An odd escape

This is a continuation of my ‘honest’ posts where I finally say things which I haven’t said before. It’s not happy at the start, but please fight through it. There’s a light at the end.

I think it’s relatively clear to anyone who has read my earliest posts that I had quite a long stretch of depression a few years back. It flavoured probably the entirety of the first year, and certainly influences everything I write to this day. What has changed is how. It was at first a dark influence, entangling everything with chains of negativity, but now it has become a positive force.

Today I want to talk about how my former depression made me who I am today. A huge proportion of people experience depression during their lives, and every experience is different. I really feel that the more there is about turning that depression around on the internet, the better. There is only so much you can learn about depression from a health website, as it’s such a personal condition. Personal experience is important in getting above it.

I’m going to a gig in a few days. A band called Anathema is playing in Leeds Minster and I’m more than excited. I feel like it was an inevitability to see these beautiful people eventually, Because despite the apparent disconnectedness to today’s theme, Anathema is an integral part of my escape from Depression.

Funnily enough, I’ve talked about this band before on the blog. Why? How does a single band get so much coverage on a blog with very little link to music? Because their music changed me. They are one of a few bands in the world that are so important to me that they have influenced who I am very clearly. I’ll come back to Anathema in a bit.

It took me a long time to realise I was depressed. Several years actually. From about 14 to 17 years old, I was depressed without accepting that fact. I only realised when it became too much, when the darkest ideas had sprung into my head and I noticed that it wasn’t healthy to be having these thoughts. I won’t go into them too much, but they weren’t too happy.

I went to the doctor. I was given a form. I filled it out. I got very close to the ‘ seriously dangerously depressed’ mark on the form. The doctor sent me to talk to a counselor.

At this point I still hadn’t worked out why I was depressed. Depression is confusing – it has to be for it to go relatively unnoticed for 3 years. I was about to find out why I was in this awful position.

I only needed to see the counselor once. She referred me to a more serious counselor, but I never went. In a few days, I wouldn’t need to.

The meeting with this counselor was strange – terrifying at the time – but the realisations I made in that meeting changed everything. It was the first time that I explained everything to another person, and in doing so it was the first time I explained everything that was making me depressed to myself.

I found out that my depression boiled down in the end to a lack of trust, A feeling of failure, and fear.

the worst part is that it seemed to stem mainly from my family.

When I was 17 I genuinely no longer trusted a single person in my family. The only person I trusted in the whole world was one of my friends. One friend. And I got to this point because…

Fear. Two people in a household of four were prone to being incredibly aggressive and I have always been pretty non-confrontational. I was however for a while convinced that one day I would be attacked during one of their uncontrollable rages. Because of this I had the entire house mapped. Despite hating violence, I knew what I could use as a weapon in every room of the house if I needed to. Some days I was convinced I would need to know.

There was also the constant feud between my two divorced parents. Little did they know how much that feud tore me into pieces. I didn’t know who to believe, so I chose to believe no one. One parent always told me how I was being manipulated by the other. The other parent did not say how I was being manipulated by the other. I only realised a few years ago that by being told I was being manipulated, I was manipulated by those comments.

Then there was the feeling of failure. I always prided myself in being smart. Up to the start of secondary school I was at the top of the class for everything but sport, and depending on the sport I wasn’t awful at that either. Then, from a mixture of boredom of the ease of work, and pressure from the formerly mentioned things, i stopped caring. By the time I was 16, my grades had dropped considerably and I didn’t enjoy learning anymore.

I also had loved extra-curricular activities. I had loved music lessons. I had loved Scouts. I had loved swimming and table tennis. A couple of years of feeling like a failure and I didn’t enjoy these things anymore.

And perhaps the most important part of my feeling of failure, was a member of my family who certainly didn’t hold back on telling me how stupid I was. Every day I would be called ‘stupid, moron, idiot’ +numerous angry expletives. After a while you start to believe that rubbish. My reaction was to become completely apathetic to it. Which naturally made me appear more stupid. I wouldn’t answer questions, lest I appeared stupid. I certainly wouldn’t ask questions, because that’s apparently what stupid people need to do (NOT TRUE IN THE SLIGHTEST), I wouldn’t shout back at the accusations of stupidity, because I hate confrontation. Withering away under an onslaught of insults was the only option.

And so it was this realisation of distrust, fear and failure that I found myself after this counseling meeting… I had one very bleak day after this.

But just one…

Now back to Anathema. They started out as a doom metal band. Doesn’t sound like a too hopeful solution to depression, does it? The thing is that their music has evolved beyond recognition from those early days (which are also excellent, but very different) and now Anathema creates some of the most soul-resonating music, I would argue, ever made.

And so the following day, as i was walking back home from school I was thinking about the dark place I was in, desperately looking for a solution now that I had pinpointed the causes of my depression. I put Anathema on on my mp3 player.

This I what I heard.

“Needed time to clear my mind
And breathe the free air find some peace there
I used to keep my heart in jail
But the choice was love or fear of pain and

I…
Chose…
Love…
Cos everything is energy and energy is you and me…

Light shines in through an open window
Shines inside your heart and soul and
Light will guide your way through time
And love will help you heal your mind and

Life…
Will…
Be..

Cos everything is energy and energy is you and me…”

A choice of love or fear of pain.

And my solution became completely clear.  The answer was to forgive and love everything.

In a moment, the world turned beautiful. It was like the switch of a light. One moment It was dark, and suddenly the world was beautiful and I was crying. I looked around me as if I had never seen the world before, marveling at the sky, the birds, the trees.

I never told anyone that I had done this. I didn’t run up to my parents and say ‘I forgive you’. They would have been confused if I had, because they wouldn’t have known they had ever done anything wrong. In fact in many ways, this is a horrifically brutal blog, because I never said to them that I felt they played a vital role in my depression, and now it is on the internet for the world to see. 6 billion eyes could potentially look at this. But they can rest at least in the knowledge that they were completely forgiven a few years ago.

Over the course of the following week, I was called stupid numerous times by that particular family member (it still happens to this day actually). It didn’t matter. I’d forgiven them and I only had love at that point. Aggressive comments were directed from one parent at the other (but not the other way round – that rarely happens, to this day). It didn’t matter. I’d forgiven both parents for any wrong-doing they had done, and I had only love. The completely blown out of proportion aggression towards normal every-day inconveniences from one family member continued. It didn’t matter. It was forgiven, I no longer looked for weapons around the room I was standing in when it all kicked off.

I made my odd escape from depression through total forgiveness and love. i only found the answer through a band called Anathema. For all I know, that band might have saved my life.

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And now I sit here, wondering if I should publish this or not. It’s a completely honest piece, and I have been striving to be as honest as possible, that honesty hurts. If certain family members read this, they would be hurt severely by it.

But honesty is honesty.

And so it becomes public honesty.

Here’s a true story. About dreams and a nightmare

Truth and dreams don’t generally get put in the same sentence. But then, those who spend too much believing things to be true don’t dream.

Luckily, plenty of dreamers don’t get too hooked up on what is true. At the very least the idea of truth reshapes itself after while.

I’m going to continue my journey of honesty today, opening up about a strange part of myself I haven’t talked much about before. My dreams. This is post is more a narrative rather than my usual thinking through of something, because I’m as confused about it all as you probably will be if you read it the whole way through.

I’ve been interested in dreams for a long time, but only the last few years have I become really interested in them, and for a singular reason. Because I questioned why they had gone.

A large proportion of adults don’t think they dream anymore. It’s not the case, but I’m not here to talk about the science/psychology of dreams today and for the sake of reducing convoluted language, I stopped dreaming for most of my teenage years. I didn’t think much of them disappearing and this strikes me as really odd – as will be highlighted when I tell the background of my dreams in just a brief moment – because they play a pretty dramatic role in childhood.

Why do so many of us accept the disappearance of dreams, and why do we have to discount such beautiful experiences as ‘not real’ and hence ‘not important’?

Now I have been working for the last few years to get my dreams back, but let’s go back to the start of my dream story…

As a child, I dreamed vividly. I dreamed almost every night. I was sometimes lucid, although I didn’t know what that meant at the time.

The problem was, most of my dreams were nightmares, and dark, twisted ones at that. The good dreams have long been lost to time, but the memory of those nightmares still stay with me. Where most kids were having nightmares of zombies and aliens, I dreamed of walking over an endless chessboard with no escape. Sometimes it was the voice that whimpered, then laughed, then screamed, with no image at all – and that was accompanied with a feeling of illness that is impossible to describe but that still hits me occasionally when i’m awake to this day. There was the sleep paralysis – that was so real that I was convinced I was cursed.

And then there was the nightmare. Sometimes I called it the man. Sometimes I called it the mummy (it occasionally appeared as a mummified figure). Now it is just called ‘you’. (not directed at the reader, don’t worry!)

I can’t express how terrifying this nightmare was. I won’t even attempt very hard. The problem is that it’s image is both blurred and perfectly vivid in my mind. All I can say for certain was that it embodied fear entirely. It also felt more real than reality every time I experienced it.

I could attempt to say more about why ‘you’ was so unbearable, but it makes me terrified even now.

I, still in my childhood years, decided eventually to take action. This is where (if it hadn’t already) begins to get a bit strange and where you may begin to doubt the ‘truth’ of the account.

My solution, was to confront ‘you’. i decided to tell it to leave forever.

I remember the last  childhood dream of ‘you’ vividly. I was in a Scandinavian-like land at a turn in a river. There was forest all around, and here on the river’s turn was a clearing with a small shack in it. The door faced away from the river, and I new ‘you’ was in there, waiting for me.

This time, ‘you’ was robed all in black, with a hood over the face. The face is the part I can never picture. There might not have been a face. Yet somehow I’m certain ‘you’ had eyes, the most fearful eyes. The door to the shack, as they always did with my encounters with ‘you’ locked.

The sensations I always experienced in the presence of my nightmare started. They are too difficult to explain, not like ‘normal’ fear, so I’m afraid I can’t explain them.

Before it became too much and I sank into the usual complete terror, I somehow (I can’t remember how) managed to strike a deal with ‘you’. I can’t remember it’s side of the deal, but my side of the deal was that ‘you’ would never ever come back. It went to the door. The door unlocked and ‘you’ disappeared. I walked out the building, and the dream dissolved.

My nightmare never returned.

But my dreams disappeared completely.

And this, is why I wondered at the start of this post why I didn’t question the loss of my dreams, or have any concern about the loss of them, for the entirety of my teenage years. I had such a clear moment where my dreams stopped. I did in fact tell my nightmares, in the middle of a nightmare, to stop. And somehow i accepted the loss of dreams with that, without asking why.

I only began to remember parts of my old dreams when I began to meditate a few years back. I remembered how I had told my nightmare to leave me, and suddenly I realised my dreams had almost completely gone for over five years.

I started dreaming again, but no where near as vividly as I used to.

So I decided to try something. I tried to bring back my nightmare, with the intention of learning about it.

A few nights after deciding this, I almost forced myself into sleep paralysis. I forced myself out in terror when the lights in my room started flashing and horrific laughter filled the room.

Since then, I’ve seen glimpses of ‘you’ in my returning dreams. Only now, it seems to be on the run. It never stays for long enough for me to work out how to react. But I Know  it’s the same nightmare.

The problem is, despite the terror this…thing inflicts on me even today, I’m determined to track it down in my dreams. It’s one of my goals for once I successfully begin to lucid dream. I realised a while back that i’ve repressed a large chunk of my childhood, and I think this nightmare has some of the answers..

The nightmare however, seems no longer to be restricted to the dreamworld alone, and this does make me question further how close reality and dream actually are (I wonder about this a lot). Twice in the last few months, ‘you’ has appeared vividly in mere daydreams. I’ve been awake, and it’s been there.

And one time -thank god it was only once – I’m convinced it was in the park on my walk into university. Dressed in a long coat and a hat, ‘you’ was there,

It’s where this shocked, confused post here came from. – https://thoughtofvg.wordpress.com/2014/12/09/welcome-back-still-multi-part-poem-pt1/

So here I am now, chasing a dream, quite literally. Since childhood, I’ve been fighting with the same being, and i’m told there is no reality at all to a dream.

I’m trying to find out.

…

One last point on ‘you’. I few months back I watched the film ‘insidious’ with some friends, and I had a terrible shock. There is sort of a ‘main nightmare/demon’ in the film. This Nightmare, I think, is the same one as in my old nightmares. I had never seen the film before, but I knew that figure as soon as it appeared on the screen. It wasn’t it’s most common form, but It was the same. I’m still trying to work out how on earth a nightmare from a film produced the last couple of years was the same as in my childhood.

…

I’m going to leave a more analytical approach to dreams for a later post, but that there was an honest account of my ‘dream journey’ so far. I’ve focused only on parts of it, but I certainly covered the most important parts.

I will finish with a few short points however.

Why do we discount these dreams as trivial as we grow up when they are so important in youth?

How can the same dream be so real, so consistent, so constant, and even start breaking out of the dream world?

Have we all got the divide between ‘reality’ and ‘dream’ completely wrong? How do I know I’m not dreaming right now? What if that dreamworld is my reality and I’ve been stuck in the dream world for quite a while?

Thanks for reading guys, I hope you never ever encounter ‘you’. That won’t stop me searching for it though.

Are you awake? I’m not.

Are you awake? No really, are you? You’re reading this right now, and we generally assume that if you’re busy reading something on the internet you tend to not be asleep.

But I’m still not sure how awake you are. I know I spend a lot of my waking life not really being awake, but rather I drift through life missing some of the most beautiful moments that pass me.

I’ve only realised the extent of this anomaly over the last week or so when I started a little experiment of mine. I have been constantly doing what I call ‘wake checks’.

The origins of this experiment came from my attempts to Lucid dream; when you become aware that you are dreaming and can consequently control it. It is meant to be an incredible experience, and although I haven’t succeeded yet, I’m vaguely aware that I could lucid dream to an extent when I was younger. (I have an interesting story about when my dreams stopped, but perhaps I’ll leave that for another post).

As i just said above that I hadn’t yet managed to lucid dream with the help of my wake checks, naturally i’ll be talking mainly about something other than Lucid dreams today. The fact, from my experience so far, is that wake checks do more than improve your chances of Lucid dreaming. Oh so much more.

Let me actually explain to you what my wake checks entail. The basic principle is fairly self-explanatory. You check whether or not you’re awake. I write ‘Are you awake?’ on my hand everyday in Chinese  (你醒马) and look at occasionally over the course of the day. As soon as I see it in passing, I ask myself “Am I awake? Am I dreaming?”, count the fingers on my hand, close my eyes, then check my hand again, looking for abnormal changes.

This may all seem a little odd, but in a dream certain small details get distorted. By making it customary to check for abnormalities in the waking world (being the strange person I am, I hesitate to use the word ‘reality’), it should increase the chance of noticing abnormalities in a dream – triggering awareness within the dream.

The problem arises when you consider that most people would think it rather strange to check they’re awake, especially when they know that they’re awake.

The bigger problem is that they should, and are missing out in not doing so.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase ‘am I dreaming?’ used for when something incredulous happens. Interestingly enough, if you force the question, you start noticing plenty of incredulous things you pass every day but ignored before as ‘normal’, ‘just the way it is’, ‘boring’.

But things aren’t just ‘the way they are’ or ‘normal’. If you have ever read ‘the Kite Runner’, you may well remember the moment when the protagonist breaks down into tears because he had seen something stunningly beautiful for the first time. The sea.

What is considered normal is just what we are used to, and we tend to ignore it to an extent. An Eskimo isn’t going to be too excited If he met a Bedouin nomad telling of the wonders of icicles. Likewise, the Bedouin would be severely confused for an Eskimo in awe of expanses of sand.

Of course both places are incredible. But for someone, they are normal and for someone, what’s normal for you would be a world of experience for someone else.

You just need to see it.

And wake checks do that.

These are some of the things I hadn’t noticed – or had at least forgotten to the sea of acceptance and normality – that have come to my awareness since starting my wake checks.

-The cold isn’t as uncomfortable as we make it out to be, we just seem to be predisposed to anxiety from it. (of course I may have a different opinion of this if I still lived in Xinjiang, where it gets to -30)

– I’ve noticed patterns I never saw before in the way trees grow

– music has more depth and clarity

-The way different colours interact with each other seems clearer

-The huge amount of movement that happens in one single view at one time is incredible (this one came partly also from a recent training of my periphery vision. That in itself is another example of positive side-effects of projects as I was improving my periphery vision for speed reading rather than for increasing awareness in general)

-Fog has a very distinct smell

-I’ve realised how difficult it is to remain completely in focus of multiple actions. Try taking in everything in front of you in extreme detail whilst also trying to focus on a piece of music.

-Even if I haven’t lucid dreamed, my normal dreams are coming back (the disappearance of my dreams is worth talking about, but not today – it’s a weird story)

-I never noticed before how certain objects illuminate under streetlights at night.

-I see now just how much most people sleep-walk through life, when I see their faces in the street.

-I’ve noticed buildings and monuments I hadn’t acknowledged before.

-I’m more aware of how I feel, and as a result i’m less confused. This gives me confidence in myself.

-I feel like I need to be more productive each day. Being aware of your own wakefulness accentuates the knowledge that you are alive. We’re not alive for very long, and knowing you’re awake is a pretty good reminder that you’re still alive and need to make the most of that.

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Some of those points probably appear more poignant than others, but I think that the apparently smaller insignificant points are the more exciting. When you notice how the normal is incredible, you realise that there is so much more to reassess for it’s wonder, and that in turn highlights how exciting the as of yet unseen really is.

So I’ll ask you something again…

Are you awake?

A beautiful moment

You realise that the world believes you will fail, but you know you will succeed. You realise you are and not can.

on…words and lost meaning

I’m a writer. Writers love words, right?

Well, yes. It’s hard to write without words. They are the building blocks of how we communicate. They join together to form streams of ideas, which then fork out into a tributary of arguments, developments, thoughts, emotions…quite frankly words are quite useful little things.

I’ve dropped the intensity of that sentence off a hypothetical crumbling cliff on purpose right there. I’ve been thinking lately quite a lot on how much we experience the world without words. Unfortunately the only way to try and tackle this concept of thinking without words is to think about it with words, but that’s just one of those lovely paradoxes that always end up appearing when you think too much.

I’ll start by sharing a quote I’ve found recently. Here’s some wisdom from Terence Mckenna.

“Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, “that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,” instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent trans-formative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of dis-empowered perception.”
~ Terence Mckenna The World Could Be Anything (1990)

found here. https://www.facebook.com/EtherealExposition/photos/a.144806929042766.1073741829.144767382380054/321604901362967/?type=1&theater

Do you know that feeling when you experience something new for the first time? Maybe not. Maybe you haven’t experienced something new for a while, but I doubt that. maybe you’re in the position that Mckenna describes, that you have abstracted everything to the point where there is no wonder in them anymore. Take the view of a young child, pointing at everything  in excitement  on a walk in a forest

“what’s that? that crying flower? Why does it look so sad? Look! It’s crying!” “that’s just a daffodil. That’s just a drop of rain, falling from it’s leaves”

“What’s that noise? It sounds like the ground is shaking! the forest is awake!” “No, that’s just a woodpecker – look! There it is, in that tree.”

“But what is the tree dreaming of? Is she happy?” “no, it’s just a tree.”

Who’s right?

Already a young child has abstracted some things. Bird, tree, flower. We need to so we’re all on the same wavelength and able to talk with each other. But children still have so much more to see, so much more to turn from wonder into the normal. You know when a baby stares at the seemingly most mundane object, in wonder? What if we could do that? why don’t we? I think it’s something to do with everything just being ‘just’ something.

Just a daffodil. Just a woodpecker. Just a tree.

Of course, words are how we communicate with one another. i couldn’t write this to you all unless you partake in this word game known as the English language. Yet as soon as words are placed on something some of the beauty is lost. Let’s take hypnogogia as an example. Most people don’t know what this is, but we’ve all experienced it to varying degrees.

Hypnogogia is the transitional state between sleep and wakefulness. during it we see swirling colours which sometimes form shapes. It’s beautiful. Sometimes unexplainable. I could spend hours writing about it and never quite reach what it actually is. It’s more beautiful in the fact that I can’t full explain it.

In most languages, the script in which something is given its name is biggest abstraction of all. what is ‘t’ on its own? It’s a sound. it’s a shape. It means nothing. How about ‘ttttttt’? now it’s just a meaningless shape. You can’t pronounce that. And then ‘t t t t t t’? now they are shapes and they make a sound. Still no recognisable meaning though. we could attach meaning to the sound though – that ‘t t t t t t’ could describe the tattattattat of the woodpecker in that forest. We’ve applied a total abstraction to a sound/action. And now that action is a collection of meaningless abstractions. This extends to actual words. What does ‘w-o-r-d’ say about the word word? Nothing.

Let’s compare that to Chinese, where the writing sound isn’t totally abstracted. put 女(nü)(woman) with 子(zi)(child) and you get 好（hao)(good). Aside from the fact that the idea portrayed there is a rather traditional view, a woman and child together meaning ‘good’ is very clever and quite beautiful.

Each concept in life has however still been boiled down to a few strokes on paper, even in the Chinese. The words are less abstract, but they do still serve the purpose of defining something in a generic term we all understand, removing part of the personal experience.

What do you experience when you read a novel? Many people who read fiction incessantly might talk of really knowing the characters in their favourite book, and of really feeling the emotions of the character, the environments of the story, a life brought onto those words. The words translate into images. You interpret them into something more. Yet you are always restrained by the author’s choice of words, and your own interpretation of them.

An imaginative reader might get close to the feeling of the unexplained, through extrapolating what they have been told and making it into something new. a great example of this is not with literature but with art. Dürer’s famous rhinoceros. He had never seen a rhino, but he had a great go at sculpting and drawing one on written accounts of their appearance. He got close, but not quite there. That’s what words are like – you can have a good go at explaining something, but you will never truly have the whole image.

“Dürer’s Rhinoceros, 1515” by Albrecht Dürer – Christie’s. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros,_1515.jpg#mediaviewer/File:D%C3%BCrer%27s_Rhinoceros,_1515.jpg

And now here’s another quote I found over the last few days, this time a criticism of written word.

“The only possible opening for a statement of this kind is that I detest writing. The process itself epitomizes the European concept of “legitimate” thinking; what is written has an importance that is denied the spoken. My culture, the Lakota culture, has an oral tradition, so I ordinarily reject writing. It is one of the white world’s ways of destroying the cultures of non-European peoples, the imposing of an abstraction over the spoken relationship of a people.” – Russel Means

http://www.blackhawkproductions.com/russelmeans.html#sthash.NLTJbUpd.dpuf

Although this quote only indirectly affects what was written before it, the divide between spoken word and written word is interesting. The idea I want to look at here is this ‘Legitimate thinking’. When you speak words, those words are accompanied with facial expressions, rise and fall in tone and movement. It’s a marriage of total abstraction and part-abstraction. Conversation allows further discussion of the most disputable points of meaning. The written word lacks that. When words are written to describe something – anything even – no matter how beautiful, chances are that moment would have been more beautiful without them.

My leaving note will be this. Do you know those moments when you think “I don’t have the words” to describe something incredible? Maybe we shouldn’t try.