Ew...insomnia. I prolly shouldn't have eaten so close to going to bed, because I have this strange knack that some knife-murderer is in my house, LOL. Nightmares...paranoia. Lovely. And I went to bed at ten, so I'm not likely to be able to sleep through the entire night. I have been a night person lately; apparently, it's a teen thing. All I can think of while I try to sleep and can't push the images of the knife-murderer out of my mind is of that Green Day song:
Artist: Green Day
Album: Insomniac
Title: Brain Stew


I'm having trouble trying to sleep
I'm counting sheep but running out
As time ticks by
And still I try
No rest for crosstops in my mind
On my own... here we go
My eyes feel like they're gonna bleed
Dried up and bulging out my skull
My mouth is dry


My face is numb
F***** up and spun out in my room
On my own... here we go
My mind is set on overdrive
The clock is laughing in my face
A crooked spine
My senses dulled
Passed the point of delerium
On my own... here we go

The images aren't particularly pretty, but I must say: the clock laughing in the face is a good one. I've done that before, several times. Especially when I have a test the next day, need my sleep, and am constantly calculating my possible amount of sleep while I try to sleep. I've watched it go from nine hours to four, and less. Ahhh! At least it's the summer, and I can sleep in. If I can do that! Anyway, I need to rid my mind of the thoughts about getting knife-murdered. Maybe I was murdered by a knife in a past-life, LOL. I've been reading this book by Brian Weiss called Many Lives, Many Masters It's very good, let me tell you. Very enjoyable. Anyway, it's got some interesting things to digest. This psychologist, Brian Weiss, had a new patient, named Catherine, who had a lot of symptoms all at once. Paranoia was one of them. She was terrified of drowning, getting choked, getting trapped in tight places, falling, and other things. She couldn't sleep ever at night, as she tossed and turned three or more hours before falling asleep, and then when she did sleep the serenity sleep is supposed to bring was contaminated by several recurring nightmares. One of them was that she was crossing a bridge, and while she was crossing it, it collapsed. Brain Weiss was positive he could cure her. He had had several patients with similar symptoms. Usually the symptoms of that sort were elicited by past experiences, mostly in the childhood. Brian asked her several questions about her childhood. To his surprise, she didn't remember very much of it. He suggested several times some psychotherapy drugs, but she had a fear of choking, and was unable to swallow pills. When he suggested that she try hypnosis, a process of puttin one into a major state of relaxation and thus sharpening their memory to quite and extent, she shivered and dismissed the idea. However, two years of intense psychotherapy passed, and Catherine was doing no better. She agreed to do the hypnosis, as she wanted to get better.

Brian was proud to claim that he had brought several of his patients back to their third year of life through hypnosis, helping them remember many traumatic events, and every detail of them to help cure them of the damage it did to their psychology. He was sure he could do the same with Catherine. The next several weeks, he put her under hypnosis, and they talked about several traumatic events in her childhood. One of them was that someone pushed her off the diving-board when she was five, and she almost drowned. Catherine claimed, however, that she was terrified of water even before that. Brian was discouraged when he spent so much time focusing on her childhood, and none of her symptoms were relieved. In fact, they were exacerbating. What was he doing wrong? What was he missing? Finally, one day, Brian asked Catherine, under hypnosis, to go back to the memory that started her symptoms. Catherine started talking then about a reality that had nothing to do with her. She said:

"I see white steps leading up to a building, a big white building with pillars, open in front. There are no doorways. I'm wearing a long dress...a sack made of rough material. My hair is braided, long blond hair." Brian was confused, and asked her what her name was, and what the year was. "Aronda...I am eighteen. I see a marketplace in front of the building. There are baskets...you carry the baskets on your shoulders. We live in a valley...There is no water. The year is 1863 B.C. The area is barren, hot, and sandy..." Catherine continued to describe a past life. She said that she had a daughter, and the daughter had the same soul as her current neice, with whom she was very close. Her life ended at a young age when a bunch of waves came through her village and killed everyone. Thus...the fear of drowning.

After that session, Brian wasn't sure what to believe. He had never believed in reincarnation. Catherine believed it, because what she remembered from her past-lives, she remembered so vividly. Brian immediately researched the Christian religion and found out that reincarnation was in both the new and old testaments. Roman emperor Constanine the Great and his mother, Helena, deleted the references with reincarnation because of power. When people had faith that they could find their way to enlightenment over a span of several lifetimes, what pressured them to get a move-on? The concept that they would go immediately to hell if they did not act as good Christians was much more controlling than the concept that they were to just try and grow closer to enlightenment somewhat in the next several lifetimes. Shortly after that, the Christian religion considered the concept of reincarnation a heresy. It was no longer openly accepted.

Anyway, that's something to think about. It was in the testaments. There is scientific evidence of it, and Catherine's case is only one of thousands. Should someone say she was out of her mind, Brian Weiss would definitely argue. Sometime, in her phase of hypnosis, Brian's dead son and father contacted him through her. She did not know anything about his private life. But she spoke of what his father and son wanted to say to him. Catherine also went on a tour in Egypt, where she corrected the tour guide on misinterpreted information. Her corrections were indeed correct. She had a past-life in Egypt, and had a few scattered memories about its history that the tour-guide had not gotten down.

Creepy, eh?

Oh, and there have also been several cases of children being able to speak languages they were never exposed to, and they claimed that they once lived in the place that spoke those languages. That is seriously creepy, also. Hey! Maybe I can do regression therapy and see if I remember a life where I spoke French, and then I can go to French class and be like "Whoa, this is pie." LOL. Anyway, this stuff is kind of shocking, because it totally contradicts what I have believed in the past. Suddenly, death doesn't seem so scary, you know? And when someone dies, it's not good-bye forever. That is a very comforting thought. AND if someone screws up in one life, they don't have to be terrified of going to hell. I would think that it would take more than one lifetime for someone to be able to learn, to be able to understand, life, love, and such. To be able to be wise enough, and deserving enough for whatever comes after the lives we live in physical state. Apparently, there is so much more after this. There are several planes of existence, and the physical world is only one. If there is heaven in the end (And it might be something like heaven, but remember: The Bible is interpreted by human beings of a time of limited knowledge. If the concept of heaven was something too complex and different than anything they could understand, then there would definitely be holes in what they told us. All we can really trust is the direct quotes from the adcanced souls, like Jesus Christ, who knew what they were talking about. Oh! And you know what's really cool? One of Weiss's later patients said he saw Jesus. After one of his lives, when he died, he had lived a very bad life, and was a very bad man. He went to the place where you wait to be born again, and visualized that he was in hell. He saw fire, and he saw hell surrounding him. Jesus approached him and all the fire disappeared. "Things are often only what you see them as," Jesus said. The man stopped visualizing the fire. He lived again, and he payed his debts in his following lives.

Anyway, it's four in the morning. I'm going to go try and sleep again. I've done enough pondering to perhaps satisfy my brain for an hour or two. What I've been pondering, too, is a lot more positive than the thought of getting a knife shoved into my gut. No eating before bed for me again! LOL. Time to try and soothe my exhaustion...