No Sleep Till Brooklyn -OR- I Start to Believe Again

When I was a kid I always wanted to grow up and not be a kid anymore. The only thing I really loved about childhood was baseball, Christmas and sleeping in. To be honest only one or two birthdays even stand out to me as memorable. Not too many trips or toys or really anything about my childhood made me want to “never grow up, be a Toys-R-Us kid.”

One thing I do remember is how much I stopped believing in things. Santa? Nope. Mom and one of her friends Lynn Brown (I will forever love both of them and don’t blame them for this) ruined Santa for me one Christmas Eve when after a few too many drinks, decided playing with my toys was too much fun to pass up and made just a bit too much noise. I never will forget waking up and thinking, ‘Santa is here!’ I, like a ninja, snuck down some stairs to spy the man who was such a fixture in my childhood. But no. There was no fat man only two women and a bottle of wine hunched in front of the tree laughing it up with the entire cast of Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The next morning, the rouse was over. Innocence lost.

I, like you dear reader, have similar stories for the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, and Pro Wrestling. Ok, yes, as a kid I thought it was real! I admit it. Fairies, wizards, talking animals, trolls, goblins, The Boogie Man, ghosts, witches, they were all so real and everywhere. But one by one they all fell to the wayside just like childhood.

Think about it. I’m sure at least one person reading this has broken a bone because as a kid they thought they were invincible. You look back and say, no it’s because I was stupid. No, you thought it would work because you believed that it would work. We all did. Whether it was a story we told because we believed it to be true or something we did because we believed a certain Fat Man at the North Pole had a list on us, we did it because we believed it.

I’ve been around enough kids to know that they all go through the Why stage. Why? Why? Why? It’s annoying as hell. But it helps a child fill in all the “gaps” in the world around them. What I’ve recently learned is; there are no gaps. They already know. We all do. We know, we just get a 1,001 answers to our 1,001 Whys that keep us from believing what we know. It’s called indoctrination.

For me a lot of the answers to questions I had came from Church. Ghosts, fairies, witches… Devil’s work; not real. Why? God. I knew Santa wasn’t to be messed with so I surely knew God wasn’t even to be questioned. God killed the wizards and talking birds. At least that’s what I was told.

What I came to “believe” was that God watched over me and was to be feared and obeyed. That’s not what I knew when I was a kid. What I knew was that I was swimming in God. Excuse the visual there dear reader but that is basically the truth of the matter; we are all swimming in God. We cannot separate we are not different from and we cannot leave ‘the source’ of us. We were taught to forget that and the knowledge that we were born with was explained away from us. We started to believe a myth and were taught that truth was instead the myth.

Without going into a deep spiritual monologue here, I wanted to address something completely different: My apartment is haunted. (I know there was an absence of a transition there). So here… I have never been a big believer in ghosts. I've always felt a sense that there should be ghosts and that there are people on the other side that ‘live’ on a different plane than us. Long story short; we die, our bodies stay, we move on. And, there is one such individual living in my apartment. He (and I’m pretty sure it’s a he) is just kind of hanging out though and generally in my bathroom. He doesn't seem to bother anything and he doesn’t really bother me other than the fact that he’s making me face some truths that I’ve tied to ignore in the past, mainly, the existence of ghosts and the whole idea of the simultaneous existence of another plane.  

I’ve recently also done a few psychic exercises that have opened my eyes to other ideas and ways in which those ideas can get from the source and the collective conscience into our individual conscience. I, along with millions around the world (you too), have experienced things as adults that we have been taught to believe is just in our imagination. “You’re just using your imagination.” As a kid this was accepted. As an adult, well, not so much.

However dear reader, I am starting to believe again. I’m starting to believe that the man in my apartment is not separate from me and that he is from the same source and he may just be there to teach me something or just point me towards what I already know. I’m starting to believe that the birds just may have something to say and that a tree has seen more than I’ll ever comprehend and I need to listen to that.

I went to bed at midnight last night and woke up at 2 a.m. I tossed and turned till 4 a.m. and then decided, ‘Fuck it! I’m not sleeping tonight.’ My mind wouldn't stop moving and I could not get comfortable, so I just moved to the couch and decided to watch The Hobbit since I had not made time to do so since the movie came out. It reminded me of my childhood, when I read the book, and how it made me believe in all kinds of things. Why did I stop? How much of that is still real and how much of that have I just convinced myself isn't?

Now I’m not saying that I expect to see a wood elf or a hobbit anytime soon and I certainly don’t expect a fat man in a red coat to come give me presents on December 25^th (But if you do still exist Santa, I’d really like some hats and a new laptop this year). What I am saying is that there are a lot of things out there that I have previously dismissed that I am now starting to see once again only this time, I’m surrounded by people who are willing to help me believe rather than tell me why I’m wrong.

I may not sleep as well sometimes, but I’m a whole lot more awake all the time.