The Return To Innocence

Seizure happened in the kitchen. Jupiter meowed and rubbed against me while I crouched. Adam came in and gently lay me on the floor. My eyes were open and blank. Adam touched my face and reached for my mind, and I spasmed and gasped and blinked. I asked why I was on the floor. Adam helped me up and stood me against the large freezer. My memory is swirling. Alicia is holding me. Earlier, Adam said he told his boss, a fellow animal lover, that he needed an extra day to care for his wife. I rolled my eyes and said that was not necessary; that I was fine. Never mind. It was so dark and so white equally braided as order and chaos magics. I was spinning at ninety-nine percent light speed and thirty-five miles an hour. The world was elsewhere. A few seconds lasted a thousand years. Adam suggested I go upstairs and rest. Jupiter is suggesting a cuddle. I am thinking coffee and clonazepam and baclofen. I am made of light and love and pure order-chaos magic in its simplest form. I can give myself the right strength. May be that I can regenerate. As brightly and intensely as a Time Lord. I always shine enough for everyone.

Why is it that, in most dreams where I am in physical danger, I am unable to scream or move quickly?
My last dream involved a bad fall and crash at the top of the stairs, while a large group of people were downstairs having a small quiet party. Something supernatural was with me, something insidious. I grabbed the stair ledge and pulled myself up to a kneeling position. I yelled my husband's name, but it was only a whisper. I couldn't call for help, not with the shadowy creature surrounding me. I was moving so slowly. It felt as though nobody was in the house but me, me and the cats.
And abruptly, I realized that nobody was in the house. Adam was at work. There was no party. The cats were all downstairs. It was only me and the shadow entity. I struggled to call on my internal resources, my spirit guardians, but even my psychic voice was muffled. I was not afraid. I was determined. I was badly injured, and I only had myself, and my powers to create weapons and defenses were drained. I stopped trying to stand. I knelt there and mouthed words, calling on the water in the bathroom, the air circulating around the house, the earth under the house, the fire downstairs used to light the gas stove. I pulled in all into me, and with a desperate burst, I unleashed it. The shadow creature shrieked and vanished.
Without any warning at all, the house filled with presence again. There was that quiet downstairs party. I whispered my husband's name again, struggling to turn it into a cry. Someone must have heard. Adam came up the stairs and found me, sagging against the door of the bathroom, my nose bleeding. He spoke to me. He half-carried me to the bedroom and helped me lie down. He brought damp towels and tissues and water with electrolytes. I managed, somehow, to tell him that a negative spirit had entered the house and stole my strength, and I pulled all the elemental power I could to drive it away. He was very proud but also puzzled, since the house was supposed to be powerfully shielded and guarded. I was crying but I didn't mean to cry. It was just a reaction without intention. He stroked my hair and curled up with me, and me took my hand and fed me energy and power and strength, and he said, "Go to sleep, my darling. I'll be monitoring you through our psychic bond and everything will be okay. I will strengthen the wards." He needed to check on our friends. He would back be up soon.
The dream ended there.

It has been something of a recurring thing: My slowness in dreams. My exquisite agony in dreams. My whispering words in dreams. Sometimes I can barely walk for the pain in my hips and knees. Sometimes I can only speak with thoughts instead of physical words. Sometimes my body is wrapped in a floating translucent shell and it is the only way I can move. In my dreams, the pain is so much worse than in reality. But I have access to weapons of all kind and I feel safe, even if something horrible grabs me.

When I was a child, I had flying dreams every night. Even astral projection. Like my father and cousins in their younger years. And if a harmful person appeared, I just waved my right hand fiercely, shouting "Shoo! Shoo!" to make then disappear.

When I was a child, I dreamed of dragons, of ancient tortoises, of unicorns mixed with white tigers, of phoenix birds with feathers of every color. Dragons have never been dangerous to me. Even if some were, there were always other dragons who were benevolent.

It is why I always bristle when I read an article comparing chronic pain to dragons. The only way I can see such battles happening is dragon against dragon. And I am a human amalgam of dragon, phoenix, tortoise, unicorn, white tiger, and fae, wrapped in the skin of a moonlight witch.

Then, why do my dreams cripple me? The only reason I can think of is to teach me to use the insides, the powers coming from my spirit and not my body. My body is very important and vital to me. But perhaps not so much in my dreams.

And I think this piece of art, beyond anything, is one of the greatest ways I can understand myself. Every time I look at it, I weep. I even have that same cane. I know Shinga and I barely know each other, but she knows chronic pain. She knows what being a warrior means. She was in the US Army and was badly injured and treated so poorly during therapy that she has severe PTSD. She is disabled badly. She knows battles. And I want to hold her and hold her and tell her what this means to me.

http://shinga.deviantart.com/art/Awaken-Warrior-and-Rise-378439320

(Note: Please please refer to Shinga before borrowing or using this image. Please use the Deviant Art link. This is her work. Copyright Shinga. The only reason I displayed the actual image was in case someone can't click on the link.)

This may be the first time I've ever said this, but I am grateful for who and what I am and what I can do and my own potential.

I am grateful for my husband, Adam Paul, whom I have loved for thirteen years and still feel that giddy joy that comes from falling in love deeply until the neurochemicals and hormones inside me explode into insanity. I am grateful that he is such a mensch - that he is almost a polymath in certain ways, that he knows so much and does so much and is so much. I believe I struck the lover lottery with him. Seven and a half years of marriage still feels like a honeymoon.

I am grateful for the friends that are still with me, who still love and adore me, who like me for myself, who respect what I am unconditionally. I really do love you all so much that it brings me to tears just to think about you; it doesn't matter if I know you in person or I know you online only, I love all of you intensely.

I am grateful for the medical assistance I have been receiving since being placed on SSDI. Somehow, I have fallen in with a team of doctors and specialists who are so compassionate, willing, kind, sweet, and intelligent that it also brings me to tears.

I am grateful for my parents, who have supported me and loved me and shaped me and have set wonderful examples of love and talent and creativity and joy. I am grateful that I was raised by an atheist mother and agnostic/semi-pantheist father who enjoyed teaching me about various mythologies and religions to allow me to choose my own path. I am grateful for their intense, amazing love for each other, and their combined ability to do whatever needs to be done to help me become myself.

I am grateful for knowing firmly that I am a polytheist, polyagnostic, pantheist, eclectic, humanistic pagan witch who is fully open to the understanding that I could be wrong or delusional.
I am grateful for being able to access the skepticism that lets me step back and view things from so many perspectives.
I am grateful for quantum physics and theoretical physics, which I consider to be occasionally mixed in with supernatural and paranormal magical practice. I am grateful to be a magic practitioner who loves to hear dissenting ideas and theories that enrich me and expand my brain.
I am grateful for my Quantum Psychic Consciousness, which is my Higher Brain mixed with my Subconscious Mind, which is always in touch with all sorts of things that can never be measured, understood, known, seen, or felt by simple human experience.
I am grateful for the universe, for being made of stars, for things that we as humans may never be able to understand even as they insist on a lack of proof and existence. I am grateful for the unseen beyond the veil, no matter how real or unreal it is.

I am grateful for my powers of writing, specifically my ability to write urban fantasy and future fantasy and supernatural or paranormal fantasy. I still want telekinesis, but I will settle for writing characters who have telekinesis.

I am grateful for my ability to take life in stride, even if I often don't get the joke. I have learned to not take everything personally, to become a rock in a river, to become a river over rocks, to move without fear of ridicule anymore.

I am grateful for my knowledge of skin and body medicine, so I can happily reply to my friends when they ask for advice. I am grateful for concealers and makeup, which I will always use because they enhance the palette of my face, even if somehow my skin becomes smooth and flawless.

I am grateful for who I am and what I know and everyone who loves me. Thank you.

I see color everywhere. I taste color everywhere. I hear, sense, feel, and connect with color. I cannot imagine a world, any world, without color, even in my dreams, even without my eyes. I speak in color. Everything I touch makes me explode in color.

People ask me why I can't use my mild psychic skills to 'heal' myself. I still have trouble explaining exactly why that is not possible. I can only pull, manifest, and manipulate elemental colors and cosmic colors so much.
I do not expect people to know what I mean. My perceptions are my own. However, I know many people who understand what I mean.

"It's something about the color..."
It's always something about the color.

Often, I dream in octarine, the color of magic. Everything is magic, and everything is color, and color shows me the depths of the universe that I cannot fully reach, not until I join that cosmic wave, full of indescribable colors that define what it means to exist.

This is why religion will never work for me. Not enough color. Not enough expansion. Too much external force. I need more color. I need more inside. I need my whole brain, which cannot happen unless the dead white matter and the damaged neurons somehow move again.

I am my own connection to whatever forces move existence. I am responsible for my own existence. My Higher Brain, my Subconscious, my Quantum Psychic Brain, and my Self are working together to create the most intense positive energy I have ever realized.

My transformation will come only from within myself. I am waiting. I am moving in directions that feel so right to me, no matter what external forces claim. I am opening myself to every past hurt, every negative feeling, and shifting them into the light. It it is a constant cycle, and it hurts so much that sometimes I cannot handle it. Meditative techniques are like lifelines.

The important thing is that I keep going. I keep growing. That is what matters. I am following the colors. I am the colors. I am made of light.

Bright eyed, bushy haired, bright colors, babbling due to painkillers and happy muscle relaxants and healing gemstones and all that weird pseudoscience silliness that I believe in despite my atheist agnostic upbringing.

I've been pagan since I was a teenager, so hah. Polyagnostic polytheist pantheist eclectic witch who will believe even if proven completely wrong. Even when my atheist skeptic parents insist that it's just my brain and that psychic powers don't exist, I will agree because that is true, too. There are so many truths out there. I love quantum everything.
See, I follow the Discworld concept: Even if a deity manifests in front of be and insists it is a great god, I will tell it "That's nice. Just because you exist doesn't mean I believe in you. I believe in my Higher Brain smushed with my Subconscious, which you possibly came from. But since you are here, let's party anyway. Red wine?"

I also follow the concept laid out by Neil Gaiman in "American Gods." I firmly believe that Man created God, and the Universe created both Man and God, and all gods everywhere sprang fully formed from Man's brain because Man's brain is more complex and extreme than we can ever conceive. The universe is bigger than everything. And we are all made of bits of the universe, and if we create a belief system with gods and spirits and entities, the cosmic consciousness of the Universe will go, "Huh, they really want this stuff, don't they? Well, shit, why not?" And the bits of our brains connected to the Universe will make our gods and entities real to those of us who truly want and desire the realities of those gods and entities. Like, our Higher Brains and our Subconscious Brains smash together to create a whole knew kind of brainpower, with psychic knowledge and spiritual knowledge and such.

So. I believe that humans can be psychic. I have had psychic experiences myself.
But I am actually skeptical whenever someone says they can easily predict the future. Time is always moving, see. The future is extremely fluid and rather non-Newtonian, simultaneously. No one person can consistently know the exact future without fail, because every possible future is slippery and plastic (not the polymer plastic, the physics type of plasticity: "In physics and materials science, plasticity describes the deformation of a material undergoing non-reversible changes of shape in response to applied forces. For example, a solid piece of metal being bent or pounded into a new shape displays plasticity as permanent changes occur within the material itself. In engineering, the transition from elastic behavior to plastic behavior is called yield.").
So, precognitives can see several futures at once, but it's all flexible. Like, predicting lottery numbers would be rather implausible. Knowing a precise fixed group of numbers at an exact time in a specific future is really hard to nail down. That's why the classic skeptic question "Well, why haven't any psychics won a big lottery?" is essentially technically correct. It's hard to nail down such a small, specific thing. And then there is seeing a changeable future: Seeing bits of a future that can be prevented or altered. Is that actually predicting the future? Which future is it predicting if the predicted future was changed? I do believe in forms of precognition. It's just that precognition in general is so hard to pin down all the time.
See how complex it all is? It's like quantum physics. Psionics really is no different from deep quantum physics. Can we truly prove what we cannot see or measure? I completely believe in clairvoyance, telepathy, retrocognition, psychometry, communication with the dead, and other such powers. It's all quantum, and the human brain is quantum and insanely complicated.

And I have also always believed in All The Gods, so whenever someone asks me if I believe in God, I always ask "Which one?" which leads to confusion and people thinking I'm, like, evil or something and must be saved or whatever that means. *shrug* I don't care. I like what I like and I don't want to push it on anyone because my faith is mine and your faith is yours.

I just ask that you please please do not attempt to convert me to Christianity, because nope nope nope. I am fully Pagan, as I have said. But I am also Jewish on my mother's side, which makes me fully Jewish*... and I know that Christianity is a Jewish heresay: Yeshua (that Jesus guy) was just a highly intelligent Jewish man who explored various belief systems, including paganism and Buddhism and Hinduism and such, and then returned to talk about it all, since he was never part god, he was just a very good human orator with mild psychic abilities.
*(I should add that my heritage is also Russian/Romanian/Hungarian on Mom's side, with Sicilian/Greek on Dad's side. So I would say that I'm Jewish with Sicilian, Greek, Russian, Romanian, and Hungarian heritage. I choose to have no part in the Jewish religion or culture, but I have deep respect for said culture.)

So, no. I am who I am and if you leave me alone I will not roll my eyes and facepalm at you. I love you all, I always will... but I can love everyone without being bothered by proselytizing. Love is love is love is love. There is no wrong or right, there is only love. Also books. Books are love. Stories create us the way we create stories.