I began to deep dive into astral projection, meditation, lucid dreaming, reiki and so forth. I was really an avid experimenter in naturally altered states of consciousness. My family, on my mom’s side, in Michigan got me into Reiki and showed me another world of energy work.
Before long I was able to record hours of notes going into detail on my dreams, upon waking in the morning. I would have to wake up an hour or two earlier before school just to record everything. But lucid dreaming and exploring these states of consciousness became a kind of escape for me. At a time when school and home life seemed to be uncontrollably falling apart.. I could reliably dive into my meditation or dream exploration and have a sense of adventure and control over my reality. Imagine what a 14 year-old kid would do in his dreams if he had complete control over his reality? You guessed it.. I would get into all kinds of ‘trouble’ in my dreams and wake up with no consequences. Except the one time I dreamt I got into trouble and went to jail and thought I had really messed up on knowing whether I was dreaming or not. But I did eventually wake up and thankfully I wasn’t in jail!
I stopped by explorations into the astral realm sometime at the age of 15 when I started to have experiences of the astral realms ‘blending’ into my waking life. There were a few times I witnessed creatures in the room or heard noises, or felt a presence .. and one time I ran into my brothers room I was so scared, and 5 minutes later the stereo was blaring and the door knob was rattling even though it was late and everyone was sleeping. I sat up and everything stopped.
There was another time I had a dream while I was sick of cells dividing.. At first it started out very slowly but then they divided more and more and there was a slight noise in the background but as the cells began to divide faster and faster and get into the billions the sound also grew increasingly louder until it was just a roar and pictures were flowing through my vision field so fast I couldn’t keep up. Then I woke up and the visions and sounds did not stop. It was very scary for me at the time as I had no basis for what I was experiencing.. Now I can relate it to all the energy work I was doing.. Yogi’s explain of all kinds of phenomenon occurring as you develop your energies / Kundalini rising. I’m not saying I’m enlightened or that I raised my Kundalini all the way.. I’m just saying that weird stuff started happening as a result of whatever I was doing.
As a result of these strange, unexplainable and increasingly unavoidable experiences.. I backed off on my spiritual explorations and I began to focus more on the material world and getting free from the obligations of money.. By earning enough to where I wouldn’t have to worry about it.
8TH GRADE IN THE FLORIDA KEYS
During my 8th grade year we all moved to Islamorada in the Florida Keys as a family.
We lived on the water in a high rise condo. I think it had always been my father’s dream to live in a place like that.
I remember starting out as a new kid that nobody really knew or liked and ended up feeling like one of the most popular kids at the school as I liked to challenge my teachers, be the class clown and was pretty fearless in football. Plus the 7th and 8th grade was smaller. Whereas my brother was connected to a much bigger school and wasn’t the oldest in the school, many of the kids there had come down from Miami and were a bit more cruel than at the school I was going to.
I remember running by his school one day on my way home for lunch (breaking the rules that I should stay at school for lunch).. And one of the kids at my brothers school just looked at me as I ran and said “You better run or I’ll f*ck you in the a**” .. That was the kind of energy around his school.
FOOTBALL IN THE KEYS – THE BUCKEYES
I used to love football as a kid. Watching all the Dolphin games and even going to many of the games in Miami with my dad during this time.
It’s no surprise that I had dreams of being a quarterback and a National football star. It’s just nobody informed my DNA that I needed to be about 100 lbs heavier and 5 inches taller to really compete at the highest level.
When given the opportunity to either play on the Junior Varsity league (just 8th graders) OR join the Varsity team and play at a higher level, I chose the bigger challenge (mostly 9th graders). This was a mistake. While the JV league was apparently more organized and better coached, the Varsity team was being coached by a felon. His first objective was to make sure all the kids got toughened up as quickly as possible with exercises like “Hamburger hill” where we would literally just line up and smash into each other as hard as we could. It didn’t matter if you were a 100 lb guy going up against a 200 lb guy. Or a quarter back smashing up with a line backer.. You were going to get tough as nails in this drill. Unfortunately the unfair match ups had their limits on the human body, and rendered some kids inoperable for the rest of the season. Kids were limping out of these sessions, bleeding, quitting. I felt like a freaking gladiator during these drills and refused to give up.
It wasn’t long though before kids started complaining and parents stepped in to ask for a different coach. Pretty soon the convicted felon was out and a nice dad with very little coaching experience stepped in to get us kids ready for our first game.
I remember playing the role of Quarterback which was always my dream role, but for whatever reason being in a negative headspace about my abilities. I used to be so good at the QB role but for whatever reason I was having a hard time with all the drama swirling at a new school, a new league etc. and the cooperation between individual players was terrible. We weren’t a unified team but a divided group of individuals who could barely agree on much.
Our team was so small that we had to play both offense and defense, against better organized and larger teams. We were doomed from the start.. Losing games with scores like 0 to 56. After several games with more players quitting, we dwindled down to where we couldn’t even manage all the positions, even while playing both offense and defense and eventually the Varsity Buckeyes of Islamorada just dissolved.