B E B E R E

I've always been a very powerful, violent dreamer. I know that I've hit people, wandered places, danced, talked quite animatedly in several languages since I was a child. The following is an account I made (a study on prose poetry - think symbolists, think Baudelaire) of a particularly intense experience I had in my first weeks adjusting to a new world.

Too much information, maybe, but I don't tend to abide by the new-age term "astral projection." There is a clinical term for this; it's called dissociation and often times severely physically abused people happen into it as a means of self-preservation. I believe it is most commonly found among child abuse victims, rape victims, women who work in prostitution, and occasionally people who have been tortured. Another theoretical manifestation of this is multiple personality, though I don't know if it's something real or if it's a dramatizing by the media of some sort of compartmentalization.

I got so good at dissociating that sometimes during meetings at work, I'd float out of my body and just sit in a corner near the ceiling and watch things going on from overhead. The hardest thing in the world was to train myself to stay in my body when I felt threatened. Now, I'm pretty good at that and haven't had a relapse of leaving myself in probably about four years.

I don't particularly like the story so much...too repetetive and very uneven. Even today, nearly 15 years after I dreamed the dream, I still have fond recollections of it. I did actually transcribe the melody and keep it in a notebook in my piano bench, though I don't think I'll ever want to play it.