Not long after seeing the Eye, I had perhaps the single most powerful dream of all my years as a teenager. I was first drawn into this beautiful hotel in the woods, surrounded by snow and majestic evergreen trees. Once I got inside, there were teenagers everywhere. Everyone was being given powerful drugs, akin to some kind of mushrooms. The drugs prevented them from understanding where they were or what was going on. In one room, all the teenagers were sitting in a circle around a one-foot-wide metallic sphere mounted on a platform. A being was standing off to the side in a black, hooded cloak, and seemed to be the Grim Reaper—but no one saw him. The kids were all completely hypnotized by some kind of technology emanating from the sphere.
Seeing the hooded being made me panic. I had to escape before someone drugged me like the others—but I realized certain people were acting as plainclothes security guards to prevent this from happening, and none of the doors and windows would open. I burst into some sort of restricted area, and everything suddenly looked very technological—like I was inside an advanced spacecraft. There was a huge, round elevator in the distance, and I felt that I needed to take it. As soon as I tried to move forward, I was attacked by a huge number of battle robots that walked on two legs, had two arms, and were very ferocious. Somehow I was able to fight my way through them. It seemed to involve a combination of some kind of advanced weapon I had found as well as ascended-type abilities.
I made it into the elevator, and inside I saw a panel revealing that the hotel was only the top level of a huge underground base that went many levels down. Somehow I knew the only way out was to confront the leader of this alien menace on the bottom floor. I was able to get the elevator to take me there, and was very surprised by how long it took to go all the way down. The elevator opened out into a huge, dark area. The only visible thing was a massive pair of ornately carved wooden doors. They were easily eighty feet tall, and had lots of strange designs carved into them. They also seemed to be covered with barbed wire; they were not made for anyone to get through without approval. I knew that whoever or whatever was running this operation was right behind those doors. I summoned every bit of physical and spiritual strength I had—and was able to blast them open.
I walked into an office that looked like it was right out of the White House, complete with the presidential desk. The chair swiveled around and I saw a man who looked like a politician or senior military official. He wore a blue suit with an American flag pin on his lapel. He had wet-combed black hair that was styled like Ronald Reagan’s hair had been. He admitted they were running the entire facility, and started very aggressively trying to get me to join them. I was promised unlimited power and full access to their technology. When I refused, he started laughing and said I had no choice—since I had nowhere else to go. Somehow I felt the only answer would be to “create myself.” I bent down and rolled myself up into a ball, going into a deep state of concentration. I went out-of-body and was able to build seven luminous energetic bodies around my own—each of which was progressively larger. I then was able to move my consciousness into the largest one.
Suddenly I found myself onboard a magnificent spaceship. I was in a massive, open room with a long, curving wall that was filled with hyper-advanced computer terminals. Each terminal had a huge screen that was about five feet wide and four feet tall. The images on the screens were holographic, full color, and extremely high resolution. I was seated at my terminal and had an image of the Earth there in front of me. I could clearly identify the underground base I had been in, as it was lit up on the globe. I had access to tremendous powers with the technology on this ship. I was able to take all the kids in the base and transport them to a safe place. Then I reached in and removed the base itself, as if it were the size of a pea, and catapulted it back to where it came from. The Earth had been profoundly healed and transformed as a result of my doing this—almost like it was bathed in light.
I awoke from this experience in an absolute state of awe. It made me remember the dreams of my youth with the old man, the messages I was given about a mass human evolution, and the way I felt when I saw 2001 and 2010. I had been able to transform myself directly into a light being. For the first time in years, I seemed to have gotten much more information than in my youth. Something tremendously evil was controlling the US government—and the way to defeat it was for us to evolve into an entirely new form. At the time, I wondered if it was only a dream, or something more. In time, this would end up being one of the most profound ascension dreams I ever had—and Jude wrote the whole thing up in a comic-book-style series of illustrations.
One day after school, Don and I were transfixed by an old black-and-white documentary on the Beatles in which we saw vintage footage of people on LSD. They were higher than we had ever gotten. Paul McCartney was talking in the show about how he stopped doing LSD after a while, and said, “It had done all it could do for us.” We were huge fans of Sgt. Pepper’s, and I realized that many people assumed the song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was code for LSD, based on the first letters of each word. All the lyrics were extremely bizarre and druglike. There were taxis made out of newspaper, tangerine trees, marmalade skies, and a girl with kaleidoscope eyes who kept showing up. The Beatles were on to something—and the documentary implied that hippies all knew LSD was amazing. Both of the classic Moody Blues albums we loved to listen to were full-length infomercials and recruitment tools for LSD use as well.
In Carlos Castenada’s books, psychedelics were used to access spiritual consciousness—so I felt my mother might have been wrong about avoiding them completely. My epic dream said I had to “create myself” in these energetic bodies, and I thought back to my forgotten goal from when I was a kid of wanting to have another out-of-body experience. It had never happened, and maybe this was the key to finally getting another chance. Lars, one of the hippies from Totem, had overdosed on LSD, so I talked to people I knew who had taken it and got the warnings on what not to do. The basic guideline was to take just a little bit of anything new so you didn’t get bugged out. It never occurred to me that the teenagers in my dream had been kept prisoner in the hotel by the use of some kind of psychedelic drug in the first place.
Don, Baner, and I took a quarter tab each of some baby-blue paper LSD, which had come in by way of the latest Grateful Dead concerts at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, on July 9 and 10, 1989. Each time the Dead tour came anywhere near where we were, there was a temporary surge in psychedelic drugs available from people who would buy it by the sheet and resell it at higher prices—about three or four dollars a tab. Fifteen minutes rushed by after we took the quarter tab, and nothing had changed, so we each took another one. After fifteen more minutes with no results, we concluded the blue doses were fake. Since we didn’t want to ruin our chances of seeing something happen, we each took another half of a different kind we had that was pink, called Soundwaves. The myth was that after taking it, you would be able to see waves of sound traveling through the air. Another ten minutes went by, and things were definitely starting to get strange.
I was exhaling smoke in my room when my mother suddenly yelled up the stairs: “David, dinner is ready. All your friends have to leave!” This was my worst nightmare come true. The LSD was probably going to hit me right at the dinner table, since at least one of the two kinds I had taken was not fake—and I had never done it before. I went downstairs, where my mother had laid out all the ingredients in about ten different bowls on the table to make tacos. I realized I had forgotten to pee, and rushed back up the stairs, two at a time. As I stood over the toilet, my heart was pounding—and it hit me. In a thunderous slam, my entire field of vision went completely black—with my eyes wide-open. It was as if someone had closed blackout curtains over my vision, and it was utterly terrifying.
I tried to hold still so I wouldn’t pee all over, and my vision faded back in. Now, everything looked like it was underwater, which I came to call “swimming-pool vision.” There were shimmering sparkles of light everywhere, and the colors were much more intense than they had been just a minute ago. My body felt extremely strange and distorted. I went over to the stairs and realized I was having powerful hallucinations. It now looked like the entire stairwell was stretching open and closed, becoming wider and narrower in about one-second intervals, like it was alive. Sparks of light were shooting down the tunnel. I was absolutely horrified. I couldn’t believe I was going to walk down those stairs, but I made the choice. I held my hands against both walls to make sure they didn’t close up on me. The height of each step seemed to be rising and falling in the same, sickening motion, but they were stable once I stepped on them, so I just worked my way down very slowly. Once I finally made it to the bottom, I felt that if I didn’t “create” each part of the floor before I stepped on it with my foot, I could fall right through it—so I decided exactly where I was going to step, and visualized walking on it before I actually did.
By the time I made it back to the table, I was a huge mess. Everything was going so fast in my mind that the speed of normal human conversation was intolerably slow. Once I sat at the table I realized I could barely lift my arms, which was necessary to make tacos and look normal. My mother put a taco shell on my plate; it was still warm, so it started slowly drooping. I felt like it was a living mouth wanting to be fed with taco stuff. With an enormous effort, I managed to robotically retrieve a single spoonful of beef and drop it in the middle of the shell, and then a small dusting of shredded cheddar cheese. There was now a little one-inch ball of meat and cheese in the middle of my taco shell.
At this point I got hit with a terrifying hallucination. The meat and cheese turned into some shrimp-like crustacean creature. It was twitching in the shell in death agony, staring at me, and I couldn’t help but instinctively flinch from it. Now I became extremely paranoid. The conversation between my mother and brother seemed incredibly strained, with huge pregnant pauses and lots of subtext indicating they thought I was messed up on some drug—and were very upset about it. This seemed to go on for an eternity before I eventually decided I had to get the hell out of there, immediately. When I was a kid I could ask to be excused from the table if I didn’t feel well. After what seemed like half an hour, I managed to plan out the following sentence in words, tone, and delivery, to sell the part and sound as normal as possible. “Mom, I don’t feel well. May I be excused from the table?”
She said, “Sure,” and I fled to the basement, where there was a phone. I called up Don and said, “Dude, I am really freaking out. You guys need to get back here as soon as possible.” As I spoke to him, the walls were visibly breathing, as if I were inside the lungs of some strange beast. Mom’s microphone stands were swaying back and forth like seaweed underwater. I felt like I was inside the belly of the whale, and it had all started when I had gone down the stairs, which was its mouth. The sparks urging me down the stairs were its saliva. Somehow it all made sense. He agreed they would return quickly, and I realized that similar things were also happening to him. I came back upstairs but never made it to my room—only the living-room couch. The lampshade was now a canvas of dazzling visuals, including spiraling triangles within triangles, castles, and mountains I was flying through, and a Centipede–style video game I could play with my mind. Mom said good-bye to me and headed off for her gig, and my friends arrived soon afterward. Things got somewhat better after that, but it was still a very unsettling experience.
I reminisced about some of the interesting moments after it had happened, and we decided to do it again later on. This time we made sure to plan it out better, so there was no chance of having to deal with either of my parents during the time it was active, which was an exhausting twelve hours. I realized the “peak” didn’t hit until forty-five minutes after you took it, and up until then it might not even seem like anything was going to happen. Every time it started, all the same unpleasant symptoms came back—a feeling of my whole body shaking, a sense of extreme nervousness, a pain in the stomach, horribly sore joints with certain varieties of LSD, time slowing down to a crawl, and a massive number of obsessive thoughts I could not control. My mind could be simultaneously caught in four or five different thought loops, all going around and around at different speeds, and I couldn’t make them stop.
There was always the risk of having a “bad trip,” where you could become far more terrified than you had ever been in your entire life. The only other experience I had that could even begin to compare to a bad trip was when I had almost died in Rick’s boat. Any one bad trip was much, much worse than that, even though nothing was actually going on—and it lasted for vastly longer periods of psychological time. In some cases I was hiding in the corner, all alone, and terrified to move—feeling that unseen evil spirits would completely destroy me if I didn’t stay absolutely still and try not to breathe. The fear that this caused me was much greater than anything I had ever experienced. I didn’t even realize it was possible to be that scared before this happened. One of my quotes that I shared with all my friends was, “No one is adult enough to be able to handle a bad trip.” It was absolutely impossible for me to prevent it from happening, and every single time I did it, there were periods that were spectacularly terrifying and horrific—and seemed to go on for eternities of time. I would reminisce with my friends about some of the interesting things, try another round, and then end up right back in that same place, asking myself, “Why in God’s name did I do this again?”
I can hear some people saying hippie slogans like “Set and setting, dude, set and setting,” meaning if you do it in the right place, and have the right mind-set, you can have a positive experience. “It just amplifies what is already there.” Who in today’s world doesn’t have hidden demons they haven’t healed yet? What happens when you get hit with all of them at once, much more strongly than ever before? I have also heard people say, “Clean acid, man, you never took clean acid.” In my case, I never had a trip that was good from the beginning to the end, no matter how “clean” the LSD was supposed to be—and I also tried other psychedelics, including mushrooms and yellow micro-dots.
There were always prolonged periods of unimaginable fright. The best I could hope for was to reduce the total amount of time I spent in absolute, full-body-shaking terror. This is why many people try LSD only once or twice and never touch it again. This was also obviously why Lars had ended up the way he did. With a large or accidental dose, the amount of trauma you could go through could literally destroy your mental health in a permanent or semipermanent fashion.
I also ended up getting caught in thought loops about the Earth every time I did the drug, which I called “ecology trips.” Everywhere I looked, I saw evidence that we were destroying the Earth—and I could not begin to ignore it. Television became absolutely unwatchable. All the smiling salespeople, marketing language, and slick jingles telling you to “buy now” became the horrific, crushing tones of a Pied Piper leading us over a cliff into global annihilation. “Three easy payments of only $19.95. For a limited time only while supplies last. Call now!” I would hear ugly, terrifying and dissonant bass notes blended in with the music, and the feeling of evil was so overpowering that a thirty-second commercial seemed like a lifetime of torment.
I felt like the trees were screaming and the Earth itself was alive and extremely terrified of us. I thought back to the Eye I had seen under the bridge, and on LSD, the pyramid with the All-Seeing Eye on the dollar bill became a vortex of darkness. It seemed that there was a tornado of energy emanating from that eye that was making the entire room around me shake—and it was extremely frightening. I realized we were a mass suicide cult, and could end up killing this beautiful being—which was forced, by design, to just step back and hope that a few of its best people could help to turn things around.
Many people have asked me to try ayahuasca or other drugs, telling me, “Oh, it’s not like LSD at all. It is much better, much more profound and spiritually meaningful. Now that you’ve been clean for years, you’ll have a much better experience.” Yet when I have asked them detailed and specific questions about what happened, I have realized that everyone goes into a psychedelic space, which is a near-death experience—similar to the hallucinations you get in a fever when your brain is starting to dangerously overheat and threaten your life. You can have really weird and bizarre things happen to you, but just as Paul McCartney said, psychedelics did all they could do for me. I would be extremely weak and exhausted afterward, and I always had a crippling backache. I also had residual LSD stored in my fat cells that could cause me to have flashbacks, such as during exercise or when I was smoking weed—so I never knew exactly what was going to happen to me next.
The main thing I got out of it was that we are destroying the Earth, and the solution requires people who are actually living on the Earth to stop it. No cosmic beings like the old man in my dreams can just swoop in, wave a magic wand, and solve all our problems. We have to take action. This is our world, and we have to fight to keep it. This also caused me to see most of the people around me as brainwashed zombies. Everyone ignored the things that terrified them the most. As soon as they saw some proof of how close we were to destroying ourselves, they would just shut down. No one ever wanted to suffer even 10 percent as much terror as I would feel in a bad trip. They would do just about anything, including completely blocking out a bad experience from their memory, to avoid that pain. Drugs and alcohol helped them stay numb—and I was equally guilty of it myself. Once I was stoned, I could completely forget about something that had been really upsetting me even ten minutes before I started. But then, as soon as I came back to reality, the problem had gotten even worse, because I wasn’t doing anything to deal with it. More and more, I was becoming deeply introverted, paralyzingly shy, paranoid, and fearful.
On January 1, 1990—in the early hours of New Year’s Day—a girl I had known since first grade died in a horrible car accident. She was riding in a car with kids from another school, and everyone had been drinking. The police report showed that the car was going a hundred miles per hour when it struck the concrete wall next to a bridge on Mohawk Avenue. Worst of all, she was still screaming as the police arrived. She burned to death and they were unable to save her. This had a seismic effect on our community—and was a shocking reminder that we were not immortal. I thought of all the times I had spoken to her over the years, and now she was gone. The story was so horrible that everyone quickly forgot about it—just as we ignored a seemingly impossible array of threats to all life on Earth.
On March 24, 1990, I ate a full eighth-ounce bag of mushrooms before going to see the Grateful Dead at the Knickerbocker Arena with my father, his hilarious buddy Rick, and my kid brother. I thought that since everyone took psychedelics at the Dead show, I would be fine—but I soon reconfirmed that being around either of my parents while tripping was a horrible idea. I decided to wait as long as possible, so I didn’t pop the hideous-tasting material in my mouth until we were in the car. Michael saw me and thought I had candy at first. I lied to him and denied eating anything, but he then realized I was doing some kind of drugs. The taste reminded me of the essence of moldy, three-day-old sock stench. It was very dry, and I had to chew it quite a bit to choke it down. The drive into Albany was about an hour, and by the time we stopped at a pizza place before the show, it was hitting me—very hard.
Right as Rick made a hilarious joke, the cheese on my pizza jumped to life and slithered across the table. I tried not to flinch, but I couldn’t help it. Everyone’s laughter covered it up. Then I looked over at the kitchen and saw a guy in a blue T-shirt and a messy white apron drive a skewer through a live, flailing rat. Its arms, legs, and tail continued going through death agony as he lowered it into the frying vat. Everything looked like it was passing through a semitransparent filter of rippling geometric patterns and sparks of light. The colors were too bright. I was profoundly uncomfortable and terrified that I was going to get caught.
As we got up to leave, I saw a perfect, life-sized image of the Hermit from the Tarot cards—a bearded man in a gray, hooded robe, carrying a staff and a lantern—standing right near Dad. I could see him clearly enough to make out the coarse, burlap-like texture of his robe. This seemed like an omen of death and made me feel even worse. A Mediterranean-looking guy with large eyes and thick eyebrows sitting at a table with his friends was now staring at me, but his face was all messed up. One eye appeared about four inches higher on his face, well up into his forehead, compared to the other, which had dropped down below his cheek. I was looking right at him, and this Picasso-like image held steady. He was very frightened as he looked at me, and I realized that my face probably looked the same way to him. I gave him a knowing nod, letting him know I understood, and that he looked just as strange to me. Once I got to the arena I really had to pee, and the toilet in my stall melted and disappeared—only to pop right back seconds later. During the show, I watched as the speakers seemed to melt over the crowd, forming a giant, black lake, swallowing everyone. I had to deal with several more hours of the trip after I got home, and I couldn’t get to sleep until after sunrise, which was an inevitable side effect.
Although I did do psychedelics after this, I was very careful to never take enough to produce full-visual hallucinations. The potential for a bad trip was so high that I didn’t dare put myself through it—but smaller doses weren’t much better.
Ever since I first tried LSD, I had hoped to get a fully discontinuous out-of-body experience from it—a journey into another reality. It didn’t take long for me to realize LSD was not the answer to make this happen. I still kept trying to see if I could ever get a good trip, but even if I did, I was always aware of being in my body, in this reality, and I felt all messed up. Hallucinations were weird and scary, but I thought back to that night I floated out of my body and could see that I had still never reached the goal. I was very fortunate to find a copy of Lucid Dreaming by Dr. Stephen LaBerge in a bookstore. The subtitle read “How to Become Awake and Aware in Your Dreams.” Dr. LaBerge taught a technique called “Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming,” or MILD. First you had to start remembering your dreams, which involved staying completely motionless when you woke up. You would ask yourself where you just were and what you were doing. Then, you would replay the dream in your head, over and over again, only now you would imagine yourself noticing some strange, impossible detail and realizing that you were dreaming. Dr. LaBerge explained that any time you looked at something, looked away, and then looked back, if it was a dream it would change—and that was your best way of finding out whether it was a dream.
While doing this, you would also mentally repeat the same sentence over and over again, putting as much meaning and feeling into it as you possibly could: “Next time I’m dreaming, I want to remember to recognize I’m dreaming.” Then, if you were lucky enough, you would fall back asleep and realize that everything around you had changed while you were still saying those words. At this point you could test your environment for changes and other impossible things—and if you found something, then you were now in a lucid dream. Best of all, once you found yourself in this state, you had full godlike abilities in the dream—including levitation and telekinesis. You could directly experience what ascension would be like in your real-time, waking life—and it was absolutely fantastic.
I put a lot of time into reading LaBerge’s book, understanding the technique, and practicing it—and after only a few tries, I got spectacular results. I could soar through the air, walk through walls, travel anywhere I wanted, and lift huge objects with my mind. I could also completely change my environment just by thinking about something different. I felt a high that was much greater than anything I had ever gotten from drugs. The first time it happened, I found myself in the front doorway of the house, right where I had gotten lost for twenty-six years and appeared to have the facial features of a black man. Now there was a single, bare bulb hanging down from the ceiling, which was obviously different. A black man was sitting there, drenched in sweat and extremely upset about something. The bulb had been shattered, but light was still coming out of it. I realized that bulbs could not give off light without glass around the filament—and suddenly I became lucid. It was a tremendously wonderful experience. I ran outside and levitated over my house, checking out how the trees and the roof looked from up there.
After one lucid dream, I was hooked. I soon realized I could go wherever I wanted to go, do whatever I wanted to do, and create whatever I wanted to create. In my second or third experience, I found myself in a beautiful pasture, and I manifested a good-sized red barn that was filled to the brim with marijuana. I walked up to the doors, opened them, and was knocked over in an avalanche of sweet-smelling buds. I then manifested a six-inch-wide salad bowl, put a hole at the bottom, attached a bent pipe to the hole, and then created a blowtorch. I packed it full with weed and took a huge hit—but I did not get high. I already was.
In another case, I created a magnificently futuristic car and went on a joyride, which included being able to punch it into speeds that were unimaginable in my waking reality. Each experience was magnificent, absolutely real, and would go on for what seemed like well over an hour in some cases. I would fly through windows, explore buildings, see people who couldn’t see me, and feel incredible. I needed enough time to get extra sleep, so I typically practiced this on the weekends—and the results were phenomenal.
In one of these experiences I started writing everything down that was happening to me—and I was shocked to discover that all my words were in perfect French. I normally could not speak it that well in my waking life, but in the dream it was very natural, and I knew it was right. I didn’t always think clearly when I was lucid, though, and in that dream I had hoped to be able to bring all my written papers back with me. When I woke up, they were gone, of course. In another dream I ended up in the local CVS pharmacy, and put on quite a show, where I levitated a group of large trash barrels and started orbiting them around one another. It was a larger-scale version of what happened in the movie E.T. I was always trying to talk to people, show them miracles, and let them know we were in a dream and none of this was real—but I always had problems. They would listen at first, but then some force would come over them, they would blank out, and walk away as if they had no idea what I had just said. This happened to the entire crowd of people who saw me levitate the barrels, and it was very bizarre. It appeared that I was not in full control of my environment.
At least two different times, I was flying around having adventures and got pulled into a highly advanced spacecraft. People with robes were talking to me and we were standing in front of gigantic picture windows. Absolutely fantastic spaceships of unimaginable size drifted past the window. Dr. LaBerge’s book had taught me that everything in a lucid dream is created in your brain and none of it is real—and since he was a scientist I felt he had to be right. So, even though I found myself on these magnificent craft, talking to these robed wise men like the old man from my childhood dreams, I believed they were all a product of my subconscious. I would tell them they were illusions right to their faces and they would just laugh and smile politely. They were always very kind to me and encouraged me to continue practicing this technique.
I was also congratulated for losing weight and was told I had the power to completely transform my life. They complimented me for the things I had done to help others. I was told that this was what really mattered where they were. No one ever shamed me or told me I should quit using drugs. I couldn’t imagine that any of this was actually real, despite how vivid it was, so after I woke up from such an experience I would always laugh about my “weird dreams,” and say, “My subconscious sure has a vivid imagination.” By the year 1996 I had established direct telepathic contact with these same people—and I was absolutely shocked to discover how real all of it had been. They ended up making house calls, and appeared in front of my brother and one of my clients who had received spiritual counseling from me, in order to prove they really did exist.
Sometime after the Dead show, a guy I hardly knew called me up and asked if I was going to Brad’s birthday bash. I was deeply hurt, as Brad hadn’t told me anything about it. Don and I went over and crashed the party, and Brad didn’t even try to explain why we were not invited. There were probably forty or fifty people there, including many kids I had never seen before, and they had kegs of beer. I decided to drink like everyone else, and before long I had downed four or five Solo picnic cups of beer. All the weed was being smoked down in the basement, and this was why Brad had asked me if he could borrow my big red double-chambered bong the day before. I took a huge, lung-blaster hit and blacked out. I was not aware of falling backward, but I was dimly aware of the back of my skull dribbling like a basketball against the concrete floor. After a couple of eternal seconds, my vision was flooded with about six faces that looked very concerned. They sounded like they were all shouting at me through a twenty-foot-long cardboard paper towel tube.
It took a while for me to regain full consciousness, and even though I almost certainly had a concussion, I just got up and kept on drinking and smoking as if nothing had happened. I became so drunk that when I went to the bathroom to pee standing up, I dropped my pants all the way down to my ankles, and had to lean against the wall to keep from falling over. Right then, the class clown Gerry burst into the bathroom—and started laughing and cheering. The story became that I had “passed out standing up,” even though I was still conscious.
After this epic mess, I got the courage to reconnect with Brenda since I had become a lot thinner. I told her about our band and the Christmas party, even though we hadn’t played in months. She called me at my father’s house after I gave her the number and told her I would be there Friday night. I was upstairs in his office and scrambled to find a pad of paper when she was ready to give me her number and continue the conversation. After I hung up, I realized I had written her number down on a promotional paper from the latest Jeff Healey album release, Hell to Pay, supporting his new album due to be released on May 25, 1990. There was a guitar in flames on the paper. My conversation with Brenda had been a little strange, and I got the strong sense that if I ever got together with her, she would be extremely confrontational and abusive. The paper seemed to have the answer written right on it—there would be hell to pay. She had been in a relationship with the same guy who I had shoved through seven desks in my junior high school fight, and they had since broken up.
Shortly after our conversation, some kid called my father, pretended I owed him a lot of money in a drug deal, and threatened to kill my father and me both if I didn’t pay up. At the time I didn’t know who it was, but it became obvious when I was putting this book together. This deeply traumatized my father and made him even more confrontational than he already had been. Every time I saw Dad, there would be about fifteen minutes of very aggressive confrontation about my grades and my overall lifestyle. No matter what I did, it happened every single time I saw him, four times a week. Sometimes in the car he would get so upset he would have to pull over. This made my life far more challenging than it already was. Between my mother, my father, and the kids at school, I felt like my life was an absolute prison camp—and the only redeeming thing I had was to get even more wasted.
On July 5, 1990, I was backstage after the Robert Plant show at the Knickerbocker Arena, supporting his Manic Nirvana album.28 It was always a challenge getting backstage at the Knick, but this time we were let right in. The room was swarming with radio station contest winners who had gotten the unimaginable opportunity to meet their top idol. I was standing right next to the door, facing this wild spectacle, when there he was—three feet away from me. I could see every individual pore on his face. This was the first musician I had the chance to meet whom I genuinely idolized. A heavyset guy with a bald head, black hair, and a beard was walking with him. “What do you think?” the guy said. “I’d be bloody eaten alive,” Plant responded. They both turned around and left. I kept my cool and did not try to bother him—but I felt like I had missed the greatest opportunity of my life. The label had given away far too many backstage passes. Even though everyone there wanted to tell Robert how much they loved him, he would be absolutely overwhelmed by everyone competing for his attention. Once again, I saw firsthand proof that being famous can be tremendously upsetting, even for the most seasoned veterans.
On August 27, 1990, the legendary blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughan told his bandmates that he had a dream where he witnessed his own funeral. It was a huge night for him, as he and the band were special guests for a concert at the Alpine Valley Music Theatre. Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, and Robert Cray were all playing, and my father was there to interview Buddy Guy and the others for a book he was writing. After the concert, two private helicopters were scheduled to whisk everyone away from the surging crowds—and my father was invited. As far as everyone in the family knew, Dad was going to fly out on one of them.
There was a delay with the helicopters’ arrival, and when the first one finally showed up, Clapton’s crew got on board. Stevie could not wait. Stevie’s brother Jimmie and his brother’s wife, Connie, offered Stevie the last seat. A half mile after taking off, Stevie’s helicopter crashed into a ski slope and killed everyone instantly.29 Dad had gotten the last-ever interview with Stevie the day before. We found out only after the crash was announced that Dad had decided to interview Robert Cray and had turned down the offer to ride in either of the helicopters at the last minute. The bearded hermit I had seen near my father at the Dead show could have been a symbol of the Angel of Death himself, in an astral form—and my father was fortunate enough to avoid his grasp. This was another shocking reminder that we are not immortal—and I could feel that same old hermit chasing me as well. He was always right nearby, waiting to claim his prize.
Brad, Chris, and Baner had pressured me into smoking with them every day over the summer, since Mom’s weekend restrictions were not in effect—but I didn’t need much convincing. I slid into my senior year on a very bleak note. I had become one of the “cool” kids for the class of 1990, but now they had all graduated. Even though I had lost the weight, and was showing up at various parties, the majority of kids in my own class still saw me as a geek. My crash diet had gotten rid of the weight, but my addiction had left me with pale, whitish skin and shockingly dark circles under my eyes. The tension with my father and mother was at an all-time high. I was fighting, arguing, and apologizing every single day. I wore shirts to school that advertised to everyone that I was doing drugs, like brightly colored tie-dyes with the Grateful Dead dancing bear on them, filled with circles of different shapes, sizes, and colors. Smoking after school was now a guarantee, since I could barely stand to get through the day, and home was no better. I also started smoking before school, and before long I discovered that if I went to school stoned, I had a reasonably good day, but if I went to school sober, I had a bad day. However, I would be so messed up in Computer Math, my first-period class, that I needed to cheat off the kid next to me in order to understand what was happening.
I now was on my fifth year of French classes, and was one of the best speakers of the language in my grade. This became a huge asset when I was seated in one of my classes next to a gorgeous red-haired foreign exchange student from France. She and I started talking in French and things were looking really good. One day, she left her little tan leather pouch of pens and pencils behind on her desk as she quickly got up and left the room after class. I grabbed it and ran after her to give it back. This was the first time we had ever spoken to each other in the hallways. She started talking about the prom, and said she had no one to go with her.
Instantaneously, I went into a complete panic attack—much like an LSD flashback. My mind exploded with paranoid, looping thoughts. Even though I had lost the weight, I had done nothing to heal the trauma from countless years of bullying and being told I was worthless. I didn’t have time to do a full analysis, because she had stopped talking and I needed to say something. I felt that I must have misunderstood her, and she couldn’t possibly be wanting me to ask her out. I felt that if I did ask her, and she said no, I would be so crushed by that rejection that I could barely handle being alive. I also had a very negative view of the prom, believing it to be overpriced—and if I had any money, I was putting it toward weed. Don had railed about the stupidity of “paying a hundred and twenty dollars for cold chicken,” and avoiding the prom had become my religion. Now I definitely had to say something, and I was in such a panic there was no way I could summon up the courage to ask her. “Wow, that really sucks,” I responded. “I hope you can find somebody.”
The next day, she completely ignored me—and it quickly became clear that she was furious. She never spoke to me again, and acted like I was the biggest scumbag she had ever met. Then she ended up getting together with a guy who looked a lot like me, and everyone found out they were going to the prom. This caused me to suffer profoundly, and to obsess over what had happened for weeks to come. It was the first time that I really saw how badly the drugs were messing up my life. I had always told my friends that I would gladly quit if I found the right woman, but now the right woman had come along—and I was so damaged that I had missed my big chance.
For me, a major part of the ascension process is looking honestly at the problems you have, and being courageous and powerful enough to confront them. This epic failure with a woman was what led me to understand the saying “You get out of your life what you are willing to put into it” when I was in college. If you lack the courage to take a chance, you never get to see the life you might have had. Healing can be an extremely difficult and painful process, as it forces you to go back and identify your original wounds—and see how they are repeating in the present. In order to get better, you are forced to confront all the most difficult challenges life presents you with. My other big saying in college was “Spiritual growth is the hardest thing you will ever do—but also the most rewarding.”
One day after school I got very stoned with a group of people I barely knew. Two of them were hard-core burnouts from the corner, and the other two were their girlfriends. We had two bowls going in opposite directions, so sometimes I had two pipes in my hands at the same time—and I would smoke both of them at once. On the way home, I started having LSD flashbacks. I ended up back on my street, and was seeing the houses all laid out on either side of the road. Garbage cans were lined up in front of the houses. I realized that I hardly knew who any of these people were. They were right there all around me, but each of us was living our lives in complete isolation.
Everyone was living in a box. They would get in a box and drive to another box, where they worked inside a box—a cubicle. Then they got back in the box, drove back to the first box, and turned on another box with dancing, colored lights, which provided them something called “entertainment.” They ate out of a box, threw away the trash in another box, and slept in a box. Then when they died, they would sleep forever—in a box. All the boxes were lined up—the houses and the trash cans—betraying the truth for all those with eyes to see. The secret was hiding right out in the open. I felt I had made the greatest discovery since the theory of gravity.
The full weight of this realization was still hitting me when I walked into the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and looked at the clock. Right then, the cool blue digits spelled out 3:33. At that moment, my consciousness radically changed. I felt an incredible, surging pressure in my ears, like a subsonic frequency. Reality suddenly seemed to have been pinched off and turned into something far more energetic. I felt myself soaring over my body at the kitchen table, and had the distinct sensation of being in both places at once. The digits 3:33 were beaming into my face as I had this incredible experience. It seemed that the numbers themselves were a very important part of whatever was happening to me. At the time, I did not understand it—but this proved to be my first major experience with “numerical synchronicity,” in which I would see repeating patterns of numbers in the most bizarre, unpredictable circumstances. This would happen five or more times a day and would become a major part of my awakening later in life. Synchronicity would give me messages that I was not alone—and I had powerful, positive spiritual friends who were guiding me and helping me through life.
At the time, I was jamming the gas pedal to the floor and redlining the engine on the road to nowhere—but my spiritual friends had me covered. No matter how broken, damaged, and beyond all hope I seemed to be, there was a greater force looking out for me and protecting me. However, before it could fully reveal itself, I had to lift myself out of my own private hell. I still needed to sink a lot farther down before I would finally decide to take better care of myself.