Am I mad? Or am I just crazy normal?

 Man's dream.

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I am  awaiting the grim reaper, not with joyful anticipation, but with resigned certainty.
 I imagine he passes my door at night, checks his list written on a parchment scroll then reluctantly moves on. Possibly there will be a problem of where to put me, as I am not sinful enough to spend eternity in Hell or deserving to suffer the boring bliss of Heaven.
  I had a dream last night, in the same world I  always go to. 
 This time I visited a rough area  of a city that I seem to inhabit in the other existence, a sort of  slum hippie area.  There was this very beautiful woman I persuaded to sleep with me. When she undressed she had large deep ulcers on her legs and ankles. I think we did it, but there was conflict with me fighting several men and the theft of some of my considerable money I had with me. Maybe I did not lose it all. I remember the woman who had long black hair and looked like Cher. The dreams seem very real. Sometimes I think when I die I will just go to this other world. I have no belief in heaven or hell. This other world will do,which may be a Celtic "Valhalla" of the Druids, embedded in my genetic memories. There, I am in my prime still.... not  a lustless, listless, soon- to- be non-ambulatory nursing-home patient, habitually drugged, of diminished brain and aching muscles, plagued by false memories.
 There, women, liquor and fighting still interest me. In my reawakened state (I cannot remember the details,)  I recall vaguely often getting lost on the subway and buses of this other world city, (which seems to have distorted features of places I might have been) I am always forgetting where I left my old car

and giving up and getting another one, which I soon lose also.
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Long Bay Gaol.
When I was 22 they put me in a small cell, 9x7 feet with two others, one a murderer and another a thief. The murderer had killed his woman friend with a lump of wood while she was getting through a barbed wire fence because she had been flirting with a man at a party. They were all drunk at the time. He kept praying to God saying he was sorry. Finally after some days of this, I told him to stop or I would bloodywell kill him. He did not stop but blubbered on, a hulking, sandy- red-haired with a rough red skin and watery blue eyes. Finally I snapped. Perhaps it was the pervasive smell of the half-full can in the corner of the cell they gave us for ablutions during the eighteen hours of the day we were locked up.
 Perhaps it was the human stink of three unwashed, unwanted humans that triggered me. 
Finally I grabbed the murderer's head and slammed it a few times on the concrete floor.   The thief stopped me from killing the murderer by banging me on my back with his fist. 
 I barely recall being dragged to the " black hole," an extended time in solitary, maybe a few days or several weeks, with no blanket or bed...just a coir mat on the floor, a bucket  and a water jug with little light and nothing to do but let the visions come. They comforted me.
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Callan Park Mental Hospital.
When I was about thirty (or maybe before) I was living more or less as a hermit out in the bush and I had this eerie feeling late one night. Some spirit was approaching me . It was out there on the other side of the wall of the shack  and seemed to be  extending itself as it reached me through the wall,  slowing entering my body through my solar plexis (belly/button)
It was transparent, slightly blue-greyish and had no definite form.It was like a thick fog, alive though..

At first I was curious and did not attempt to stop it. Then it seemed a  tentacle of protoplasm reach my mind and I suddenly became angry because it was taking me over without my permission.
 I pushed it out of my body with my abdominal muscles and concentrating hard in my clouding mind, by counting one  to twenty   repeatedly.It seemed to get weaker and retreated out of me and ebbed away through the wall into the darkness outside.

I walked to my father's house and woke my mother. I told her  I feared maybe the thing would come back and I would be dead.

She urged me" Stay here tonight". I would not, as I always felt hemmed in at my parents' house, almost unable to breathe, though it was a large house.
 Walking  down the dark, bush- track back to my shack at three in the morning, I was aware of moving  shapes and ghost-like Banksia trees, but these did not scare me, as I was a creature of the night and moved quietly among them.
 I tried to stay awake that night (in case the apparition came back ) and I sleepily greeted the greyness of the picinnini daylight  creeping mistlike from the hills near Garie Beach.. No supernatural being  appeared, but the sun came up. Another hot day. It was as if my life-force had battled  and won the night before.
 During my life since, I have never had that experience again.

Sometimes this almost brings a tinge of  regret, because the spirit (or whatever it was) seemed to be an errant part of my psyche, a lost experience.

The next day I went into the city to Callan Park Mental Hospital outpatients and told a psychiatrist what happened. He seemed matter-of-fact about it.

"Just your imagination" He stated with authority "But you had better come back, because I am doing a study of Demonaic Possession and you are the ideal subject."

"What? You tell me it is just my imagination and then you say it is Demonaic Possession?." I left chagrined and never returned, though my mother received several telephone calls from that institution concerning my non-attendance. 

Travelling  home on the steam train from the Mental Hospital visit, I shared a compartment with a very old woman, who observed me keenly. "Something happened to you, didn't it?" she asked.

I related what had happened the night before.

"Yes" She continued. "That has not happened to me. I just see things. Sometimes it is a man sitting on the end of my bed and sometimes it is a little girl."

I asked, " Do they speak?"

"No dearie, each one stays a while and I can see them so clearly and then they fade away.You don't have to be scared of things like that. They are just things that happen. Maybe a lot of people have these experiences and don't tell anyone..in case  they lock us up as crazy."

I  left the steam-train at Waterfall station to walk the bush-track, where I sometimes spotted my little sister's footprints when she took a shortcut to school and I didn't feel so much  a freak anymore..

I decided to walk on to my parents' house to tell my mother  that I was all right. She made me eat something and drink a cup of tea.

"I think" she mused, "it happened because you fell off your pony onto your head on the bitumen highway when you were seven or eight."

"I remember that. I was always falling off Tommy, my pony, wasn't I?"

"And I recall you climbing up on the shed and walking right off into the air. You collapsed and no bones were broken but I am sure you hit your head."

Memories of myself falling as my pony slipped on wet bitumen came back to me. And the shed incident when I hoped  I could fly like Peter Pan my hero, who didn't want to grow up, just like me.

My fall from Tommy had happened  near the brick pit and the other fall occurred just a hundred yards or so from where my little brother Bobbie aged three let go of my hand when I was four years old and ran across the Princes Highway and was hit  and killed by a red truck driven by a man, who should have slowed down when he saw kids crossing the road.

"Yes Mum, I think that had something to do with it." Story by Ric 
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 Psychiatry's Electroconvulsive     www.antipsychiatry.org 

SHOCK TREATMENT
A Crime Against Humanity
by Lawrence Stevens, J.D.

.Prefrontal Lobotomy: A Patient's Report At age 12, Howard Dully's stepmother convinced psychiatrist and trans-orbital lobotomy pioneer, Walter Freeman, to lobotomize her stepson.  I have no first-hand knowledge of this particular case, but in similar situations I would speculate about stepmother externalizing the problem (located in her own head) and then having it cut out surgically.

Now 56-years-old, here is Dully's moving account of his efforts to learn more about what actually happened.  Mr. Dully was able to see his original medical file.  He also interviews his father, the late psychiatrist's son and family members of other lobotomy patients.

The interview with Dully's father (beginning at 15:15 into Dully's report) offers a vivid picture of a man warding off the experience of guilt.  Also interesting are the younger Mr. Dully's comments on the discussion with his father.  He notes that his father does not take responsibility, yet he describes the opportunity to talk with his father about the lobotomy as "the happiest moment of my life."

Mr. Dully's book, My Lobotomy, will be released in September 2007 in the U.S. and in February 2008 in the UK.

Dully before the procedure.

Dully during the procedure.

Dully shortly after the 10 minute procedure.

H/T: Neurophilosophy

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1800's, Madman.