CHANGES

CHANGES

Following my dream “Aerial,” I experienced an altered state of consciousness—one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life—that I chronicled in a series of vignettes:

“Literally overnight, a startling change has come over me. I have incomprehensibly achieved a vivid sense of my life’s continuity. I am discovering…

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PRESCIENT?

PRESCIENT?

As I reread my dream, what strikes me now is how prescient it seems: The two sets of windows I escape through could represent the two “institutional” jobs I would hold in my twenties and thirties, the first at Seven Hills School, the second at Tiburon College. The...

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PRESCIENT

PRESCIENT

“Last night I had this dream: “It was evening in a room of my imagination. I discovered that with a bird-like stroke of arms, I could rise into the air and float above the floor. I called in passersby for a demonstration and found, to my mortification, that I couldn’t...

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DELIRIUM

DELIRIUM

“Somewhere beyond gaze

myriad lilies are spinning beneath the sun

One flesh presses another

both shivering with forgetfulness

My white room is hot and bright

my body abuzz

cell and germ contending

Somewhere beyond hearing

a perpetual waterfall rains on a…

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EMBATTLED

“Sickness and a vacation from the habit of teaching…and I see myself, though I hardly recognize what I see. I would cry except that my sense of bewilderment is almost greater than my pain. I’m remembering the desperation that used to send me running out into the night...

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DEAD END

“Write? I can only dump out my soul like a pile of smelly laundry. Write? Feeling subhuman, what do I have of humanity to communicate? I can’t see anything clearly, least of all myself, except in odd dreams, when I’m caught in the sweep of a searchlight. In the day...

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