The 1960s drug culture triggered an interest in Native American shamanism, which crystallized around the popular books by Carlos Castenada. Carlos reported alleged transcripts of conversations and experiences with a Yaqui shaman he called Don Juan. Confidants of Castenada’s revealed that many of his far-fetched tales, particularly in the later books, were fabrications, but the underlying concepts were valuable to many people—including my mother. She became aware that there could be an alternate reality surrounding us, in which unseen spiritual forces are guiding us. With the proper spiritual instruction and practice, it was possible to enter into the “second attention” and have direct contact with these entities. These concepts inspired my mother to begin writing her dreams down in notebooks she kept by the side of her bed, and she found that they provided useful guidance in symbolic form. I heard about this from a very young age, and began remembering my own dreams as well—often in vivid detail.
Dad managed to get another job at GE, and his parents helped us move into a three-bedroom, one-bath house in Scotia, New York, on the other side of the Mohawk River, just opposite Schenectady. This gave Dad an easy commute that was never more than fifteen minutes even in rush-hour traffic. Our move-in date happened to be October 31—Halloween—1973. I was fortunate enough to live in this house throughout the entire remainder of my childhood and adolescence, and Mom held on to it until after my younger brother graduated from college in 1997. We lived fairly close to a military base in Glenville, and occasionally an enormous C-130 Hercules aircraft would fly over the yard at an astonishingly low altitude. This created tremendous noise and a vibration you could feel in your chest, and the plane was so large it almost covered the entire sky. It was an extremely powerful, even shocking event every time I got to witness it in the backyard. I started having many dreams where I saw similarly huge flying craft in the yard—except in these dreams the craft were huge, cigar-shaped cylinders with no wings. They also made no sound, and had an odd fluttering motion as they traveled over the land. My mother had very similar craft appearing in her dreams as well.
It may be hard for millennials to understand that there were only four television stations to choose from at the time—CBS, ABC, NBC, and PBS, the Public Broadcasting System, which was commercial-free and relied on donations from its audience to stay on the air. The most significant and well-produced shows appeared at “prime time,” beginning at eight p.m., and with only three networks and PBS to choose from, the selection was quite limited. This meant much of America was watching the same programs. By far, the two shows that my father never missed were M*A*S*H, which took place in the Korean War, and Happy Days, which presented an idealized view of fifties culture. My mother only tolerated TV, unless it was educational programming for children. She would often get up and walk around or leave the room entirely while the TV was on.
My mother sat and read to me from books ever since I was an infant, pointing at the words as she said them aloud. She very quickly got me watching educational television programs on PBS, particularly Jim Henson’s classic Sesame Street. We never missed a day of it from as early as I can remember. The show did a great job of teaching children how to read. I remember seeing profile images of people’s faces as they verbalized the sounds of certain letters or syllables, and then the image of those letters would pop out of their mouths. In some cases they would assemble words this way. You got to see how the word was spelled and what the letters all sounded like together. There was also the Count, a puppet vampire character who verbalized various numbers as they appeared on screen, and taught you the order in which you would count them. This, combined with daily story time, led me to have the ability to read by the time I was two. By the time I entered kindergarten at age five, I was significantly ahead of most of my classmates.
My father started his own local pop culture newspaper called KITE in 1970–71 and wrote articles promoting major rock bands that were coming into town to do concerts. This made him very valuable to the record labels, who saw this publicity as critical to the financial success of their shows. As a result, we had a brown United Parcel Service van pull up to the house every afternoon and drop off two-foot-square cardboard boxes of varying thicknesses, from half an inch to as much as two inches deep. Inside them were precious jewels: all the latest releases from every major record label in existence. It was normal to receive two or three boxes a day. We received copies of almost every new rock album in existence, whether they succeeded or not—and most never did. Each album was marked in some way, such as having a hole punched out of the cardboard jacket, the corner of the jacket sliced off, or a big stamp that said FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY. The labels included Arista, Columbia, CBS, Atlantic, and Warner Brothers. Dad was also given free tickets to every concert, as well as backstage passes—giving him direct access to the heroes who were making the magic happen.
Dad would come home from GE at around 5:20 p.m. in a suit and tie, have the dinner that Mom had waiting for us at the table, and then go upstairs and change into a T-shirt, blue jeans, sneakers, and a flannel shirt. All the best rock albums of the time were played after dinner, and they fit into neat forty-four-minute chunks of time, divided into twenty-two-minute sides. The TV went on at seven p.m. to watch the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite; Cronkite was considered “the most trusted man in America.” Dad never missed the news, and felt that it was vitally important that he watch it in order to ensure that “the world is safe for democracy,” as Cronkite would often say. I invariably watched every single broadcast with him over the years, and was fully aware of what was going on in the world as a result.
Friday night was often reserved for a rock music marathon after Walter Cronkite. Led Zeppelin’s classic albums were played far more than anything else, particularly I, II, and IV, and Dad very much liked their heavy blues influences. I also heard all the classic Rolling Stones albums, and the first four Aerosmith records—the American answer to Led Zeppelin, who were also very popular for their hard-rocking blues influences. I also heard many sixties classics, including Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Doors, and the Moody Blues, as well as seventies psychedelic gold such as Pink Floyd’s Meddle and Tangerine Dream’s Rubycon. (For some reason Dad disliked the Beatles and never played any of their music, because he felt they were overexposed—and thus I hadn’t heard most of their songs until I started listening to them in 2010, when I investigated why they had such a powerful historical impact.) My father would often get up and dance when he played these albums, along with my mother and me, giving this music a deep, almost subconscious positive association in my mind. I had no idea at the time that there were any negative associations with the Rolling Stones. My father didn’t take any of it seriously. Many other bands would follow similar paths as time went on, presenting a mystical aura to their listeners. It is important to remember that the Cabal does not expect to create any sudden changes in the people who are exposed to this media. Their goal is a gradual, long-term introduction of Luciferian symbolism to the public. They plan to create an eventual hostile global takeover and establish a New World Order, in which everyone is required to accept these new beliefs or be imprisoned, tortured, or killed.
Every Saturday, my father would sit at the fold-out living-room table, which we rarely ever used, and type up his latest articles, which he called “columns,” on a gray-and-blue Smith Corona electric typewriter. During this time I was not allowed to talk to him or make any noise in the area, and that rule was strictly in place until he had finished. He would interview many of these bands by telephone; he had a funny black suction cup from Radio Shack that he would stick on the receiver, allowing him to record a barely audible version of the call onto a cassette while he also took notes. Dad was heartbroken when he actually got an article into Rolling Stone magazine, the ultimate goal that any rock journalist could aspire to, only to discover that the pay for each article was twenty-five dollars. There was no possible way that he could put in the time and energy to write for Rolling Stone and still raise a family.
My parents did bring me along to rock concerts as early as age two, when I was placed on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle at a Grateful Dead concert. Marijuana use was heavily advertised in classic rock albums—including Hendrix singing “Purple haze all in my brain” and Led Zeppelin’s lead vocalist, Robert Plant, singing “Smoked my stuff and drank all my wine” in the classic “Going to California.” The sweet, complex aroma of marijuana smoke was a constant, inescapable odor at every concert I went to. As soon as the security guards went by, all the glowing pipes and joints would pop up, and thick clouds of smoke would billow into the air. It was quite common to see the bands smoking it backstage as well—and I met countless famous rock bands in my youth thanks to Dad’s journalism. I hardly ever saw any other children at these shows, and it was very common for people to glare at me in hatred when they saw the bright, colorful backstage pass stuck to my shirt.
My brother Michael was born on April 7, 1975. I remember my mother showing me her pregnant stomach and explaining that I had a brother on the way. One night I told her that I loved her very much, and I was sad because I knew she and I would never be as close once my brother was born. She held it together as I innocently told her this, but then quickly left the room, where she quietly cried for some time. I didn’t find out about what happened that night until I was much older. During the time my mother was pregnant with Michael, she experienced extremely realistic dreams of going out into the backyard and seeing awe-inspiring UFOs, including cylinder-shaped craft just like what I was seeing in my own dreams. Some of my dreams featured Mom and me standing out there at night and holding hands as these ships hovered just above the yard. My mother’s dreams were so vivid that she became convinced there must be truth behind the UFO phenomenon, and it was a source of great mystery to her.
I really enjoyed having a brother. Michael had his own gifts that were different from mine, as he was extremely interested in producing art. Almost as soon as he could pick up a pen and paper, he began drawing complex mazes that really worked and had only one solution. As the years went by, his mazes became difficult enough to solve that I would often cheat by tracing my way back from the end to the beginning; he would also create elaborate designs, including pictures and words, with mazes in them. Michael cried a lot more than I had as a child, and Mom was advised to let it happen and not rescue him every time, as otherwise it could create a dependency. Up until he was about five or six years old, Michael would occasionally have frightening temper tantrums in which he would become extremely angry, shake with rage, and sometimes try to bite me if I upset him. This would scare me, but I learned to stay calm and prevent him from hurting me.
Shortly after Michael was born, my UFO dreams became far more vivid and personal. I would often describe them to my mother in great detail, and she was astonished that I could remember so much. In many of these dreams I would end up inside a very futuristic-looking spacecraft, looking out the window and seeing other ships passing by. I had many different meetings with a wise old man with gray hair and a gray beard, who wore a robe with a hood that he usually kept down. Again and again, he would tell me that a fantastic event was going to occur on Earth, which would transform the world in a remarkably positive way and give us superpowers. He told me I would see this happen in my own lifetime. He also said I had an important role to play in the process, and would become very famous—like the rock stars my father was meeting, or even more so. In some cases I found myself at what looked like an airport, complete with a huge control tower, but the craft that were parked there were absolutely fantastic-looking—and unlike anything I had ever seen anywhere else.
I remember Mom telling me about her religious upbringing, and how disillusioned she became with born-again Christianity. She warned me that fundamentalists were often far more judgmental and abusive than other types of people, and that if you didn’t think the same way they did, they honestly believed you would burn in hell for all eternity. She also told me about the importance of being a good person and being kind to others. She said that whether we realize it or not, each of us is here to build houses, one brick at a time. Every time we think a loving thought, or do a good thing for someone, we add another brick to the wall. Every time we have a hateful thought, or hurt someone, we take a brick away. This made sense to me, and I felt very deeply that she was right.
My mother began teaching piano students at the Yamaha School of Music, and I remember her taking me there when I was very young. I reached out and touched a thick black pipe on the wall there and was badly burned. Scalding-hot water was rushing through the pipe, and Mom had to cancel the class and take me home. This was one of my first experiences that taught me that I was fragile, I could easily be injured, and sometimes seemingly innocent-looking things could be very dangerous. Shortly after this injury, Mom began reading a book called The Nature of Personal Reality. She explained that a woman named Jane Roberts had learned how to talk to an advanced, ghostlike being named Seth, using nothing but the power of her own mind. She was able to speak the words that Seth wanted her to say, and her husband, Robert, wrote them down. The entire book was allegedly written by Seth. The main message it conveyed could be summarized in a single sentence: You create your own reality. My mother was very excited about this, as it was causing her to have a powerful awakening and see her life in a completely new way.
During this same time, it became increasingly clear that my parents were not getting along. I hardly ever saw them act affectionately toward each other. There always seemed to be tension in the air. Sometimes after they put Michael and me to bed, I would hear them arguing with each other, and this could include shouting. This caused me severe anxiety and led to my first great addiction: sucking my thumb. I only ever worked the right hand. By the time I was five years old, I had done thorough damage to the structure of my face, including moving my nose off to the right, collapsing my left nasal passage, pushing up the bone on the roof of my mouth, and tilting my entire jaw so it rested at a diagonal angle and was slightly higher on the right side of my face than the left. These were subtle changes that are quite common, and most people would never notice, but the nasal blockage made it hard to breathe and caused any sickness I had to get a lot worse.
I started having a variety of dreams in which I could levitate effortlessly. In some cases I went only ten to twenty feet above the ground, whereas in other cases I soared like a bird over my hometown. In many of these dreams, I would take a jump rope, stand on it with both feet, and pull up on the edges. Somehow, this allowed me to lift myself up into the air. These dreams had such an effect on me that I would repeatedly try to duplicate the effect in our driveway while I was awake. It never worked. Sometimes I would stand there in the driveway with the jump rope and completely break down crying, pulling and pulling in a useless attempt to levitate. Then I would have another dream in which it worked, and it would inspire me to go out there and try it again the next day.
I also clearly remember celebrating the two-hundred-year anniversary of American independence, on July 4, 1976. We walked all the way down to Jumpin’ Jack’s fast-food restaurant by the Mohawk River and the Western Gateway Bridge into Schenectady to see the show. There were many different street vendors selling American flags, all kinds of merchandise with red, white, and blue, and various forms of the Statue of Liberty. Many people were burning sparklers, drinking milk shakes, and eating burgers, hot dogs, and fries from Jumpin’ Jack’s. I remember having profound feelings I couldn’t understand. I felt as if I had been American before, that this was not new, and I could hardly believe that two hundred years had now gone by since America was founded. I had no idea why I felt this way, but it was very strong.
I very clearly remember the day in the late summer of 1976 that I got my first taste of a hyper-addictive social revolution. My mother took me to my favorite babysitter, Julie’s, house, who lived down the road a few blocks at the time. The kitchen was cluttered and smelled like bread dough. There, sitting on the countertop, was a black-and-white TV with a strange black box connected to it. The box had two round knobs on it. When you turned it on, it put blocky white lines on the TV screen. It was a “video game” called Pong, which had been released in December 1975, just in time for Christmas. They asked me to try it and I was worried I might break it, but they told me it was fine. When I turned the knob, a line on the screen moved along with it as the paddle, and a white square was the ball. Each time the ball was released, I had to keep it from going past my paddle.
Right as I started to get the hang of it, the hot new single “Dancing Queen” came on the radio. It was very sparkly and happy, had nice vocal harmonies and a dance beat, and is commonly regarded as one of the most successful singles of the 1970s. I had never heard any music like this at home. The fusion of the music and the Pong game elevated me into a state of pure ecstasy. In amazement, I breathlessly asked, “Who is this on the radio?” as I continued vigorously working the paddle. “ABBA,” my babysitter replied. “It’s a band called ABBA. They are very famous.” After “Dancing Queen,” other ABBA songs were played as part of a music marathon, and I couldn’t believe my parents hadn’t played it before. I asked Mom why we didn’t listen to ABBA, and she said, “You’ll just have to ask your father.” I asked Dad as soon as I got home, and he said, “That’s disco. We do not listen to disco. It is absolute garbage.” End of discussion.
My mother took the flu vaccine in October 1976, when I was three years old, and strange things started happening to her. Within a week or two after taking the shot, she was walking down State Street in Schenectady and realized that instead of walking straight, she was nearly bumping into the sides of buildings. She also found that when she played the piano, and reached for octaves with her left hand, she was overreaching. She would aim for E flat and hit a C. She then became very sick, which reached a peak about two to three weeks after she took the shot. She had a plastic pan to throw up in as I sat beside her on the couch, and she became so sick that she couldn’t even move her head more than an inch without throwing up. She asked me to call our neighbor, Mrs. Warner (not her real name), and remembered the number well enough to give me the digits out loud. Mrs. Warner called Dad at General Electric, who rushed home from work and took Mom straight to the emergency room while Michael and I sat with a babysitter.
Mom ended up being gone for an entire week, and Michael and I were never taken there to see her. We had a very nice woman who acted as our babysitter and took care of us all day, every day. She had a bird marionette puppet made out of Styrofoam balls and orange feathers, with little white eyes that had black circles in them that would move around as she made it talk to us. She fed us cinnamon toast, which seemed like an amazing treat. Michael and I did not know this at the time, but both Dad and our babysitter thought Mom was about to die, and they just wanted us to be happy and calm. The doctors thought she had a brain tumor and did tons of tests. Once they ruled that out, they felt that she had multiple sclerosis. She kept insisting that the flu shot had caused this to happen, but they said that was impossible—it was totally safe. Yet the woman in the bed next to her had the exact same symptoms and had also just taken the flu shot. Mom discovered that her old high school friend Hope, who worked as a farmer, also developed the same sickness after having the flu shot, and toughed it out at home. Once she talked to Hope on the phone, she found out that many other people had developed the same deathly illness after getting the shot.
This had all the hallmarks of a cover-up in the medical industry, if not an outright terrifying conspiracy. Mom gradually got better while she was held in the hospital for a week and was run through a battery of tests. Once she got out, she vowed never to use the mainstream medical system again unless it was a dire emergency. She started seeing a chiropractor named Dr. Leith, whose office reeked of minty camphor oil, and he got her taking vitamins A, B, C, D, and E every day, as well as drinking disgusting-smelling brewer’s yeast. We started routinely going to Patton’s, a local health-food store. She also began swimming fifty-yard laps at the YWCA, in their Olympic-sized pool, a few times a week. By following these practices and having a healthy diet, she never got sick, never took any pharmaceutical drugs, and never needed to see a doctor.
The downside of Mom’s health-food awakening was that she strictly forbade us from eating very much sugar. The television was constantly advertising sugary cereals like Cocoa Pebbles, Count Chocula, Frankenberry, Lucky Charms, Froot Loops, and Trix, which invariably featured cartoon characters that appealed to children. No matter how much I begged and pleaded with her to buy me these cereals, Mom absolutely refused. Dad had a habit of eating Rice Chex every morning, and the best cereals Michael and I ever got were Cheerios, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, Rice Krispies, Grape-Nuts, and Kix corn puffs. Mom’s eyes went straight to the sugar listing on the label, and anything above a few grams was automatically forbidden. At the time I was very angry with her for this and felt that she was robbing me of all the best things about being a kid, but now as an adult I am very grateful that she was tough enough to say no to me, no matter how much I asked. I also have a strong memory of my parents buying a short-lived new cereal in a blue box, only to check on one of the ingredients, which may have been cellulose, and conclude that it was “plastic.” The idea that any manufacturer would put plastic into a food product was shocking to them, and I felt the same way.
I got my first real bicycle in 1977. It was all sparkling indigo blue and had a chain guard that said “The Rabbit,” along with the image of a stretched-out cartoon rabbit. It had rims over both tires, a kickstand, and training wheels so I wouldn’t fall over while I was riding it. Once I got the Rabbit, I started having new nightmares. It was always the same dream. Mom and I would be driving over the Western Gateway Bridge, and suddenly our car would plunge over the side. We were falling to our deaths. The dream always ended before we hit the water. In other dreams, I had to drive the car myself, which I obviously did not know how to do, and that was terrifying—and then the car would always fall off the bridge. I would wake up before I died, often screaming. It would be many years before I understood why I kept having this same dream, over and over again.
I then saw a commercial for Keds sneakers in which kids put these shoes on and could fly. Beautiful streaks of light emerged from their feet, and they could soar eight to ten feet up into a tree. I believed that this was real, and told my mother I absolutely must have Keds sneakers. I went to the kids’ shoe shop at the Mohawk Mall, with the funny guy with black curly hair who looked and sounded a lot like Richard Simmons. I was measured for the shoes and could hardly wait to get home and try them. I stood in front of the old birch tree in the front yard, did my best jump . . . and nothing happened. It was just like the jump rope all over again. I was devastated. The television had lied to me. These shoes could not make me fly. I started to realize that nothing could. If I ever started falling to my death, like what had happened in my nightmare, there probably wasn’t anything I could do about it. As I reflect back upon this now, I realize that my dreams of flying may well have been preparing me for the powers of ascension. I was told in my dreams that this would happen to us, and I could already try out the abilities—but the real world hadn’t caught up with the dream world yet.
The epic film Star Wars was released on May 25, 1977, just in time for the summer movie season—and my father made sure that he took us on opening weekend. I was absolutely dazzled by this movie, transported into a parallel universe, where it all seemed completely real. All the images of spacecraft, planets, and stars seemed extremely familiar to me—so much so that I didn’t understand why everyone became so obsessed with the movie. For me it was just “normal.” Luke was being trained in “The Force,” which would give him the exact same abilities that I had in my dreams. The wise old man Obi-Wan Kenobi faced off against the villain Darth Vader and was clearly losing. Obi-Wan then said, “If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine.” Vader sliced him with his lightsaber, but Obi-Wan completely disappeared, leaving only his robe in a heap on the ground. He then returned to Luke later in the movie as a ghostlike being of white light.
I immediately noticed the similarity between Obi-Wan and the man who had been talking to me in my dreams. My parents were both very surprised, because well before the movie came out, they had nicknamed my brother Obie, and also called him Obimious (which sounds like Obadiah, a book in the Bible) and, as crazy as it must sound, Obie-Wan. That name actually pulled me right out of the movie for a moment. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing—and it proved to be one of my first experiences with what Dr. Carl Jung called synchronicity. My parents adopted the full name and began calling him Obi-Wan Kenobi. The very next morning after I saw Star Wars, the wise old man appeared again as Obi-Wan Kenobi—and the interior of his ship looked even more like some of the scenes in Star Wars. He now appeared to me in the same glowing, luminous form as Obi-Wan had in the movie. This appears to have been an effort to link a being who was very real in the dream plane with a symbol from the physical plane that I could now easily identify and interpret. The old man told me that many people on Earth were going to transform into a luminous form like this, and that if I followed what my mother told me about being a good person, it could happen to me too. I felt even closer to him than I did to my own parents, and when I woke up and realized it was only a dream, I started crying. This happened dozens of times.