Hello. This is the Universe.: Are You Listening?

MATRIX

CHAPTER ONE

CHILDHOOD

I had my first hallucinations as a child. The first one came while I was eagerly waiting for the Easter Bunny to bring my basket. My parents told me not to wake them up early in the morning. I did indeed wake up while they were still sleeping, sitting up in bed fidgeting with my sheets, impatient for the big moment. Then a very large rabbit walked into my room. He looked about seven or eight feet tall and he had to duck his head to get into my room.

The rabbit wore a little bowler hat on his head and a vest. He had an Easter basket slung over one arm. The rabbit leaned against my wall with an insouciant air and smiled at me. Needless to say, I was flabbergasted. I opened my mouth to shout It’s the Easter Bunny! but before I could speak, the rabbit put one paw to his face in the Sssh manner, so I stopped mid-scream. I couldn’t take my eyes off his face – he was just fantastic. Then he winked at me and hopped away. When my Dad came to get me, I told him I had seen the Easter bunny and he placated me nicely.

The following year two strange things happened. My Mother was taking me to the homes of all the sick children in the neighborhood so I could catch whatever they had, on the theory that would provide immunization for my adult life. She was particularly concerned that if I had one of those diseases later in life it would make me sterile. Unfortunately I came down with two diseases at once. I can’t remember if it was chicken pox and measles, or measles and mumps, but I was in bad shape. I had a high fever and slept a lot. I remember waking up and struggling to sit up in bed, thinking I’m hot, I’m so hot and how can I get cool? and suddenly my bedroom had become the ocean. I was underwater, but I could breathe and there were lots of beautiful and colorful fish swimming by. It was quite absorbing and quite cool. When the ocean went away, my fever had passed. I told my parents about it and again they did not believe me.

Later that year the strangest event of all happened one night when I was out in the yard, looking at the full moon. I was staring at it intently, looking for the face of the man in the moon, when I had what I think of as an other world experience. I didn’t know who I was. I remember looking down at my body and saying out loud so I’m a little girl with some disgust and then up at the moon asking what am I supposed to do here?

I felt that I didn’t belong in my body and I kept wondering why I had been put here on earth and what my purpose in this life could be. It was so disorienting. After a while my mother broke the spell by calling out It’s time to come in and get ready for bed and I obediently walked into the house in a robotic fashion, trying to adjust quickly to the new scenario. Getting through the pre-bed ritual of brushing teeth, etc. and getting tucked in with the goodnight kisses was a strain for me.

That night I lay in my bed, unable to sleep for a long time, feeling quite uncomfortable. In the morning I decided I had to forget about that strange experience and I did forget it for many years. Then one day many years later, when I was meditating, it all came back to me. It was like watching a movie, but I remembered exactly how I felt that night. It was just like the what am I doing in this container? feeling that came back to me after my first out of the body experience.

When I think about my life and what I have learned, my thoughts turn to the metaphysical events which have occurred to me in my past and also in the present. I do not understand the things which have led me here, or why I had the strange experiences which have altered my reality.

At about the age of ten I read that adults only used seven percent of their brains. I thought that must be a mistake. I asked my father. He said yes, I think that's true - I also read it somewhere. I thought he was mistaken. My science teacher, Mr. Talbot, lived in our neighborhood and I often stopped to chat with him if I found him outside. So I went over to his house, and he was mowing the lawn. I remember the smell of cut grass, the sun-dappled houses and the huge elm trees that shaded the street with the arch of their boughs.

It was a time full of peace and innocence for me. Mr. Talbot seconded my father's opinion, that it was true that we only used seven percent of our brains. I can't tell you how much that bothered me. I thought well, he's a science teacher - he must know. But it couldn't be right and I hoped it just was not right. It made me feel so limited. For about a week after that I asked every adult I spoke to - do you think it's true that we only use seven percent of our brains?

They all said I think that's right or Yes, I've heard something like that. It depressed me to think about it, but I couldn't stop thinking about it. Finally I just couldn't stand the uneasy feeling it brought to my lovely summer. It was like a mosquito bite that wouldn't stop itching. I resolved that I could only deal with this problem by making a promise to myself. I solemnly promised that when I grew up, I would find a way to use more than seven percent of my brain.

Of course, I had no idea how to go about this. But it stayed in the back of my brain and sometimes I would hear about something - usually something strange - and I would think well, you never know, maybe this would work. This later led me to the Rosicrucian’s, to séances, to LSD, to numerology, Ouija boards, ad infinitum.

I think I was twelve years old when I starting putting myself into trances. I was walking home from church one summer day (in my religious period) and trying to remember a prayer, or a psalm. I walked slowly, but with a rhythm and repeated the lines over and over, enjoying the feeling of the hot sun on my body.

Then I started to realize that something in my consciousness had changed. I didn’t understand the concept of consciousness at the time, but I knew my brain felt different and that made me feel different and I liked it. I wondered if the effect was due to the fact that I was reciting something out of the Bible, like a religious swoon of some sort. Later I decided to try something else, and I choose Poe’s Raven poem, which has a great rhythm. It worked even better than the prayer. So not religion. I kept up the walking trance throughout high school, when walking in between classes, and I got the reputation of being very weird.

CHAPTER TWO

LOVE

My first love was named Andy and we met at the age of eight, when my family was at his house on for a Sunday dinner. My father and his father were friends and they both couched Little League because both of our brothers played baseball. After dinner we were sitting around, me on the couch and Andy sitting on the floor. I looked at him and our eyes connected. I remember thinking at the time I really like this boy and then he looked at me and smiled. We started hanging out together then, later both of us were on the same swim team. He was a fantastic diver and I swam 50 and 100 meter breaststroke and backstroke races and relays.

Often we walked home after the races, but when we were on the Lombard Park Commons team either his mom or my mom would pick us up. One night when we got off the bus at the park we couldn’t see either Mothers’ car or we had spent all our money on popcorn and cokes. So we decided to walk home together. It didn’t seem like it could take that long.

We always had a lot to talk about and after we had walked a few blocks chatting he stopped me at the corner and said I have an idea, let’s kiss at each corner. We had been good friends up until then but as soon as he said it my heart leaped and that evening our romance began. At each corner we would stop and kiss and in between we talked and talked. I didn’t get home that night until nearly midnight to find two very worried and angry parents who had called the police to report me missing! I was in hot water after that for a while.

Andy was not very tall and not very handsome but he was cute and sweet and he had a wonderful smile. Which made him perfect for me. He also had a lot of moxie, a good sense of humor and he was just a great person. I remember the night he finally asked me for a date. I wasn’t allowed to formally date until I was sixteen. Andy kept coming over to visit my brother Jeff, but I knew he was really hanging out at my house for me. Then just after my 16th birthday he came over and I answered the door.

Andy stood there and asked me if Jeff was home. I said When are you going to stop pretending you are coming here to see my brother and ask me for a date? And he grinned and said I’ll pick you up at 7:00 tonight. His mother had just bought a beautiful yellow Mustang convertible and she let him use it for our date. It was a beautiful summer night and we cruised to the pool hall with the top down listening to the Everly Brothers and life was dreamy.

We fell more and more in love as the years went by. Andy was a great gymnast and the first one in our state to do a triple back. He also had a love of motorcycles and we had a lot of fun riding around on his bikes. He took me to a dirt bike race track a few times and taught me to ride and most importantly, how to take a fall. Andy had a few different motorcycles over the years but my favorite was his Norton P-11. I remember riding over to a pool hall on it one night when we didn’t have enough money to do anything.

Another thing Andy was good at was playing pool. It wouldn’t take him very long to make the money we needed. Both of us looked younger than we were and I think when he walked into the pool hall people thought he was a dippy little kid and it sure worked for him. He asked me if I would go steady with him when we got our high school rings. I had to put a lot of pink angora around his to keep it on my finger and I still have the ring. When we were nineteen he proposed and I said of course I’ll marry you.

I still have the picture my Dad took when Andy picked me up for our senior prom in his tux, holding my corsage. I was wearing a white gown and we both had big grins on our faces. After the prom we changed and went to the sand dunes where we spent the night with our friends around a camp fire. It was so much fun and so innocent. We did a lot of necking and petting but we were saving ourselves for marriage. How quaint that seems now.

Andy got a gymnastic scholarship to Oklahoma State and I was really depressed that he would be leaving. He delayed until the winter semester and then one night before he left when we were driving around town, in his mother’s Mustang yet again, he drove over to the junior high parking lot. It was completely empty and covered with ice and he started driving really fast with me screaming at him and then he put his foot on the brakes and we spin and spun, but of course there was nothing for us to hit.

I was appalled that he was doing that with his Mom’s beautiful car, but it was so much fun that we laughed until we cried. And when he stopped the car we fell into each other’s arms and cried for real because we both realized at the same moment that it was the last fun we would be having together for a long while.

Andy sent me funny cards and letters every week while he was gone but I could tell Oklahoma was not his sort of place and he wasn’t happy there. One night on a bet he rode his motorcycle up and down the stairs of some old historic building on campus and got himself kicked out. He wasn’t sorry and I was so happy to have him back in town again but his father was not pleased. He got a job with International Harvester which he didn’t really enjoy, but he was kind of lost and didn’t know what else to do. At the time I was working for the Sears Roebuck offices in the city (of Chicago) and I didn’t love my job either, but we were saving money for our marriage.

Andy had a very low draft number and when he learned he was drafted, he decided to enlist with the Marines because he felt that was a notch above the Army. I remember vividly the day he came to tell me that news and what a shock it was to me. I said Are you crazy? The war in Viet Nam was created by a bunch of old men in Congress who are just paranoid about Communism. It doesn’t make sense to me.

He said he was going to fight for his country. I said I wasn’t afraid that the Vietnamese would invade us in their rice boats. We argued about it some more and then finally I said, without thinking "You are going to be a god damned hero and you will die with your