I decided to come back to Live Journal - it's just less of a headache for me.  It looks like a lot of my friends have moved on, that's okay too.  My goal is one post per day, even if it's just a comment about something that happened, a picture of something, whatever.  We'll see how it works out.

Myself, because I'm from the planet Zorb, and I speak the language.  :)

My story starts where most stories end – in the present. My near-death experience (NDE) was an event that I did not even recall until November of 1999. Yet looking at it now, and recalling it clearly, I can see how much of an impact a few minutes of life and death have had on the person that I am in the present, and how it has impacted my life in the way of attitudes, decision making, emotional responses, and even my dreaming life.

In November 1999, while trying to go to sleep, a complete memory returned to me. It was not a dream, as I was wide awake at the time. The memory consisted of a series of events that I had dreamed about repeatedly since as far back as I can remember. Prior to this particular night, the dreams I had about the event were basically snippets of the whole sequence, which I was now remembering in full. In a lifetime of seeing these pieces of memory in dreams, out of sequence, I now saw clearly the entire span of events. In the matter of only a few minutes of remembering, suddenly everything made sense to me. About my childhood. About my behavior. About my experiences.

Here is the memory in its entirety:

I am standing next to a pile of boxes. One of my brothers is with me, and my mother is in another room. I cannot tell whether I brush up against one of the boxes, or if the box brushes up against me, but I feel myself falling backwards, tumbling, bumping and banging my head as I fall. The pain in my head is staggering and I am trying to scream but I feel the air rush out of me.

There is a whirring noise, and I feel like I'm being sucked into a dark tube. The whirring noise suddenly sounds more like many voices all speaking at once. I am in this tube and hearing these voices, yet I am floating just above a stairwell. There is someone lying at the bottom of the stairs, in a heap. It's a child. The child isn't moving. At the top of the stairs, I see my brother. He is scrambling down the stairs towards the child. He's upset and yelling. No one answers, and he runs back up the stairs, disappearing for a moment. The child at the bottom of the stairs still isn't moving.

Suddenly my mother appears at the top of the stairs. She's upset, and runs down the stairs. She picks up the child.

As this is happening, the tube becomes a dark, open space. I can still see what's happening, but only as if it's in the periphery of my vision. The room I am in has a purplish glow about it. It becomes very quiet. I am not afraid, just calm. It feels like I am part of the dark room, and the dark room is part of me. I catch a brief glimpse of my mother carrying the child, who still isn't moving, up the stairs.

The whirring noise begins again. And there, the memory ends.

It was not until I re-experienced the entire sequence of events in this flash of memory that the reality of the situation became clear. Obviously, the child at the bottom of the stairs was myself. For nearly 40 years, I believed that child was someone else. All my life I have had a phobia about stairs, which I was never able to explain. At first, I could not believe it. A few weeks went by while I worked at sorting the memory out. Was I remembering correctly? Had I added anything, over the course of seeing pieces of the memory while dreaming, that might have altered the memory?

After determining that I hadn't added anything, that the whole memory was essentially the same as the pieces that I'd seen in dreams, I decided to ask my family. Unfortunately, the person who would be the most credible witness, my mother, was no longer alive to confirm or deny the story. My father had a vague recollection of the event, although he was at work at the time that my fall down the stairs took place. The only other witness that I knew of was my brother. When asked about it, he confirmed that yes, it did happen. Exactly as I remembered it. He was only four when my tumble down the stairs happened, but he clearly remembers the feeling of helplessness he had when he ran down the stairs after me. If he was four, I would have been just barely two years old.

While there is no medical proof of the event – I was apparently breathing again, and put to bed to recover from the fall – I have every reason to believe that during some period of time I was either dead or well on my way, apart from my body, watching myself from above.

Once the memory was established, and verified, things in my life suddenly started making some sort of sense, where before I could not make sense of anything.

During my early childhood, my parents observed that I was unusual. It was obvious even to me that I was very different than other children my own age. My father remembers that even when no one else was around, I was talking to someone, someone only I could see and hear. My parents accepted this as part of the child I was, and never reprimanded me or tried to correct my behavior. It was apparent that it was not harming anyone; I would not talk to my "imaginary friends" when I was in the company of other people, only at home or when no one but my family could hear the conversation.

My parents used to tell me that I was born old. I was always responsible beyond what was normal, paid close attention to the sensitivities of others, and had a strong spiritual impulse. In truth, I can't remember any time of my life when I was not keenly aware of the spiritual significance of life events, even before I had any spiritual training at all. I was raised in the Catholic Church and as I got older, I found myself spending more time alone, immersed in contemplating what I would learn within the context of Catholicism and trying to reconcile that training with what I somehow knew, deep down, was the truth about spirit and life.

At the age of 5, I was awakened by bursts of colored light that appeared above my bed. More annoyed than afraid, I ran to my parents' room and asked my father to chase the lights away. While I waited, he went to my room to take care of the problem. He then took me back to my room to tuck me in, only to hear me complain that the lights were still above my bed. He told me to close my eyes and ignore them if they were bothering me. Naturally, I couldn't just ignore them, and the light continued to burst in bright colors until just after sunrise.

When I was 8 years old, my first experience with death and loss was initiated by my mother, who told me – on my way home from school – that she was gone, but that she was all right. Although she had been ill for some time, I had been told that she was getting better, and had no idea what death was at that time. I believe my mother visited me when she did so I would be prepared to be a support for my father, who took her death very hard. I remember telling my father that I knew she was gone, but he did not believe me.

The older I got, the more acutely aware I was of how other people were feeling. I was constantly picking up other peoples' feelings, confusing them with my own. Rarely did people need to tell me what was going on with them; I just knew. Sometimes, much to their chagrin, I would blurt things out, personal things about them. Over time the awkwardness of their reactions taught me not to blurt things out. Sometimes I knew if they were ill before they said anything, sometimes before they knew themselves.

Always I was aware that I was trying to connect with Spirit on some level beyond the level I saw in other people. Unfortunately, this created a lot of confusion for me. Catholicism seemed to be setting limits on too many people, myself included, in what I could become. I began to believe that I could not be happy spiritually, that spiritual fulfillment was something only others could experience. My religious life, as a result, went haywire. As I reached my teens, I felt so spiritually disconnected that I was grasping at anything I could find. The more I learned, the more pain I experienced, and the darker my thinking became. While I struggled through learning and experiencing various religious ideas, I felt myself being dragged backward. Ultimately, I felt rejected by Spirit.

At 18, I became a born-again Christian and a member of an evangelical church. In my mind, I felt certain this was what I needed to re-connect with Spirit. For a while I felt a sense of release, but the more time I spent with other Christians, in Bible study, and in prayer, the more concerned I became that I could never measure up to what God wanted me to be. Over the next fourteen years my life seemed to unravel. Every time I felt I was taking a step forward, learning about life and myself, I would find myself taking six steps back. I began feeling like a hypocrite. Finally, at 32, I left Christianity for good. I simply could not reconcile what I had learned as a Christian, either as a Catholic or as an Evangelical, with what I felt in my heart to be true. Yet I still could not tap into the truth inside me in a way that would make the truth make sense.

Suddenly I found myself completely alone. I was trying to please someone, be someone, become someone other than who I was. More than anything I had developed a fixation with getting there the right way. Deep down I knew that it wasn't that I wanted others to approve of me; it was that I wanted others to approve of the way in which I actually got there – to me, that is. I was more enamored with the method of getting there than I was with actually reaching the finish line.

Over the course of the next year I had internalized so much anguish that I became ill. For eight months I became housebound and was unable to eat. Looking back now, I understand that this illness happened for a reason. I had caused it by constantly judging myself, by feeling pain and never being able to adequately express it, stuffing it down inside myself. Now the illness was causing me to stop and take pause, to re-evaluate my entire life.

Towards the last month I was ill I had an unusual dream. The imagery of the dream was so powerful that it forced me to take notice. Here's the dream:

There is an open, arid place with a large, round building in the center. Lines of people are entering the building; the lines stretch for miles. The people walk into the building and leave the building completely renewed.

I immediately knew what the dream meant. There was nothing special about the building. The building represented humanity. It represented the inner self of each human being. It didn't matter how they got to the building, only that they got there. Each person was responsible for getting there on his or her own. The core message of the dream was that each human being is responsible for him/herself, and has to go into him/herself to be renewed, to change, and to grow.

It no longer mattered what method I used to get to where I needed to go. There was no need to be angry with people, religion, or God. All that mattered was getting to myself.

I quickly recovered from my illness, let go of the anger and frustration, and starting looking inside myself. I developed an interest in Paganism, finding that it helped me with the deep inner work I needed to do. Because I was genuinely interested in getting to the truth within myself, memories started coming back – childhood memories, and memories of lives I had lived before this one. The memories were not always pleasant, and some of them could have potentially destroyed me. But I worked through the implications behind them, sorted them out, started piecing together the puzzle that was me. As of today, I'm still working on it.

One of the feelings that surfaced after remembering my NDE was one of rejection. I've been dealing with feelings of rejection throughout my life, for reasons I could not explain, up until now. I had been rejected by death as a child. Because I became an unusual child, I was equally rejected by life. It's hard to determine how much this influenced my thinking as a child, how I processed this information, and how much it altered my perceptions of others and myself. What I do know is that it did give me a skewed view of life and death. I constantly felt I was being watched and judged. It's no wonder that I took those feelings and applied them to myself over time.

Now I know where these feelings of rejection originated. I also know that I have a choice to allow them to control my life or to let them go. When I began to recognize my personal responsibility for who I was, I began steering my own life, and began realizing the harm judgment causes when applied to other people. I most likely would have continued to blame others, blame life, and blame God for my personal shortcomings. I never would have taken responsibility for who I am or what I am doing with my life.

By itself, my NDE could hardly be considered a positive experience. Some might even consider my experience morbid, frightening, or surreal. After all, there were no bright lights to step into, no loving family reunions, no angels, and no talks with God in paradise. But in a larger context, looking at my life as a whole, I can see that my experience was specifically designed for me, in order to expose personal traits like fear and judgment. It served the greater purpose of helping me learn who I am. I really don't believe I would have learned these lessons without having gone through the experience. In a way, it forced my hand, forced me to change how I respond to the world, and how the world responds to me.

Experiences like this happen for a reason, even though sometimes we do not understand why. I believe experiences like this are Spirit's way of tipping our hand, showing us what we need to change within ourselves in order to get to where we need to be, both as individuals and as a collective whole. If humanity is going to change for the better, the change must start from within each of us. It's experiences like these, dealt with honestly, that create real change.

I have been doing dream analysis for myself for many years.  Some interesting stuff, and possibly I am quite mad.  But I put on my "look at me, I'm NORMAL!" hat every day and keep plugging along.  In my head, I'm flying around the universe in my own little TARDIS.

___________________________________________________________

Много лет я сделал мечту анализа. Там были интересные вещи, которые я обнаружил информацию о моем самообороны, но вполне вероятно, я совсем с ума. Но я ношу "посмотри на меня, я нормальный!" шляпы каждый день, и продолжайте идти.

В моем воображении я лечу во вселенной и времени в ТАРДИС из моих собственных.

When the original "Star Wars" film came out (back in the Stone Ages, LOL), I saw it 36 times - IN THE THEATER.  I kept dragging friends along to see it.  I still see it from time to time, haven't tired of it.  Back then, it was the special effects bomb.  Nothing topped it.

Привет всем моим русским друзьям.

Unfortunately, my life has no meaning at all.  Lasting mark?  Not likely.  I wake up in the morning, I go to sleep at night, and in between, well, there's not much going on.  It is what it is. 

Of course I believe in Aliens. I am the proof that they exist.

If I believed in luck, I would be bound to admit that I have none.  So, I choose not to believe in luck.

"It's almost 11:30am, dammit, give me my Busy Chewnola Bone!"

I don't think we'd get along at all.  I don't think it would be because of boredom, but because I am too negative and pessimistic.  It's so strange, I always try to come up with funny things or say kooky stuff to make other people happy, but can't seem to get the same for myself.  All in all my inner world is pretty dark.