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JOURNAL OF POSSIBLE PARADIGMS
ISSUE 4, SUMMER '96

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I'm back at school, which means I am about to learn something. Agent Scully from The X-Files is here to give our class a presentation about her real-life duties as an FBI agent, when she's not taping the TV series. The TV show is just something she does as a service to the country, to help explain what kind of cases she's working on for the FBI and for us, the public. The subject of her slide presentation is the places around the world to which she's traveled in the line of duty. As a kid, I had a retarded friend who believed the same was true of Batman & Robin.

Scully passes out some candy hearts as we take a break, the kind that have little messages on them like "Lover Boy" and "No Way." During the break I move to the front of the big table around which all of us students are sitting, to get a better view. I'm excited by the presentation. Scully comes back and starts to loosen up a little before she resumes. She does so by taking off her outer garments, leaving only her underclothes - bra, slip, panties, garters, etc. I notice her left leg is a wooden prosthetic. Once undressed, she continues her presentation.

I am in a small city park at twilight. A cool evening breeze blows through some trees along the edge of the empty parking lot. I see The X-Files' Fox Mulder come up on a deer hunter who is obviously poaching. Mulder is in the park because they're taping an episode of The X-Files here. There are huge floodlights illuminating the park where the taping is taking place. Being a real FBI agent with a real gun, Mulder pulls his gun on the poacher and yells "Freeze!" Two deer the hunter was chasing run away safely. This reminds me of the picture I saw the other day in Jung's book on dreams and alchemical symbolism, a picture of a royal stag hunt on horseback. To Jung this symbolized the search for psychic integration.

It seems to me these deer are screen memories like Whitley Strieber talks about. Their large, black, mandala eyes are suggestive of the aliens called Grays. They suggest innocence, freedom, the spiritual. Rather than freeing them, I have to wonder if Mulder shouldn't have shot them himself. Their guiltlessness and purity is probably only a cover. Maybe then the answers he seeks wouldn't continually slip out of his grasp at the last minute like these elusive creatures of the night.

I wake up in a hospital bed. The nurse comes in to check on me. She looks like Eve Six, a clone from an episode of The X-Files. This nurse clone is relieved to see me awake. She explains that I had to have a major operation to relieve the pressure in my penis. A slight incision had to be made on the top of the glans, about one inch wide, perpendicular to the shaft. The blood was drained through this slit to relieve the pressure. Apparently the space all around the capillaries was full of excess blood that would not drain back into my body by itself. The operation succeeded, she says. Succeed sounds like suck seed, as Aleister Crowley aptly pointed out in The Book of Lies. Saying the operation succeeded is like saying it sucked seed - my seed. I look under the bedsheet at my penis and the incision, not ashamed that the nurse and people walking by the open door can see it.

This seems to be a reference to Jeff Lewis' theory on primordial genital wounding, the castration of our psychic self. Eve is the Hebrew for life; the Septuagint calls her Zoe. She is no doubt Mother Earth, who castrated Father Uranus and threw his genitals into the ocean. It's as if I were abducted for the operation, and told afterward everything was OK.

Purity Control- the "operation" to create alien/human hybrids, artificial offspring created by unnatural alchemy, overseen by a clone of the first woman- called Life.

It's the future, and Scully is married to Mulder. She and her son are in the bathroom getting ready for school. Mulder comes dragging in wearing only his underwear, unshaven. His son says hi, but Mulder ignores him. Scully says something to him about it. I get the idea their relationship is actually more platonic-it's her son from someone else, and they are living together for convenience. She wants him to act like the boy's father, because it's the proper thing to do. He's given up going through the motions because of his disillusionment.

The son is certainly the result of the operation, an alien/human hybrid produced under the auspices of Purity Control. Perhaps if my penis-Mulder's penis-hadn't been exsanguinated, his progeny would be more acceptable to him. Now he is like Scully, with her prosthetic leg and artificially-sweetened hearts with their ready-made messages of "love."


That blood-letting was the beginning of the operation called Purity Control. His blood-my blood-was used to create this son. He is not mine, but he has been thrust upon me. Like Arnold Schwarzeneggar in Total Recall, my reward for going along with the operation was a woman, Scully. She's no longer enough. She's not even real.

I'm in the basement of a large private building with my partner, Dana Scully. We have snuck into a secret laboratory to look for something-clues of something. Of what? It's not clear, but what else could it be? On the show we're always looking for evidence of aliens-frozen alien embryos, alien/human hybrids, a flask marked Purity Control. A staff scientist who is working late comes through the lab, but doesn't take much notice of us. Still, we are forced to depart unsuccessfully, having abandoned our mission, in the light of this interruption, as a failure.

Leaving the building at night will be a problem, as it is well-guarded. In the huge lobby, the security guard sits at a small table. He checks our IDs, lets us pass. Scully gets into an elevator with another lady, an employee also leaving the building to go home. I look in and see the elevator is only two feet wide. Scared I'll get trapped in there, I part ways with my partner and choose the escalator. I've had this happen many times before, been confronted with these weird elevators. It will happen again July 7th, in downtown Minneapolis' IDS Tower. Sometimes I try to ride them. This time I don't. I start going down from the mezzanine-level lobby to the ground level exit on the escalator.

Flash to a hospital room. I am now observing the scene, detached, rather than participating in it. I am no longer Mulder, but John Carter watching Fox Mulder. Scully is visiting Mulder in his hospital room, where he is recovering from an operation. They say he needed it to save his life. He sits in a wheelchair, weak, demure. "Are you OK, Mulder?" Scully asks. "Yes, I'm OK now."

At first, I was Mulder, or rather, Mulder was me. I made the mistake of parting from Scully, of giving in to my fear of weird elevators. Divide and conquer: I'm sure the elevator was deliberately put there to scare me off. The guard let me pass with my phony ID-my phony Id-and my phony password ("Purity Control") so I would think I had made it. I-Mulder-was abducted, operated on, and then released to the hospital, all for the crime of having snuck into my own subconscious-the collective unconscious, represented by the secret lab in the basement where the horrible experiments called Purity Control take place. And I wasn't even successful! What was removed in that operation? It was I-the conscious part of Mulder. In the lab I was myself in Mulder's place. In the hospital I was safe while Mulder was obviously in a weakened state. He-I-had no memory from the escalator to the hospital. It seemed instantaneous. Something happened in between. We were separated against our wills, then set free. We were tamed, domesticated, tranquilized, made harmless, and then released. He suffered for me, as an example, to scare me off from the lab.

And I am here, and he is still there. And the thing we have created is not acceptable at all.

I see a dentist's chair in profile, in the middle of a large dark room. The room has the appearance of an empty television studio. The chair faces right. On the chest of the man in the chair sits a Gigeresque alien creature right out of Sigourney Weaver's worst nightmare. This winged demon is French-kissing the helpless patient, who is barely conscious because of the anesthetic. He is only conscious enough to be afraid, but not conscious enough to run away. Sleep paralysis. I think it's Jeff Lewis in the chair.

When the demon sees me, he reaches over with his left hand and tosses a large three-paneled metal screen in my direction in order to block my view of this hideous scene which I was not meant to see. On each of the panels of this triptych are numerous small tortured figures right out of a Bosch painting of Hell. Mulder looks up in awe at the screen as it flips and rolls in the air. He smiles a huge smile, as if he's finally found the secret he's been looking for.

Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zoroaster), the theme music from 2001: A Space Odyssey, swells as the scene cuts from the darkness of the studio to the darkness of outer space. The screen which the alien tossed at Mulder and me is still rotating, but is about to be replaced by the spinning solar panels of a communications satellite just as the bone weapon was replaced by a manned space station in the movie. The point of Kubrick's famous scene is that the space station is just a tool, as was the bone to our ancestors. The point of the dream is that the screen which we erect (or allow to be erected) is also just a tool, a tool designed to preserve our cultural "sanity" by screening out the painful truth. Mulder is distracted by the screen, and mistakes it for reality. I have seen what is behind the screen. I make no mistake about which is the real reality.

The experience of co-experiencing death is, I feel, much like a near death experience. I did not have a near death experience, but did travel part way up the tunnel with my husband as he left this dimension.

On Memorial day (observed), May 27, 1979, I was five months pregnant with my son, Christopher. My husband and I rode bicycles and ran errands around town, and it was a very hot day for Minneapolis. I lay down after dinner and was so exhausted that I could barely move. As my husband went to the corner store about 8:00 to buy something for his lunch the next day, I fell into a very deep sleep.

I dreamt that I was walking with my husband, Herb, up a dark and shady forest path. It was a heavily wooded path, which was enclosed by a thick canopy of trees overhead. The path was slightly inclined, and at the crest of a hill I saw the sky, somewhat like the light at the end of a tunnel. Herb and I had been in deep conversation, about what I could not tell, but I suppose we were reminiscing about our relationship. I felt our very closeness and felt totally in love.

He began to tell me about what it was like to die; at first filled with rage, pain, and frustration, and upset that the clerk didn't seem to understand his pleas to call an ambulance, that he had been stabbed in the heart and needed help. He said that after a short while, which felt interminable while he was experiencing it, he left his body and floated above it and saw the body below him, and felt detached from it, like it was just a body. He was filled with peace and love. And he felt no pain.

After telling me this, he then said that he had to go. His feet started to move very fast, and he began to leave me behind on the path. I told him that I could do that too, and put some effort into "powering up" my feet to make them go superfast. I actually started to rev up and move along the path quickly, and felt as if I was travelling up a tunnel of forest toward the sunlight at the top of the hill. As I began to keep pace with him he said "NO!" in a very powerful voice, and I woke up in my bed, feeling hurt at being told no. I looked for him, to tell him about my dream. He wasn't there, and his side of the bed showed that he had not slept in the bed that night. It was dawn. I began to get irritated, thinking that he must have gone off with some friends, and feeling upset at how irresponsible he was behaving. I went to where we kept our bicycles, to see if his was there, and it wasn't. I was so angry that I broke the bicycle lock and chain off of my bicycle with my bare hands, (he had taken both keys with him), and set off down the street toward the corner store. His bicycle was near the store, and a patrolman was standing next to it. I asked him where my husband was, and why his bicycle was sitting there. He asked my name and address, and refused to tell me anything more. He suggested that I go back home, and that someone would explain everything to me later. In about fifteen minutes a police officer and a clergyman came by and told me that Herb had been killed the night before.

The dream braced my for this news, and although I was in shock, I felt assured constantly that he was not in his body, and a comforting presence was with me throughout the next few days of viewing the body, the funeral and other unpleasant business.

Two days after the funeral, I was preparing for bed and contemplating suicide to join Herb, so that we could be together on the other side or in our next phase of incarnation or whatever. I consciously thougth a question, "Should I kill myself to join Herb, or stay here?" I then went to bed. I was just falling asleep when I felt a presence by my right side, and looked to see Herb, naked and glowing with a soft, beautiful white light. He looked beautiful and I felt filled with love and happiness to see him. He spoke mentally to me, and said, "This is our son," indicating my womb, "Take good care of him." I had no question then about my purpose, and have tried to do the best possible job taking care of my son ever since. It did not at all seem strange that he used the word son, and of course, although these were the days before ultrasound, I did give birth to a boy.

The intent of cermonial magic is just this: ritual repetition of any formal operation over a sufficient period of time eventually embeds the ritual's parameters firmly into the subconscious mind. Its structure becomes a part of you, effectively altering your world-view in the process. Sing "Jesus Loves Me" often enough and you'll soon believe it. Persistent invocation of heathen deities leads to a pantheistic view of the universe quite at odds with the jealous demiurge of the Judeo-Christian tradition; just look at the ecological bent animism has given the neo-pagan movement. Goddess worship is a natural outgrowth of feminism, and vice versa.

The Temple of Psychic Youth practiced a ritual sigilization on a monthly basis. The practitioner was instructed to focus his or her deepest desire while slowly masturbating to orgasm in a specific setting. Here the image of a short-term desire is reinforced by the Pavlovian reward of orgasm. Presumably the subconscious will capitalize on any random, subliminal occurrence to attain this goal; to force the hand of chance, as it were. Of course, a little conscious effort on the sigilizer's part doesn't hurt matters any, either, though some say the operation works best when it is forgotten completely by the conscious mind, apparently leaving the subconscious to work in peace towards its own ends. As with meditation, when all outside distractions are shut out the minds turns inward. Rather than assume anything, I recommend experimentation for the curious reader.

Austin Osman Spare had a quite different method of sigilizing, of which the TOPY version seems but a corruption (but who knows what mysteries lay at the heart of the Temple?!) Spare would devise a pictorial representation of the desired object or event by writing it down and arranging the letters into a sign or sigil (after a little editing and manipulation, that is). From here it's only a short leap to construction of a mantra for the same purpose, possibly even for use in conjunction with the sigil for a synergistic effect. Another idea would be to construct a single pictorial representation in symbols only; the nonverbal nature of the subconscious may be even more susceptible to this. After only a minimum of experimentation in this area, I've had a few small successes with speed-learning of various data. Advanced students could certainly learn to focus on the sigil internally, using only their mind's eye as di Tibetan Buddhist monks who must meditate upon incredibly complex tapestries depicting various heavens and hells, and peaceful and wrathful deities, until every detail can be recalled from memory.

Kenneth Grant takes Spare's system one step further, stating in his books that prolonged masturbation without ejaculation creates a psychic tension that must eventually be dissipated-if not in waking, then while the magician sleeps. He says that succubi will visit the magician's dreams, often bearing the mark of the sigil in use for the particular operation. Intercourse to orgasm will occur in these dreams, thus confirming the experiment's success. This is probably the secret-or a secret-of the eighth degree of the OTO.

The next obvious step is sex magic with a partner or partners. Tibetan and Indian tantrikas have known for centuries that prolonged sexual ecstasy without release is the way to at least one form of "enlightenment," usually in the guise of oracles. Perhaps the practitioners of karezza have reached a similar conclusion. The ninth degree of the OTO is said to work within the framework of such a system designed for the Occidental mind. Even Spare seems to have had such a relationship with the witch Paterson, in addition to his Zos Kia Cultis.

Here we have come full circle, for that which is repeated during the day will soon make its appearance by night as well. Many of the medieval European withches knew that the true sabbat occurred in dreams (not to mention under the influence of hallucinogens), while in the East the student of yoga is required to meditate day and night. Imagine staring at a brick wall all day with only minimal breaks for months on end, only to be told to do so in your sleep as well! Yet, dream programming is a reality, and by reading this article many of you will already have incubated a new dream experience. Indeed, Lovecraft's dreams seem to have been almost compensatory in nature, his mind's recourse for such a reclusive lifestyle; mine and those whose works I've read hold much closer to this paper's hypothesis: namely, as awake, so in sleep.

Dream control seems to be the best response to sigilizing in this respect, for what better way to communicate with the subconscious than in dreams? Lucidity should also be mentioned here; the process of becoming consciously aware in your dreams yet remaining asleep is pregnant with possibilities. Curiously, I've found more useful information to come from spontaneous dreams, pre-programmed or not-lucid dreams usually push the random subsconscious element to the fore. Still, the possibilities are obviously there, and most lucid dreaming does include many inexplicable elements. Like the dreamworld in Philip K. Dick's Ubik, it requires an intense effort to maintain a whole universe-something always seems to be falling apart at the edges.

Aleister Crowley used to advise his students to awaken at least once each night for some "magical" practice. Since we know that the most vivid, even lucid, dreams come early in the morning after several hours of sleep, it's not too hard to figure out what this practice was. That invocation of Nyarlothotep you've been working on? Try reciting it in a dream tonight and see what happens.

Under the thick old quilt the five year old's body squirmed in his pajamas against the cool bed sheets. Sighing a breath into the night, the long rows of lashes closed toward each other over green hazel eyes. Early autumn crept through the open screened window before summer had been declared missing. A night unlike all others, it seemed to his dozing mind. But night is all alike, a darkness that blankets our senses.

In some dreams we long to wake. In some we long to die. In others we find ourselves, living despite all contradictions. A boy dreamed one night, and became me.

From this perspective, as I write, I can remember the frequency of my dreams. Each night I would lie down, having said my ritualized prayer, my mother's contribution to the ceremonious order of my life...the God bless list, not forgetting those who might be ill or in trouble (all names suggested and interposed by Mom), and including "all the poor souls in Purgatory." That sacred duty having been executed, the day's light failed. The cool pillow caressed a headful of electrified gray areas. Maybe questions were asked for which no words were required. That seemed to explain the rather inarticulate answers that sometimes came. Most of my questions were blanket kicks or grinding milk teeth.

An ear snuggled into the chilly shadows of night hears strange noises. Between the brashness of wakefulness and the subtlety of drowsiness, mindfulness is problematical. The thrumb, thrumb, thrumb of the heart, heart, heart in the ear, ear, ear.....the drum tom-tom rhythm that pulses with each body pulse, rushes like a bloody gush through the ear of the besmoldered....

All noise is not sound. Most is simply a wave of interference, an interruption from coherence, a dissociation from identity with knowledge of the self.

But I snore loudly with the exhalations of rasping philosophy. Philosophy is an allergic reaction to reality, and many snore loudly from the breath-obstructing dreams of philosophy. Tradition may well be the wimp's bargain with reality, a rational escape from time's real bullies, but if we face the facts of our mutual hallucinations, then revolution remains the madman's gamble against a reality that not only doesn't exist, but doesn't particularly care if he does. Truth can be found by following the general outline of this logic. Of course, so can falsehood.

But in the mind of my five year old self, sound and rhythm blend to become a visual field. Back and forth, to the intermittent rush and flow of blood through the temple of my head. A red-tinted peak, like a henge bloodied by sacrifice, or a mountain peak reddened by the rays of Ra, bounds back and forth, ever enlarging as it approaches and fills my field of vision; then it fills it and the thrombing sound grows larger. But behind the first peak grows and dances another, and behind it another, and behind that another, in a infinite regress that fills the mind of the child in bed with, I now think, its first notion of the infinite.

But it was no notion ever articulated. A string of dreams threaded on the idea of infinity created the numenal DNA that allowed such an idea to self-replicate in mind and become a living thought entity. This Thought about infinity could never have occurred to the five year old, but it depended completely on his nurturing of the garden of introspection for the eventual evolution of a jumble of mere conundrums into a whole species of speculations.

What good or bad is in it is for the strangled hearts of ethicists to decide. No ethical decision escapes into the absolute aorean clouds of paradise on the wings of angels without willfully trading--in the damned souls of the wicked to the devil. There is joy in condemnation, if not salvation! Every echo down the halls of dreams insists that such pacts should be condemned. They are the real estate deals ethical speculators make for parcels of Hell sold by televangelists to their electrified flock.

But now it is time for this part of my self to go to sleep and allow another, a past or future memberance to re-member all. All.
 
 


Types Type:
The Hieroglyphs of Unknowing




Memory falls like a cold rain in January on the already deep fallen snow of half a season. New footprints are washed away, but the first hand prints in the icy underflow stand exposed like very temporary fossils that have to be captured in description, or lost forever. The hand prints are those of my son. The ruminations are those of a 41 year old father. The truth is buried in a magma of overcascading years. No truth exists free of its matrix of relationships.

Dreams of flying were an every night occurrence when I was five or six. That bed. That room. That roof over which I hovered nightly are etched in memory more strongly than the toys of Christmas, than the touch of my mother, than the friendships of youth.

After listening to the drum of a heart verifying self-life, and after seeing the ad-infinitum march of silhouetted peaks that somehow signified at last, after conquering my fear of it, life, then, at last, I learned how to fly!

Of course, as a child, and as a human child, and as a human child inundated by cultural images, when I flew, I flew as Superman flew. I flew with a cape flapping off my shoulders, I think. At least memory serves up that image. But my flight was not mere imagination, I know. At age five I had never seen my home and its surroundings from high above, except in lucid drowsing, which occurred most nights. What stands as most remarkable to me, and has long struck me as remarkable about this memory of youthful dreams, is that to my child's mind, none of it seemed particularly interesting. In fact, there was a notable lack of excitement in such "dreams". They seemed anything but adventuresome. In fact, they were a bit boring. All that would be seen was my West Philadelphia row house from a perspective from between twenty and fifty feet above, with enough hovering and lateral motion to make the whole street visible, or just the black tar of the flat roofs of the adjacent homes. There was a large stone church across the street, and I seldom spent so much time looking at it as I did my own house. I remember specifically looking down from a position high up to see the front porch of my childhood home, with the wooden door and its circular beveled glass window. One night a gorilla jumped up and down on the porch and knocked in the front door. Well, obviously, astral memory is not exactly literal.

Or is it?

Dreams are strange bedfellows. One in particular, a very vivid childhood dream, never lent itself to a rational explanation. For some reason, I could never acknowledge it to be a mere fantasy and separate from reality. I couldn't separate the memory inherent to this dreams from the "reality" that kept existing after I awoke. In this instance, I remembered from dream experience that my parents had gone on vacation to the New Jersey beach and left me behind.

I specifically remember waking up from that vivid dream and actually accusing my mother of leaving me behind while she and the rest of the family went vacationing at the shore. I remember her laughing-off my "dream", and I remember the certainty that I had that it was no dream.

For most of my life, the memory of that dream seemed a silly though vivid hallucination. An unexpected proof of synchronicity just may be in the offing because of such a seemingly irrational "memory".

Without tipping my hand, I'd like to suggest that all probabilities are possible, and vice-versa. To argue otherwise, I have found, is to choose the possibility/probability that limits you in ways you not only can, but must accept as self-defined "natural" limitations.

Here I am. Years later. My father retired a few years ago, and he and my mother moved away from our old suburban Philadelphia home to Cape May, New Jersey, a summer resort town. I "know " it has nothing to do with my dreams as a five year old, but as a 41 year old, I am allowed to wonder. Have they left me behind while they go vacationing on the shore of eternity? Did I always know they would?

I enjoyed the article on UFO / Extraterrestrial dreams (Vol. 13 No. 4, Dream Network) which got me pondering their fairly frequent occurrence in my own dreamlife. As a hypnotherapist who has interviewed abductees, I find that while most abductees report these dream-like experiences, all UFO dreamers are not repressed abductees, as some lists of "symptoms" presented in popular UFOlogy might imply.

However, that doesn't exclude the possibility of a mental "contact," though not in the classical sense of "contactee." Irregardless of the source of these dreams, they can be explored through a variety of process-oriented therapies, using metaphors of what the experience is like. This tends to avoid the pitfalls of typical regression, such as leading suggestions, re-traumatization, false memory syndrome and even telepathic transmission of the therapists own pet theories (experimenter bias). As in Gestalt therapy, one might "become" the UFO, or any related object, or being from the dream and experience its essential nature.

Nevertheless, without any form of processing into narrative, these dreams have great direct impact. If I can speculate, they remind me of current experiments in the new field of Virtual Therapy, where those with phobias are gradually exposed to a source of anxiety for systematic desensitization. For example, someone with a fear of heights takes a virtual journey further and further out on a bridge, stretching boundaries. The experience becomes more familiar and anxieties surrounding it are lowered. The experience takes place in virtual reality but the emotional, attitudinal changes are real and translate to daily life.

Dream contact may function in much the same way, whether it is induced by ETs or is a phenomenon of our collective unconscious, softening the blow of culture shock. The psycho-social change is in full swing toward global and even galactic identification. Our personal and cultural self-image is undergoing radical revisioning. A seemingly external force is penetrating our society, culturally, symbolically and even sexually, if the abductees are to be believed.

Sightings, reports and even rumor are breaking down the restrictive "box" of official consensus reality, within which most of us function. Yet, according to the media, most people "believe" in UFOs and related phenomena. Our root metaphors, the images through which we perceive "reality," are changing-how we know what we know about ourselves and the universe.

As we encounter ways of dissolving our false boundaries (time, space and ego), we become more familiar, closer to that which has been perceived as alien without and within ourselves. In UFO lore, the borderline between "Them" and "Us" is symbolically dissolving as the anecdotal stories of alien hybridization grow in number. Other theories suggest ancient alien genetic manipulations of humanity. We've met the aliens.... and they are us!

Therapies exploring these UFO dreams help us comprehend what it is like to embrace that alien sense and way of being, in both frightening and benevolent forms. Embracing the sense of its nature, which is not essentially different from our nature, means growing empathy within us for yet another aspect of that larger consciousness whose name remains Mystery.

If we allow our imaginations free reign, it is possible to conceive of the big "Contact" point as a strange attractor in the history of mankind, pulling us toward a seeming inevitability. For some, that time is now. Perhaps they are the ones feeling that pull from the future-the precursors of the "Main Event." For some, contact is purely physical. Others may experience astral or emotional contact through the dreambody, or the inspiration of the mental faculty regarding related scientific ideas, such as hyperspace, or philosophical notions about the nature of deep reality. I think I'll write Dean McClanahan re:the UFO dreams.

It sounds like our "implants" are on the same wavelength.

Thanks for a great journal!