2007-11-15 4:37 p.m.
I'm going crazy. That's the only possibility.
Yeah. I think I'm losing my mind. Or something.
I was just going to write a quick entry, but then got off onto other random internety things. It's an hour and a half later, and I haven't typed anything.
OKAY. Here's the deal.
Or not. I just don't know where to begin, and this isn't a topic that's easy to bring up. Except I feel like I need to sort through it, because it's got me ready to start climbing walls in frustration.
I mentioned in my last entry that my friend and I are in a weir situation, and that it's kind of like having a religious experience because it's forcing me to reevaluate my world. It's not actually a religious experience, the effect is just the same.
In short, everything I've ever believed in is now coming into question. Which is, to say the least, extremely difficult. Try damn near impossible.
It helps a bit that my best friend is as confused about things as I am. She's practically my twin sister from another mother. All of my friends are sisters from other mothers, but this girl is my twin. Except for our religious viewpoints (I'm a pantheistic pagan and she's a Christian), we're the same person in two bodies. Which, granted, isn't necessarily what twins are. I've known plenty of identical and fraternal twins who were nothing like each other except in appearance. But twins are usually represented in popular culture as being the same (I present, as evidence, the Weasley twins from Harry Potter) and so I describe her as my twin sister.
I guess what it all boils down to is that there have been some extremely weird happenings in both of our lives, lately. Mostly psychological, I think. But then those have been coincided with things happening around us.
I tried writing some of the stuff tht's happening out, but it even looks crazy to me. And I know that this is mostly anonymous, since the one person who knows my true name behind this page isn't even in the states. But I don't know...
Like I said, it's crazy. This is the type of thing that if someone said it to me, I would suggest in all seriousness that they see a psychologist. But when it's happening to me, and to my very best friend who is also the most levelheaded woman I know, it's terrifying.
So without telling what's going on, because I don't need to be sounding insane, I'll give a vague outline of how things have progressed.
Over the summer, my friend and I began having dreams in common. Really weird dreams. They wouldn't be the exact same dream, but she would feature in my dream as doing something - which would actually been what she had dreamt about, and vice versa. These were really intense, vivid dreams, and they were sticking around in our heads for days afterwards. I would tell her that I had a dream about something and she'd be like "That's so weird because in my dream you were telling me about that (or something) while I was trying to do something else" which of course would then be the something else that I had dreamt that she was doing. And there were other people involved in these dreams, a pair of guys whose faces never changed but who we don't know in reality. Our other two best friends who never remember their dreams but were mentioning that they'd been having weird thoughts (that were related to what my best friend and I had been dreaming regardless) when they woke up. Things like that.
So then one day over the summer my best friend and I went on a trip. While on this trip we were on public transportation, and talking about a writing project we're working on in common, and laughing about the poor people sitting around us and how horribly bizarre our conversation must have sounded to them. Somehow this conversation then flowed to the weird dreams we'd been having, and their extremely dark content. Like, extremely morbid. And the conversation then kind of took off from there. We've noticed some definite themes.
And those themes have been popping up everywhere. We joked around about it at first, when every single day there'd be like fifteen things that popped up that were very clearly thematically related with what we've been dreaming and experiencing. And it's gotten way more intense than that, at the same time.
Now, my best friend is very religious. Her Christianity is very important to her, just as my take on religion is very important to me. I see all the various gods of the world as basically being different faces of the same entity, all teaching the same message that we should love and care for one another while we're on the earth. In that way, I'm also Christian; however, my definition of god also definitely includes other deities like Isis and Odin and Cerridwen. I also see everything as being sacred and not-sacred simultaneously. In other words, nothing is any more sacred than anything else. Either none of us or all of us are creations of god, whoever that may be. I choose to think we're all creations, and as such, everything holds the spark of divinity and is therefore to be honored and respected while we love and honor and respect god in whichever face we find god. This is why I can hang out in Christian churches and take communion and not feel like I'm committing some sort of blasphemy or other act of disrespect.
Now, at my friend's church, there are a few people who have visions. Like, seriously. They have visions and they do other serious things that is clearly coming from "above", from god. And some of these people have had visions that are almost straight out of the dreams my friend and I have had while we've been talking. And they have identified my friend and I as being the ones they're about, which, needless to say, scares us. A lot. Especially since, as I said, the content isn't exactly all happy-fuzzy.
I'm not saying the world is going to end. At least I hope I'm not. But my world is. The way I've lived and the things I've accepted as true and whatnot are changing. Granted, I've seen this coming. My one superstition is that my tarot cards actually "know" things - and that happened after several incidents last year in which they accurately described situations I wasn't seeing. So accurately, in fact, that while I was laughing about the readings as I was telling my friends about them, my friends were seeing the truth. It was eventually one of those situations that caused these friends to tell me (and only me) what was going on, when they had originally intended never to tell anybody because they were convinced that they could get through without outside help. One of them ended up in the hospital because of that, and the other one found them and called me - the second the phone rang the card that symbolizes a hospital stay jumped out of the deck. Needless to say, it disturbed me a lot.
And now my deck of cards, which I had promised myself never to use for personal situations, is telling me more things about these people's visions and my friend's and my dreams, and none of it is happy cheery. It's a local thing, but it's affecting me profoundly. And I feel like I'm going insane.
I mean, dreams? Visions? Gods and tarot cards? This sounds like a bad fiction novel. I was even going to use my life as the basis for my novel, but decided against that when my best friend and I began to notice that everything we've planned out for our characters in our shared story is stuff that has or looks to be about to happen to us at some point.
As for the has happened part, here's where we really begin to depart from reality. I fully expect you to advise me to get my ass to a psychologist after this, by the way. Still with me?
So my friend, despite being a Christian, and I, because I believe in this all-the-gods-are-one idea and karma, we believe in reincarnation. Past lives. The whole bit.
We've always joked that the reason we're so close now is because we've been friends and sisters before in other lives. Well, at some point over the summer, she and I one day got this wild hair on our heads to go and find books about past life recall. We were talking about how discontented we are with our lives, and how if we could do anything in the world without fear, we'd go off and have crazy adventures on the other side of the world and to hell with responsibility and everything else. This is why our favorite movies are action/adventure films; why we call ourselves Merry and Pippin or Anne Bonney and Mary Read; why Fred and George Weasley and the Marauders are our favorite Harry Potter characters. Adventure and mischief, doing what we want because we want - that's what we would do if we could do anything, but only if it meant something. Only if it were somehow crucial to our development as individuals or otherwise helpful.
So we found ourselves at the bookstore, getting books about past lives. One of them is written by a Ph.D. and it came with a CD of his, that has a meditation to do to recollect things - it warns that most people don't experience any memories until they've done it a few times.
My friend and I decided to try it. What could it hurt? Both of us had had flashes of memories and stuff that we knew couldn't possibly be real and had written off to overactive imaginations in the past - until one day we were talking to a child who hadn't yet started school and she began telling us "what life was like before [she] came to live with Mommy" and told us this ultra-vivd story of being a minister's wife with seven children, describing a town she'd never been to but we had in frightening detail. It would seem we do have some capacity to remember these things, so my friend and I attempted this focusing activity with open minds.
What we got was pretty bizarre. When we compared notes, written down before our discussion and traded, I had landed myself in a place that she has "memories" of, and she had landed herself in a place I have "memories" of. Not only that, but they filled in pieces of story that we knew were right.
Either we're going crazy, or we've lived lives together as sisters.
We kept up with doing this meditation thing, and slowly an idea of what these lives were has come to solid form. We don't talk about them until we've got about five or six, and then we compare - and they've not yet contradicted. Usually the details we call out are ones that to us seem insignificant but the other will identify as being major in her own. It's kind of hard to explain, so I just hope I'm not confusing you by dancing around specifics here.
It's been sprawling, but it's tightening down to a focus that we don't want to accept. We're not entirely certain that our dreams and the visions of the members of the church have anything to do with the past life thing, but regardless of whether or not it does, we're noticing some serious repeating trends. Trends that somehow we've been acting out in this life.
And then there are other trends which have been messed up by other people.
As an example, if these "memories" are in fact real, then she and I have met more than once in a religious and educational institution. There are at least two different lives in which we've been priestesses-in-training of some religion or other, and we've always met there as children of around six or seven after something terrible happened in our families.
When I was six, my father walked out on my mother. On my birthday, no less. We had just moved to a new town, across the street from a church. About a week after my dad left, I indicated a desire to go to the church across the street. My mom tells me that when she asked why I insisted that I needed to, which she found to be a strange answer from a six year old girl who had no concept of god. She still finds it ironic since that's now the church that I attend when at home, and I'm the only one who goes despite resisting the label of Christian. Anyway, we began going to a Saturday night gathering there, but I always had the feeling that I was in the wrong place, and would tell her so. She would suggest a different church, but I was sure the building was right. The people were what I insisted was wrong. Mom didn't get it. I didn't either. Until I found out that at that exact same time, my best friend's parents were divorcing and her mom had just begun taking her to that specific church. Had my mom shifted our church-going schedule by only a few hours, I would have met my best friend five years earlier. My entire life would have been different.
It's altogether possible that it's just coincidence. But I have a saying: Once is chance, twice is coincidence, three times is conspiracy.
And we have a lot more than three coincidences floating around. And it's driving us crazy. We're not sure how much of it is in our heads and how much is actually out there in the world around us, and there's no way to check with anyone. Anyone we told would think we'd gone bonkers. And, quite frankly, I'd be tempted to agree.
And then there's the ghost in my apartment, who's been playing with the faucets and electricity, fooling with my alarm clock and computer. Who I saw take form as a small black animal and run down my hall when my housemates swear there was nothing there. They've had incidents with the ghost, too, or spirit or whatever the hell it is. My best friend and I joke that since it's too small to be a hellhound, it must be a hell-chihuahua. Or something.
My life has gotten weird enough that I'm praying. I don't pray. I never used to. But now I am, and the only thing I'm asking for is guidance. For some way to understand what's happening to me, to my friend, to my world.
Because everything that I held to be rock steady, reliable, unchanging, you name it, is shifting, morphing, changing around me and I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's going to happen next, and it scares me.
And I especially don't like feeling like I'm going crazy!
So there you have it. Bleargh. I'll keep you posted if anything happens.
In other news, I really should update this more often. Kind of like my novel, which I haven't worked on since the Monday of 12 thousand words. Oh, well. I'll get caught up and ahead this weekend.
I've got a couple of people writing me letters of recommendation for my study abroad adventure next year. I'm really looking forward to it. I just hope I get accepted. I've wanted to go to England since I was a child. I'm just so fascinated by the culture and the people and everything about it.
And with that being said, I think I'm off. I still have two essays to write that are due tomorrow, and I only have seven hours to get them done. Good thing I'm not afraid of papers anymore. ;)
Goodnight. Be happy and sane!
