Passing the torch

Saturn, from the European Southern Observatory –
http://www.eso.org/public/germany/news/eso1116/

My narcoleptic experiences had died down to a dull roar during my teens, which is strange, but they intensified after the birth of my son at age 22. The last big one I had was when I was about 28 years of age. (Which is interesting as that is the age that some people believe your ‘Saturn returns’ come into play. For example: every 28 years, Numerologically & Astrologically, you go through a crisis of some sort.) It’s an age when people are apparently more likely to commit suicide – or make a major change in the direction of their lives. Apparently every 7 years you go through a crisis, good or bad, just like every 7 years your body has totally replaced every cell in your body.

At age 7 you are learning more about the world, its rules and your place in the world. At age 14 you are dealing with puberty and going through lessons dealing with how to become an adult. At age 21 you are expected to have ‘arrived’ and the crisis is usually to do with questions such as ‘who am I? what am I here for? where am I going?’ Some people figure that if you haven’t got it sorted out by the time you are 28 years of age, or if you are having difficulty with your assimilation into society, that it’s a big crisis. 4 x 7 = 28 and every 28 years is another major crisis.

The Atheist in me is still intrigued, but more likely to believe that each person has different life paths, patterns etc. Some people seem to be in crisis all the time! It’s usually all pinned to the journey an individual has lived, the summation of the decisions and choices they have made, their background, their projections and perceptions, belief systems, relationships, environment etc. Although a 7 year rhythm does seem reasonable, as most things in the universe relate to the vibration of a number, I don’t believe that everybody is exactly the same with this cyclic phenomenon.

At the time, I was living alone, apart from my 5 year old son. Nothing overtly important was going on, other than my son having started school. I was single and living in public housing, in a stand alone unit. I wasn’t working at the time and had a routine set with getting up early, getting my son ready for school, including getting his breakfast ready and packing his lunch. Then we’d get on the bus and after dropping him at school I’d come home and do housework, shopping etc.

Prof. Dr. Mario Markus, Max-Planck-Institut

This time there was no warning. I hadn’t changed the position of my bed. It was early on a Saturday morning and the sun was coming through the curtains, around 6:30am. It started with a dream, where I was in the back of a bus and I needed to get off. When I started walking towards the front of the bus, a few other people got up too, and we were queued in the aisle. When the bus stopped, we got off one by one and when it was my turn, I looked at the bus driver and something told me not to look at him, but I couldn’t help it.

When I did look at him his face was scrunched up in a really evil smirk or snarl. It was very scary. When I turned to jump off the bus I saw a little brunette school girl, about 5 years old and she had a surprised expression on her face. Her head then started getting bigger and bigger, as though someone had started pumping up her head with a bicycle pump. It looked like a balloon, the way her head kept getting bigger and bigger, and her eyes kept getting wider and wider, as if she was becoming more and more surprised.

Finally, her head exploded and then I saw a totally different scene. It was like a page filled with swarming maggots, but when I looked closer, I realized that it was a massive orgy with thousands of people swarming over each other. It wasn’t long before I snapped to and woke up out of the dream, but I was again paralyzed and couldn’t scream. I was on my back and felt another mouth inside my throat. It kept saying, over and over – “Why don’t you call your mummy?!” – in a sarcastic, taunting voice.

At the same time the voice was taunting me, I was trying to scream but couldn’t, and I also heard in my right ear, railway crossing bells ringing loudly. I could almost make out the railway crossing to my right, as I strained to see the room. Then I saw the ceiling go a misty white, like a cloud was forming.

As the clouds started clearing in the center, I saw three aliens. Two of them seemed like the standard greys but the one in the middle was the one that scared me. It seemed to have a face that floated in front of its actual head, changing and morphing like oil on water.

I was screaming inside my own throat, as the voices kept taunting and the bells kept ringing. I forced myself to look off into the left corner of the ceiling and yelled inside my mind for my ‘higher self’ to come and help me. As soon as I started doing that, I could see an orange ball of light appear in that left corner of the ceiling and as I focused on that – rather than the aliens, it dissipated. At the same time, lots of eyes had started appearing all over the walls, blinking and looking at me.

It took a long time to shake that episode off. Even after I got up and went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea – 10 minutes later – I could still faintly hear the bells and my throat felt like the lips were still there. It shook me so much, I finally made an appointment at the local hospital and was linked to a neurologist.

After being interviewed and giving my whole history, I was scheduled for an EEG reading. They played strobe lights in front of my face as I stared straight ahead, and after a while we stopped and they told me they’d be in contact with the results. A few days later I received a phone call from one of the doctors, who advised that the findings were quite amazing. Apparently the majority of my brain activity was in the right temporal lobe. They said that the left brain was virtually inactive in comparison! They said that they could see where the last attack had taken place and that I needed to be tested further.

According to a theory put forward by some scientists, the right brain is best at creativity & expression. It also covers intuition, music appreciation, emotions etc. The left brain is supposedly in control of logic and analytical thinking, being better at things such as critical thinking, language, reasoning etc. (Some scientists say they have debunked this theory as a myth.)

I’ve always been very creative, love music and consider myself mostly intuitive, but I can also be quite analytical and like to think that I have a good grasp on language and critical thinking! So I went to my next EEG reading which was more intensive and then finally went back to my neurologist for the results. I was told that even though it’s a sleep disorder, it’s not technically narcoleptic. Hypnagogic hallucinations happen when falling asleep and hypnopompic hallucinations happen when coming out of sleep. I mostly have hypnopompic ‘turns’ but have sometimes had hypnagogic turns.

A trick I learned, especially over the last big turn, was to aim to turn my head to the right. When I was finally able to move, I noticed that I could ‘snap’ out of the attack and sit up, no longer paralyzed. Hence the reason that I have not had anything like that last attack since then. From time to time I have felt myself slipping into it – but suddenly turning my head to the right sets me free! There was a time, after that, when I fell asleep on the couch and I half awoke, feeling like there was a tornado in my ear. I felt the familiar, rubbery sensation along my spine and thought “Oh no!”, but was able to snap myself out of it. Some people say that the roaring in your ears is the beginning of your ‘soul’ leaving your body, as in astral projection. Who knows!

It was sad, (and strange) when I realized I had passed on this ‘affliction’ to my son, Zack. He was three years of age and prior to his first incident (or at least, to my knowledge it was his first incident), he had not yet strung words together to make full sentences. I was a little worried, although he was able to communicate and knew quite a lot of words and was obviously intelligent. It was early morning and I was at the table having a coffee. My brother Lucas lived in the unit next door, in the fishing village of Warneet on the outskirts of Melbourne.

All of a sudden, his door flew open and he ran towards me, very angry, breathing like he’d run a marathon.  He just looked at me, angry and breathing hard. I asked him what the matter was. Then he calmed down and said “I come from the Pleiades constellation!” That’s right. They are the exact words that came out of his little mouth. I was flabbergasted and nearly dropped my cup. All I could say was “What?!” He repeated himself. Silence. A little while later I said “Say that again.”

He said it again. I grabbed his little hand and took him next door to my brother’s house and woke him up, which made him grumpy, of course. I told Zack to tell his Uncle what he had just told me. He said proudly “I come from the Pleiades constellation!” Lucas woke up 100% and did the same routine, saying “What?!” and so on. We were both flabbergasted. Zack proceeded to tell us, in full sentences, that our whole family came from the Pleiades constellation, from a planet called “Liftkik” (I don’t know if that’s the correct spelling!), and that we were vapors before we came into our bodies on this planet.

We spent the whole morning, trying not to lead him, to be as clear as we could, to find out where this stuff came from. It turned out that Zack had woken up in the middle of the night, feeling trapped in his body, and he tried to scream for me but I wouldn’t come. He said he saw tall grey aliens in long black cloaks standing in a semi circle around the room, with small, squat black aliens in front of them. One of the small black aliens put a clear crystal ball in the air and it floated towards Zack.

He saw that it had a black key in it and they told him that if he took the ball and unlocked the key he would discover the secrets of the universe! Apparently all the aliens kept chanting “Take it, take it, take it!” There was one alien that was very strange. He was also short, but like a white dwarf, with a long nose, pointy ears with gold earrings in them and he didn’t have a shirt on and no shoes. Apparently he was wearing shorts. Zack was mostly afraid of him. Zack asked me why I didn’t come to him when he was screaming for me. I apologized and said I didn’t hear and agreed to let him sleep with his door open from then on.

No matter what had happened, it dawned on me that he too might have inherited the dreaded narcolepsy curse. Or – our family comes from the Pleiades constellation! (?)

The Pleiades star cluster. Image Credit: NASA, ESA, AURA/Caltech, Palomar Observatory.