I lost the plot in March of 2019. It started with a psychic reading. I know, you already think I’m crazy but bear with me. She was really good. Like, eerily good. She knew I had a spell in my freezer and told me to take it out during her first reading with me. However, one of the things she told me was that a man was trying to come into my life. She said he wouldn’t come if I didn’t let him but he was trying.
I had been having flash visions of a guy I had met six months prior at camp. I thought he was gay. Someone at camp had told me he was and I love gay boys, they’re safe and I want them all to be my friend. I reached out to every gay boy I had met at camp.
Around this time I decided I needed a break from cannabis. I love it because it helps take my anxiety from an unmanageable 9 to a manageable 7. It also makes it possible for me to sleep through the night, which is a true and honest blessing. The only thing I don’t like about it is that I don’t dream when I am smoking cannabis regularly. Other methods of consumption don’t affect my dreams but smoking does, I’m not sure why. Because of this, I like to take breaks from cannabis for a few months, a few times per year. This time might not have been a good time to take a break.
At the same time as I took my cannabis break, I started chatting with the guy from camp, a nice, safe guy who turned out to be straight and lived thousands of miles away. It was easy peasy and as safe as could be. That’s probably why my delusion clung to him.
I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Complex Type II. What this means is that my mental state is stuck on PTSD. Most people experience PTSD at some point in their lives — they get in a car wreck or see someone seriously injured; they have a near death experience or deadly illness. The experience of PTSD can lead to something called dissociation. For me, dissociation means I suddenly see myself from a third person perspective and my consciousness isn’t in control of my actions anymore. Everything feels like it is in slow motion and every time the triggering memory is accessed, it feels like the situation is happening all over again. PTSD is intense and can change your life, but for many people, the effects go away relatively quickly. That’s PTSD, Type I. Type II is when you really got fucked up somehow or you were really susceptible to getting fucked up in general and the fucked-upness never truly leaves.
Part of my PTSD is that I dissociate. My head will swim and I will feel like I’m watching myself from the outside. However, when I am really triggered, I will dissociate completely. Suddenly, I will freeze in place and the world will pixelate and fade out. I will come back to myself very suddenly, sometimes hours or days later, with no idea of what happened. When I come out of dissociation, I’ll just suddenly blink and find myself in a place I have no idea how I got to. I’ll jump into the conversation I was having without missing a beat while having no idea what I was talking about. People don’t seem to notice that my consciousness just shifted but I’ll suddenly be in first-person control again. Now that I’m an adult, this happens very rarely and usually only for a few minutes, but recently I had an incident that made me wig out.
Soon after I started a lovely online friendship with the guy from camp, my boss got really angry with me at work. We were on a call and he said that I had a document. He stated that I was working to edit it and when it was done, he would send it to the group. I jumped in and said that I hadn’t seen the document yet but that I would be glad to review it that day if someone would please send it to me. I guess my correction of what he’d said, in an attempt to carry out his stated wishes, was offensive to him. Later that morning, we were in his office when he asked me to come stand by him to look at a map. He then said in a vicious voice, right in my face, “I did tell you to do it.” He then raised his fist and took a step towards me and swung hard. He didn’t hit me but he meant to make me flinch. He’s an MMA fighter and wanted me to know he could and would hurt me.
Too bad for him, I dissociated instead of complying. He brushed past me and shoved me a little with his shoulder before sitting back down. I have no idea what I did in response. The world pixelated and I was gone. I woke up the next morning in my own bed with no idea what had happened. I had no idea how I left my boss’s office. I had no idea if I went back to my cubicle or if I left the office and went straight home. I have no idea if I looked before I crossed the street on my two-block walk to my apartment. I don’t know if I walked the dogs or cooked dinner or made sure my 18-year-old son was alive and where he was supposed to be. I lost that entire day.
That’s when the astral visits with my friend from camp started.
The astral realm is kind of like the dream space. It’s a place between worlds. Some religious traditions believe that in this space you can speak with those who have passed to the beyond, or people who are also awake to their own presence in the astral realm, if they choose to hear you. My religious tradition teaches that this is possible. To the average person, this is a cool idea. To a person with delusions, it can cause harm.
The man I had been speaking to online was also in my religious tradition. When I started seeing him in the astral realm, I wasn’t sure if it was real. I was afraid to come right out and ask but I needed to know if he could see this too, so I reached out to him on messenger.
I told him, “It’s not like I can come right out and say it was lovely spending time with you in the astral last night but you should still know it’s true.” He responded with “Do you know what subtext is?” Then he made reference to something I had only said in the astral. I also reached out to my compatriots in my religious group about connecting with people on the astral plane, but only one person answered. That person was also a novice but at a higher level than myself. They agreed that this type of connection could be real, but warned me to be careful. So, I tried to be. I didn’t know I was just strengthening the delusions by entertaining them as true reality.
Camp guy and I did not form an intimate relationship in the astral realm but we did become friends. We shared our traumas and our attempts to overcome them. We showed our souls and what we hoped for. It was sweet and overwhelming. During this time, right after my second true dissociative event as an adult, I was not sleeping at all. I would stay in a trance state all night but would get no rest. I was so tired I could barely concentrate. Benadryl, my go-to for can’t-sleep issues, wasn’t working. Nothing was helping. I even had a leftover sleeping pill from my brain injury the year before but nothing helped. It took almost three weeks before I learned about Kava Root and its benefits for insomniacs. It helped a little but not a lot.
During this time, my son was graduating from high school and his father was on his way to visit for the event. This triggered reminders of what we went through in our ill-advised relationship. I was having some mixed feelings about that situation and I was also extremely anxious about going into the office for work. I have an abuse history — I believe people when they threaten me. I believed my boss might hurt me and I was terrified as a result. I bought a taser and became prone to calling in sick on the days I was required to physically be in the office. I tried to find another job, but I couldn’t seem to find a way to leave.
The astral visits with camp guy got strange when suddenly he showed me himself at someone else’s house. He was getting real cozy on the couch with some people and I didn’t understand why he didn’t come and sit by me. Then, I saw a guy who was very buff with long, dark hair hand off a white paper prescription bag to camp guy. It was ripped slightly and I could see a needle sticking out the side. Someone said “HGC.” I freaked out and found myself beside his mother’s bed. I told her what I had seen and she said “Oh no.” Then I woke up. I was very anxious the next day because I felt I had tattled on the guy from camp. His business is not my own.
He told me he had some stuff to take care of after that. He promised he wasn’t mad at me, and then he was gone. I didn’t hear from him in the astral realm or the real world for two months.
I was extremely anxious about whether these situations had really happened at all. These were not sexual fantasies but intimate ones. It was extremely strange and hard for me to believe, but they felt so very real.
By the time two months had passed with no visions, I was sure it had all been hallucinations from no sleep and leftover complications from having a cerebrospinal fluid leak, dry brain, brain droop, and meningitis. Camp guy still messaged me on social media occasionally and I would answer. Then I found myself living alone for the first time in my life. It wasn’t a good time for me to be alone. The visions returned with a vengeance.
I had two strange incidents in my astral state that made me believe camp man was having some trouble emotionally. The return of these astral interactions that I wasn’t sure were real was distressing to me. My anxiety spiraled and gnawed on worry for my son, fears for my safety at work, and the ever-increasing hostility from my boss and his boss. It was all too much for my healing brain.
I didn’t have any more delusions for another month or so, but around the end of August, they started again. They picked back up the night I arrived in New Orleans for a two-week training at my job’s largest office. During the layover of my flight from LA to NOLA, my son called me, crying hysterically. His girlfriend had broken up with him.
The girl my son was dating has been his girlfriend since the 9th grade. My son doesn’t make friends easily and usually keeps a small circle. Everyone he lets into his life is important to him and his girlfriend was the most important person in the entire world to him. Last year, one of my best friends from high school lost his nephew to suicide. The boy was the same age as my son and had killed himself after his girlfriend since 7th grade broke up with him.
I couldn’t return home. My son was in Los Angeles with no one to turn to. He lived in an apartment with his girlfriend and now she was gone. His other friends couldn’t console him. He was isolated with no family and no support. He asked me to come home but it wasn’t possible, I had to be at this training. The stress was mounting inside me. I was terrified he would hurt himself and I wouldn’t be able to stop him.
The stress caused me to have flashbacks from my own childhood. These flashbacks come upon me as I’m trying to fall asleep and leave me in a sleepless trance that lasts all night long. They leave me exhausted, physically and emotionally.
This was the window the delusions needed to enter my mind again. After I returned home from my trip to find my son and his girlfriend reconciled, the delusions didn’t go away.
I was irrationally upset about everything. So much so that I threw some serious self-hate at myself. I started having intrusive, negative thoughts. I was afraid camp guy would kill himself and I would be at fault because we were fighting so much. Suddenly, after months of talking to him in the astral, my mind would say ‘murderer’ every time I thought about him. It was distressing to me. I was afraid I was going to drive him over the suicidal edge.
This was the moment when I started to want to break the delusion.
Don’t get me wrong, I already knew this wasn’t real. I chanted it to myself all the time: “This isn’t real. This isn’t real. Even if it’s real in the astral, it isn’t real.” I started looking at some practices from within my religion to keep intrusive thoughts away and to provide myself with a kind of psychic shield. I started doing meditations on the truth and hearing/seeing/feeling/speaking/knowing the truth. My delusion started to break down.
Camp guy and I had a huge astral fight. My delusion disappeared for about two weeks but I was extremely upset that camp guy was gone. I was beyond worried for my imaginary friend; I cried for days.
This part of the delusion tipped me over into truly believing it was real. I couldn’t fully believe when the delusion was being nice and helpful, I doubted constantly when it was being compassionate and kind, but I instantly believed it with a passion as soon as it hurt me the way I have been hurt too many times in my life.
I might have been in the grips of insanity, but I wasn’t unaware that something wasn’t right. I started therapy in an attempt to deal with my intrusive thoughts and PTSD. I was having severe panic attacks almost every day, the worst of which made my arms and legs go numb and my chest feel like it was being compressed. I thought I was having a stroke. I couldn’t move at all.
I was on another cannabis break; Gods help me, why I do that to myself, I do not know. I was having constant flashbacks and disturbing new memories arising in my mind. When these memories arise for me, I feel them as if they are happening now and get lost in them so I’m not able to consciously participate in the world. I was also in the throes of Saturn and Pluto going direct after being retrograde together in Capricorn, the sign of my Moon, for months. It’s a little floofy, I know, but I believe that would affect me and so it does.
I spilled this crazy story of betrayal by my best friend across Facebook and immediately people contacted me asking what had happened. When my friends heard the story, they set me straight about how Not Real my story was. I was smart enough not to name any names in my online ranting but I was not smart enough to not post that shit at all. I quickly took it down, but then my nervous breakdown took a turn.
Instead of breaking down because of this horrific betrayal I had experienced, now I was breaking down about the fact that I was so delusional that I had been hallucinating on and off for months. I really acted on the stuff I made up in my own head. The worst part is, my logical brain never believed any of it was happening but my emotions latched on and wouldn’t let go. My emotions believed enough that my brain got shoved to the backseat. I had truly lost my mind.
This triggered the worst and deepest wound of the childhood abuse I have suffered; my Chiron wound. My groomer and my parents would gaslight me terribly when I was a kid. They would tell me that the abuse I suffered and saw others suffer wasn’t real. They would say that I dreamed it, that I imagined it and it never occurred. They would tell me I didn’t know what was real. They did these things to make it easier to control an abused child. Spread rumors that a kid lies and has a wild imagination and no one will ever believe them again. They won’t ever believe themself again.
I have never been able to be sure what is real. That’s why I love social media. Someone will validate the reality of my situation anytime I need it. This time, they invalidated my reality and set me free from erroneous delusions. I’m very thankful for both. Unfortunately, my emotions were shot after cognitive dissonance hit me.
It took days for me to calm down enough to admit that I knew these delusions were not real. I had fought them and questioned them in the real world and had tried to get someone to say they were or were not real many times. I had talked about the goings-on in therapy but my brain is so rational, even when it is insane, that my therapist didn’t question my situation. The sad fact was that I was the only person who could say what was fantasy and what was reality. My mental state after a serious brain injury and a very triggering PTSD experience made me choose the wrong option in the question of what’s real and what’s not.
I am now on the other side of what I believe to have been delusions as a side product of severe dissociation. I was working with a therapist to redirect my intrusive thoughts but I think I used the power of suggestion too strongly. I’m supposed to redirect my mind and hold on to reality, not redirect my mind and create a whole new reality. I hope practice makes perfect with this technique.
My therapist says I picked camp guy because he was safe and friendly. He was also really far away which made him a safe avatar for my mind to manipulate, as well. He was the kind of person I like to be friends with and we were friends, which made it easier to lose my grip on what was real and what wasn’t.
On the exact day that Pluto — the lord of the underworld who oversees our shadow selves, our obsessions, and delusions — turned direct, I was set free from my own shadowy delusion. The crash-out is a story for another time but the outcome is indisputable. I walked through the valley of the Dark Night of the Soul and I survived. Barely, but I did survive.
Hail the mighty Pluto and his companion during this retrograde in Capricorn: Saturn, the lord of karmic lessons and renewal. I have certainly had my emotional worldview reaped and reborn as a whole new construct. I just wish the experience had been more gentle, but isn’t that the way everyone feels about cataclysmic change? I’ve lived in the lofty towers of my delusional mind and smashed back to the hard reality of Earth but I am more whole and healthy than I was before. I understand myself and my own needs to a greater degree than I had ever been willing to know. I know a path forward, and I’ve heard the warning of what could happen if I ignore my PTSD. It could shatter my reality in an instant. It might have been difficult knowledge to obtain, but I do now know.