Halloween, Northglenn, Colo – 1966 (P3 of 3)

My perceptions reeled into an echo-chamber, the constant pounding of a rhythmic machine, like a pile-driver, smashing a steel beam into the ground. A sudden shift to standing on a cliffs edge, tittering, unbalanced, looking down into a dark abyss, daring me to jump into the void forever. A soft voice from beyond, barely audible, beckoned me to return to the present time.

Again, my 4th-grade teacher, Ms. Shuburg, sat on the folding chair in the corner of the room.

The more I peered into her blue eyes, the more relaxed my body, and an overall feeling of peace, like a gentle wave of the sea, splashed over me, once again returning to my origins, that one safe space most of us can never remember.

Ms Shuburg spoke to me, though only in my mind, as her beautiful red lips never moved.

“I want to show you images from the future, circumstances and situations, possible futures, based on what decisions you make for yourself. None of these futures are set in stone in this existence, but alternative lives, that are existing too, as we face each other now”:

Similar to watching a large movie screen, I see my self having sex with a pretty girl no more than 15 years of age; we are the same age, and I'm drunk and having an orgasm, I lift myself off the bed and stumble down the stairs in horror, feeling I had committed the most egregious of acts imaginable. The scene changes, and the girl is holding a child, a crowd surrounds her, and everyone is happy. A sudden cut and I'm watching us at a wedding ceremony. Later, the girl and I are much older, arguing with the child now grown. A new cut in the film, much older now, standing by the gravesite of the girl, my wife, now dead, and feeling the pain of loss and anger that she has left us too soon.

The scene changes and I'm with another woman, around twenty years of age, and I know we're married. Our surroundings are dirty, unkempt, and smells of week-old rubbish. We are sharing drugs while a toddler waddles across the room, smudged in mud, wearing soiled pajamas. After injecting the drug, the woman, my partner, falls into unconsciousness and dies because she has overdosed. I appear panic-stricken, pacing the room in a drug-induced frenzy.

Now viewing a ceremony at a prestigious university, feeling pride because my son has graduated with honors; the person next to me is a beautiful middle-aged woman, who shares my pride for our son.

Now I'm standing on the deck of a large ocean-liner. I can feel the sea breeze and smell the salt in the air. I look terribly old and alone. In the next moment, I see myself jump over the railing into the ocean and drown.

Now surrounded by the unrelenting sounds of gunfire. We're sitting in a hole as the bullets whizz over us. And my friend lays beside me wounded, bleeding, ready to die, but there is no way out of the hole to save him as the enemy is everywhere. The dying man turns to me and says, “Remind never to join the service for a stupid war like this one. Hell, man, we shouldn't even be in Vietnam; it's their damn country, for fuck sake!”

The movie screen begins to flicker and grow dark. Though I can see my two sisters and myself fully grown, laughing at my younger sister's child's antics, acting the fool for the family. It's there I realize he'll be a famous actor one day on the Broadway stage...

The screen goes completely black, and I'm now sitting with Ms. Shuburg in the makeshift room in my home, and I remember that it's Halloween.

I hear my father's frustrated voice from behind me. “C'mon Craig. Give us a hand taking all this shit down. You got to go to school in the morning.” Turning back, my 4th-grade teacher had miraculously vanished.

Many years later, I read about quantum theory and the notion of the multi-universe. Can it be possible that there are thousands of other 'selves,' living similar lives, in different dimensions? Does our so-called destiny solely depend on those seemingly indiscriminate choices that we make every day? In one dimensional existence, did I really marry my childhood sweetheart and live happily ever after? In this dimension, I managed to escape going to Vietnam, but in another, was I drafted and watched a friend die in a hole right in front of me? Perhaps. It's an interesting notion to consider.

Science has moved beyond what is called biological determinism. Actual consciousness cannot be explained in basic Newtonian terms. Quantum Physics has revealed that a rock is not simply a rock, that at its most basic level, there is an awareness that cannot be entirely explained. Existence and perception, that is, consciousness, remains to be a mystery.

Over the years I had put this insane incident out of my mind. For certain, at that age, I had been experiencing everything from lizard heads appearing on my chest while sleeping in bed to Nazi soldiers chasing me through the house, only to then awake, back to this dimension, hearing the soft sound of my mother's voice, reading poetry.