like winter, and the sky was unusual. I saw sunlight hitting the ground, but the sky was a weird color.

I became aware that I was not alone. To my left there was a spirit but I couldn’t look at it. It said, “Do you want a closer look?” I nodded. Without walking we were suddenly next to the fence, looking through it at large wooden crates stacked around the back. As I stared, a pair of feet on the ground in shiny black shoes with the toes pointed down, resting on the ground, caught my attention. The socks were really stockings. The legs were between rows of crates and I couldn’t see them.

Then something happened in the space of a second or less. Just a blur of movement. But the shoes were now toes-up, and I could see the knees of the legs. The body, obviously dead, had beige knee-length leggings and were bloody. The voice beside me said, “See what you have done!”

Well that was it for me. Whether it was my imagination or a real astral event, I wanted out. I was back on the sofa, wide awake.

At the time I was staying with my daughter for a few weeks. Her son Antony was almost a year old. And all of the sudden, he began waking up at night crying.

One other thing. The book had a bunch of stuff about colors and what they did. I think orange was energy, green was healing…and so on. I’d learned psychic self defense, which one used when in the presence of people who drained you, like psychic vampires, something I believed in then (but thank God for medication).

Somehow I was brought to the idea that envisioned energy coming from Heaven, going through me, and then to whomever I was trying to help, could calm down Antony and help him sleep. And somehow I remember thinking the color blue was calming. It made everything worse. Soon his room was full of flies. He would only go in there to pull toys into the living room. He couldn’t fall asleep in there. He was scared silly of his room.

Only later did I realize after earnest prayer that something I did was behind it. I asked God to show me the problem. Mind you, I prayed in the living room, but after asking the question and meditating quietly, I saw Antony’s room. Two walls were on the outer corner of the house. A longer and a shorter wall. The longer wall had two huge, jagged, gaping holes through which a hippo could enter. The shorter wall had one hole. With my experiment I had brought back a demon. It was my guide. I realized that God doesn’t loan his angels out for evil things we’re forbidden to do. The occult is forbidden, so what went with me was demonic. And it came back with me. It allowed him to blow holes in Antony’s walls so other demons could torment him. Demons love tormenting children; as I had done when I was a child, Antony could see these things but not yet describe them. He couldn’t even voice his fear except to cry desperately. Now of course these holes and what came through them weren’t part of the visible world, but they were revealed as I had asked. I then repented the stupid act and asked for the holes to be fixed and for Antony to be protected. In another vision I saw that the damage was not repaired. The holes remained. Instead, three angels stood in them, facing the outside, so I could see only their backs. These didn’t glow. I imagine that if physically manifested, they may have. But I was seeing the spiritual, and they looked like men. Possibly because seeing an angel in its true form is dangerous to mortals?

Anyway, they wore long robes, white but dirty, as if they had been fighting. They were serious beings, guarding my grandson’s room from further attacks.

I found out the hard way that a book, no matter how beautifully illustrated, can be dangerous. I found out that you don’t need a Ouija board to bring true evil into your home. And I learned that irresponsible actions can hurt the innocent even if you have good intentions.

That was 2004. I’ve never meditated once since then.

Today I talked to a very nice lady at FiOS customer service. She was patient and sorted out my problem. Her name was Lee Ann. I swore she had a Pasadena (MD) accent. She reminded me of the girl I knew in third grade. The one I fell in love with at first sight. The one I’ve loved ever since.

Customer Service Lee Ann reminded me of good things in life. That there’s still kindness and decency. She reminded me of a girl I haven’t seen since 1972, who still has my heart. And even though I never told her, it doesn’t hurt. It’s perhaps the most positive and decent thing I have left.

Seeing into the past, whether you want to or not, will happen. We have to deal with it. But today, thinking about Lee Ann, I discovered that sometimes, yes. There are demons in the rearview mirror.

But there are angels back there, too.

Note-

I can’t say where flashes of the past come from, nor can anyone else. Scholars would have us believe that there’s some sort of misfire happening in some area of the brain. But that doesn’t explain accurately placing a house and a car on a map long before you see the map. It utterly fails to account for the emotions you feel in close proximity to certain places. Or seeing people in period dress appropriate to a carriage and feeling as if you’re in someone else’s body.

There’s much to guess with here. Much to debate. Are we seeing bits of past lives?

I’ve never been one to fully believe in reincarnation. I have had stray “memories” not triggered when traveling, and one that’s haunted me since I was a child is a fragment, a bit of memory of walking up to a single-story house, not a large one, at dusk. The temperature suggests a cool but not cold evening in late spring. I “remember” approaching the place on a small road with thick woods close on both sides. I could see a light in the distance, shimmering through the trees as a light breeze blew branches. Up close, it is impossible to see the house as I’m suddenly at the front door. What bothers me the most is the window set in the door. Square but with diamond shaped panes and frosted or textured amber glass. The glow of light on the inside is bright but I have a feeling I don’t want to go in. I don’t want the door to open. A random thing, for sure. So what’s behind all this?

I have an idea, and you won’t like it. I said in another post that since I was very little, there was a shadow on my walls that I could see moving. I could feel its malevolence. It terrified me.

I know it was a demon. These come or appear in many forms, from black smudges in the air without form to shadow snakes to shadow “people” to “ghosts” of dead relatives to fully manifested animals and people. Since demons have been here longer than us they have interacted with billions of people. And since they are spirits, we can easily be influenced by them. We suddenly feel angry or afraid. Remember those scenes from Blue Bloods, Leave it to Beaver and the Brady Bunch where the family all sit down and eat supper together? Well that’s how families took their evening meals, not merely here but the world over. But did you ever notice that, TV aside, sometimes arguments break out suddenly over small things, and quickly escalate? Demons love to interrupt and interfere in everything we do, and take particular delight in causing division in families, business, even church. They can pass into your dining room without being seen. Their presence is extremely disruptive. They may not stay. They may not claim your home as theirs but they can certainly visit.

If they can do that, and given that we know their numbers are great, imagine what happens when they are accidentally too close. Like when you pass a house where one has a claim to the territory. The spiritual can, purposely or otherwise, see and feel us, our memories and likewise, even have their memories transfer to us.

And it’s not just them. They retain memories and emotions from everyone they’ve ever come into contact with. That’s why these flashes are almost universally negative and come with emotions you otherwise wouldn’t be feeling. This is what I believe is happening. American families who eat dinner together are growing rare. Communication is always a problem. The demonic divide us, making a whole into weak fragments. God is left behind, making the demons more powerful and influential. It can even cause them to take up residence in your home. Some people never experience these things. Some do but don’t think about it because it’s too frightening. Everyone is a potential target.