The Story, so Far....

("The Story, as it Goes" was written forthis site @ the beginning of my junior year)

.The Story, as it Goes.

..................screw grammar......................


For a while now, I've wanted to get this off my chest. But I realize that typing it into a computer will not do the job.

Last year, as everything ran out of control, so did my mind. When the adhd medication I was taking wasn't working well enough, the damn psychiatrist assigned to me gave me a crazy-high dosage of something called adderall.........basically the same stimulant as ritalin.....and just as gay too. By the end of last school year, the tension and anxiety caused by the medication caused everything to go haywire. I averaged about 4-3hrs of sleep every night. In case you don't get what that means, I was high 24/7 (NO IT ISN'T FUN AT ALL). At one point nearing the conclusion of the year, I woke up, had an extreme fever, was delusional, went back to sleep, and I slept..........for 49hrs.

Surely you've been so overworked that you don't have time to do what you want, to be who you are, to have fun, to be with others, or to be free by any means. As you can guess, throughout all of last year.........I felt just like that. No freedom. I was dieing from within. The very essence of who I was-withering. The inability to do any school work caused by my extreme exhaustion left me doodling instead of taking notes. I didn't think coherently when I drew. I just drew to make myself feel better. Haha.......and can you guess what it was I drew? Wings.

Some, including my mom and the psychiatrist who studied me, would agree that I became two different people last year. One, half-dead, barely alive, dreaming to his thoughts end. The other, a monster absorbed in stupid quantities like focus and grades.

All of my doodles involved exoskeletal suits. That is........suits that a person wears as a sort of performance-enhancer. I've always liked the notion of giving a parapelegic person a new pair of legs just by sticking him in such a suit, or just rebuilding his leg muscles and nerves.

A few of the suits I “designed”:

A full-body water-suit designed to enhance swimming by extending the arms into flipper-like appendages and the legs into a single flipper much like a dolphin's.
Hydrophilic Suit

A winged upper-abdomen-suit designed for a human to pilot using his or her thought to control the wing movements
DesignSubWing03

A lower-body suit allowing a person to control elongated and modified "running" legs by thought alone.
ReverseKneeAdaptation

The doodles were merely attempts of mine to escape boredom in classes I neither cared about nor tried in/was too tired to try in.

Probably the most important thing to happen to me so far in my life has been the series of dreams I experienced during my highly-stressed sophomore year.

The first of the dreams goes something like this:
I'm standing on a cliff, and there's someone I know next to me. The world is falling apart around us. If we don't leave soon, she and I will both be killed. The instant I realize this, my arms extend to form wings(???). We don't have much time left, so I quickly yell out to her, "Look out! My wings are big! Hold on!" So, as you may guess, she hops on my back and I leap. Flight is not one of those things you can describe to another person, especially when all you use are your own wings. Anyways, I fly, as marvelous as it sounds, down to another cliff. I end up flapping my wings to come to a halt, and gently let her down. We're safe.

The second:
Im standing on top of a cliff. There's a crowd behind me. Im older......like in my 30's because my hands look older. I raise my head from looking at my hands to look behind me. There stand a bunch of people, some I know, some I don't. There are even some tv cameras pointed at me. Sickened by this sight, I turn to look in front of me at what's near the edge of the cliff. There........propped up on wooden struts, was the most beautiful pair of wings I have ever seen or dreamed of. They were made of some material I have never seen. I approach them. They are really big, and they look to be attached to a sort of harness for the upper human torso. Part of the harness looks sivery white and has a small window. Beneath the glass......or plastic(who knows?) I could see blood and veins. Scratched into the silvery surface was my signature. I did the only thing I knew to do. I maneuvered my arms into the provided slots in the harness and the suit closed behind me. I could feel the thump of an artificial(or maybe lab-grown) heart beating through the harness against my back. The second my arms were fully into the slots, I lost all feeling in them. The feeling then sprang back up, but this time, the tips of my fingers felt like they were at the tips of the wings. I simply cannot describe the sensation. (pauses to remember) Now, the wings are very heavy being so large, but something attached to my legs allows me to support them. From here, I lift the wings off the struts, back up a few steps, lean forward, and run off the cliff, flapping the wings. 50ft away from the cliff, I'm flying. The dream ends.

The third:
Probably the most complex dream I've ever had. And definitely the most beautiful by any means. It's set in a valley, most of which is a meadow of tall grass and weeds. There's a wooden shelter in the meadow. I'm standing under its roof. I hear a sound. I look up to the sky, past the mountain tops surrounding the valley. There is a massive, crimson dragon flying towards me. I call out to it, "Big Red!!"(not related to MBA.....just its appearance). The dragon lands next to me. This creature cannot be described. Its beauty defies the imagination. It looked real, actual, maybe even........natural. The placement of the muscles, the bones, the wings.............all of its parts looked like they'd work. The head even made sense. This didn't look like something I or anyone else could have possibly thought of. No. It could only be the work of nature. Afterall, how could something exist. It would work!!!!!!! The dragon offered its back to me. I climbed up on it(the dragon is probably 6ft tall with its wings folded). Once I had laid myself against its back, something incredible happened. I'm kinda sorry though, because I cannot really explain it. It was as if the thoughts of the dragon and I merged. The beast and I were thinking together, in tandem, without any conflict. As soon as I wanted to, the dragon rose off its belly and began to trot. Soon after we took off. Since our thoughts were shared, so were our sensations. I felt.......if it is possible.......the feeling of the wind beneath the dragon's wings. I felt the long neck. We were thinking alongside each other, flying together. Quickly we rose, with my body on the dragons back, arms wrapped around its shoulders, infront of its wings. Soon we were above the mountain top. We crested it, and descended the other side, staying just above the tree tops. As we glided down the other side of the mountain, we gained speed. Everything, the wind, the ground and the trees beneath us, was blurring. Something strange was happening. I wanted to fly again, not just glide. Something strange... very strange........ Where was my body? I couldn't feel it?!?! I was sinking into Big Red's body?!?! My body completely disappeared into the back of the dragon. Time slowed. I lost all feeling of my old body. The body of the dragon changed color, so now, instead of being a deep crimson, its skin gleamed a brilliant white. I was not a human anymore. The dragon and I had essentially become one. The only thoughts were my own. The feeling of the wind beneath my wings was my own. My long neck-mine. My tail-mine. My legs and my snout - both mine. Now, I had full control of the dragon's body. I was the one flying. Oh time has never been so slow....... After I changed, I flapped my wings once, and that was it- the dream was over. I actually remember what it was like - to have wings and a tail.

The fourth:
I and a bunch of my friends are standing atop a ridge. The ridge leads down into a valley, but at one point, it is too steep to descend. We have walked to the top and are stopped. I am bored and sick of sitting around doing nothing, so I turn away from the group and venture higher up the ridge. Eventually, I reach a drop-off like a cliff at one point, and I still don't know why, but I back up a little, and run off it. Instead of falling to a violent death, that same sensation of having two wings pops back into view, and I glide, rather quickly, down to the forest floor. Upon touch down, I'm laughing(???, maybe it was fun, ???). I turn around, looking up at where I had come from, and I take off again, barreling up towards where my friends are resting. I land and beckon them to follow me back to the cliff. This time, we all jump, and we all glide down, laughing till the end.

The fifth:
This is the shortest fragment that I can remember in detail, but it still is quite complex. I and someone else are waiting for something. We are under a structure which opens onto a valley with a lake running its length. There are two large(30ft) dragons in front of us, both sitting, as if waiting for something. The person next to me walks up to them and climbs on top of the right one as I had done with Big Red. When the person lays down on its back, the wings of the dragon spread. They manage to run and take off, but with some difficulty. They fly dangerously close to some limbs on the opposing side of the valley, but still manage to clear the trees. I climb onto the remaining dragon. I lay down and immediately I share control of its body(the same sensation as with Big Red). The dragon and I take off, accelerating and climbing in the air. I am pushing as hard as I can to fly as fast as the dragon will allow. We burst through a hole in the trees, opening our wings to slow us down. The dream ends.

Those are the only dreams I can actually remember from beginning to end. There are fragments of others, many of them with dragons and winged-suits. For now, these will have to do.

The five dreams I summarized each made me go quiet for atleast a day after having them. They were of unexplainable beauty, and they all demonstrated the freedom I lacked during the 10th grade. Not until the summer would I actually begin to understand them, using some techniques of dream interpretation I learned at Vandy's school of psychology. Until I knew what they meant, I could not stop thinking about them. Every moment of my life was dominated by a will to fly. I wanted and had to fly.

Up until this point, my dream in life was to become a particle physicist, as at one time or another, I had actually understood the theories of people like Steven Hawking, Brian Greene, Einstein(easiest of the three). I was merely good at the science, and as I approached it with increasing enthusiasm, I found I even had a natural talent for it. In the beginning of my sophomore year, I was so deep into the subject, I began to make my own theories. Two of them developed without any knowledge of current particle physics research. This means that I came up with them out of the blue. The same two theories turned out to parallel some of the those under intense debate as possible explanations for the structure of matter, time's constant, the fabric of strings, etc. One of my theories basically consisted of the statement that matter is made of energy. If you don't believe me when I say that I came up with this on my own, I still have the page of math notes that I scribbled it down on. Also, David Carlson, who sat next to me, can account to my spas'd behavior surrounding my "revelation".

So what happened once I had the dreams? Simple. That desire to fly took over every inch of my being. Its kinda hard to abandon it........who wouldn't want their wings back?

Now I had to find a way to do it.

Some know that my mind is basically the unexplainable as witnessed by Finger, Dr. Clark, and others in my physics class(and my long time friends who already knew this^^). It has been about two years since I have thought more than one sentence in my head, as thinking for me consists of emotion and feeling, image and sound, certainty and uncertainty. At the time of the dreams, this meant that out of nowhere, images flooded my mind. Usually, those images were designs of exoskeletal suits, some were surreal and very emotional, and others were schematics or theories.

“The Story, as it Continues…” (written for my website this past august)

….....…SCREW GRAMMAR……….

Continuing over from my sophomore year, first came the summer.

The freedom after 10^th grade, during summer 2005, gave me the chance to reconsider all the reasons for the dreams and visions, as they seemed to permeate my thoughts. Their effects had cascaded down, from my conscious, through my subconscious, and into the very basic levels of my being.

Gradually, I disconnected from people I had once considered my friends, simply because I had too many of these people, and if I was going to change anytime soon, I had to narrow the number of people I would have to deal with. Also, I realized that many of my “friends” were not worth my time … single-serving friends … (seen Fight Club?). You see, I didn’t want to hang around people, sharing and participating in small-talk, when I knew, as I grew with them, becoming closer and closer to these people, that I would not be that way for much longer. I had adopted an ideal, which demanded I become something close to the opposite of a sociopath. With the dreams came such a fundamental change in my being, that, among other things, I was reborn, with new beliefs, aspirations, and desires.

What was I now that I wasn’t before? The two people are about as different as lima beans and speed bumps. O_o. Exactly. They are completely unrelated. To begin with, I now lived by the phrase, “you should live for yourself”, keeping in mind that having friends can be considered selfish. Secondly, I no longer desired to pursue Particle Physics, something I’ve been fascinated with since I first saw an atomic bomb film, back in the 6^th grade. I began to consider biomechanical engineering. My desires became what they are today: in general, to pursue beauty in all its forms.

So what, exactly, was it in the dreams that seemed to inspire me so? Well, let me regress and tell you the real story of the dreams, especially the events surrounding the third one, with the dragon in it. Here’s the uncensored acccount of the dream:

Microsoft Word Document

Story last updated: 12/2/05

Probably the most complex dream I've ever had. And definitely the most beautiful by any means. It's set in a valley, most of which is a meadow of tall grass and weeds, with a creek bed running through the middle. There's a wooden shelter in the meadow. I'm standing under its overhang, sorta feeling disjointed/alone. Looking up the glade past the trees and into the mountains, I hear a sound. I look up to the sky, past the mountain tops surrounding the valley. There is a massive, steely-crimson/brown dragon flying towards me. I call out to it, "Big Red!!"(I wish it had been a better name, but it wasn’t.). He lands next to me. This creature cannot be described. Its beauty defies the imagination.(XD….and my stupid imagination had to go and do this to me) It looked real, actual, maybe even........natural. The placement of the muscles, the bones, the wings.............all of its parts looked like they'd work. Heck……the air, the grass, the ground, the shed, the mountains, and my surroundings in general were so real that I couldn’t possibly deny this. The head even made sense. This didn't look like something I or anyone else could have possibly thought of. No. It could only be the work of nature. Afterall, how could something exist. It would work!!!!!!! The weirdest part about him was that I considered him to be me. The dragon offered his back to me. I climbed up on him(the dragon is probably 6ft tall, back to ground, with his wings folded, and his skin was warm, as if he was warm blooded). Once I had laid myself against his back(avoiding the taller spines), something incredible happened. I'm kinda sorry though, because I cannot really explain it. It was as if the thoughts of the dragon and I merged. The beast and I were thinking together, in tandem, without any conflict. As soon as we wanted to get up, he rose off his belly and began to run, first on all fours, then only his hind legs. With his wings spread, we took off. Since our thoughts were shared, so were our sensations. I felt.......if it is possible.......the feeling of the wind beneath the dragon's wings. I felt the long neck. We were thinking alongside each other, flying together. Quickly we rose, with my body on the dragons back, arms wrapped around his shoulders, infront of its wings. It was as easy as trusting myself……to ride on his back. Soon we were above the mountain top. We crested it, and descended the other side, staying just above the tree tops. As we glided down the other side of the mountain, we gained speed. Everything, the wind, the ground and the trees beneath us, was blurring. Something strange was happening. What was wrong?!?! Why weren’t we flying. I wanted to fly again, not just glide. Something strange... very strange........ Where was my body? I couldn't feel it?!?! I was sinking into Big Red's back?!?! My body completely disappeared. Time slowed. I lost all feeling of my old body. The body of the dragon changed color, so now, instead of being a deep crimson, its skin gleamed a brilliant white. I was not a human anymore. The dragon and I had essentially become one. The only thoughts were my own. The feeling of the wind beneath my wings was my own. My long neck-mine. My tail-mine. My legs and my snout - both mine. Now, I had full control of his/my? body. I was the one flying. Oh time has never been so slow.......to have wings and a tail. It was (not a word can describe it). The bright pure white faded away from me till I was a dark brown-grey color. It took a few seconds(seemed like forever), but I had absorbed the full situation around me, had just gotten used to the feeling, to the flying, and then it happened. I saw her. She was……geez……..umm………beautiful. If you’ve ever been blindsided by something in your life, then you know what it feels like. Another dragon, she was flying, in the air, a little higher than me and off to my right. She was a ruddy brown color. She glanced over at me. I was stunned. Ugh….and of course, I lost altitude and crashed, into a lake. I swam to the shore(which was quite fun using my wings) and got out breathing but my blood was racing, coursing through the veins of my neck. I felt all tingly inside, just as you should feel sitting next to a warm fire. I looked around the lake. It was surrounded by a meadow with the grass thinning towards the shore. It was dry and rustling. There was a wind blowing. I remember that after I saw her, everything was so ……uhhhh…….. (high?). It was like remembering to breath? So easy. I raised my head from the ground and looked around for her. She probably heard the splash. Sure enough, there she stood. On the other side, not 200ft away from me (my sense of scale was prolly wrong seeing as I was larger than normal). I spread my wings again, flapped them to get some of the water off. It was cold. I walked away from the lake, judging how much distance I would need to take off. I turned, and let go of myself, running and flapping towards the lake, barely making lift-off before the water. I was going rather fast, but I wasn’t exactly holding back. So I touched down on the dirt, maybe ten feet from her. I was right?!?!? She was brown, but she was much like myself in structure. Her belly was yellow though, and her eyes…amber...now there’s a sight for……..I locked my gaze with hers. She was so different…. She was just so beautiful…..but so intense. I hadn’t completely folded my wings (I was still in shock), but I walked over to her and rose up on my hind legs, using my wings and tail for better balance. I placed my (hand or paw?) on the left side of her neck, and….hmmmm…. A warm fluid sensation spread up my arm into my chest. Maybe all this time I had been numb. I……. I thought, “I know you.”.

That’s all I can remember.

Well, of course, you have to know that in the days following the dream (back in the 10^th grade), I didn’t mention the female even once. Hell, I can’t remember if it was three or four months before I even really referenced this dream. I was different, for sure. Maybe, in the summer, I actually let myself think about the dream, a little less ashamed of it, now. I tried, desperately, to dissect the female dragon as a symbol, but I had an immensely troubling time doing so. My dragon, on the other hand, was now the center of my thought, as a creature of unparalleled beauty, something I had witnessed in reality, right?

Well, the dream was messed up to begin with, or….it was too perfect to be real, but the degree to which it seemed that made me sick. Gradually, my confusion-cum-obsession with this dream grew, but I didn’t know, at first, what to do with these thoughts of being a dragon in my dreams. It was fun, sure, but was it sane? Well, unfortunately, I let the idea take over me, but what about the female?

11^th Grade began….

She was something that would have to pass. The beauty found in my dragon would have to be enough for me to accomplish all that I wanted to in life, because she wasn’t real. She was just another part of my mind, some far-off tangent of symbols that I didn’t really need to think about. I decided that I could draw my feelings for this other dragon and get them to go away, disappear, even though I had never……ever…….drawn without a ruler and a calculator. So here’s my first drawing:

A Release

Shortly after, I wanted to lock up yet another rogue emotion. This time, it was the feeling of freedom I experienced in the dream. So here’s that freedom:

Floating

My friends were noticing changes in me, and they told me so, but I didn’t let them know what I was up to until a little later.

I was safe – set to work through the school year, unaffected by her presence or the ridiculous ideas surrounding my dragon. By this time, I could now address my mental disorders. It is only because I have such a strong ideal that I refuse to take medication for most of my diseases. (is laughing) You see, by aiming myself at an ideal of, say, constantly focused, orderly, behavior, I notice when I begin to deviate, and then make changes to compensate. It works quite well, and just now, I’m beginning to have some luck treating my bouts of anxiety. Well, that worked, for a bit.

Oh, then it happened.

It was around late September that, while I was perusing an online forum of dragon artists, that I found a drawing, forever changing the way I will think about things.

Project Huge Drawing (phd for short)

That dragon on the left is my dragon. The one on the right is the female. Both appear just as they did in my dream.

BUT HOW!?! WHO IS DOING THIS?!?! WHAT’S GOING ON!?!?!?

I had no way of understanding this, but I accepted it. It was just as it seemed – nothing more. Getting upset over something like this……I mean……how could I?!?!? RIGHT?!?!?!

>Let me say that I considered a number of actions involving a most powerful hatred on my behalf. It seemed, to me, that some random person I didn’t know, boy or girl, somehow drew both by extreme….very extreme coincidence, and that perhaps the person was playing with me in some abstrac, twisted, or demented manner. I was now … scared.<

That October was one of the worst months in my life. A very DEEP sorrow sank into my blood, staining all the ones I loved with my suspicion. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.

Eventually, in November, I learned that the person behind the drawing was a girl my age who claimed to be the female dragon. Sooooooo…….she was responsible for all my pain……she was at fault for my misery, the root of all my problems. Wait! This isn’t possible, because dragons don’t exist. Telepathy doesn’t either.

When I say that the dragons look just like they did in the dream, I mean it.

It took me a month before I had the courage to email her, and I think I scared her just as much as she scared me. Together, she and I have, for the past year, been surrounded in coincidences that just so happen to align with each other. The first time I saw my dragon, she saw a mental image of my dragon stronger than any other image she’s seen before. It would take me an hour to list all of the unnerving coincidences we’ve had, so believe me when I say I was constantly paranoid.

Things didn’t measure up to the everyday standards of reality. People floated past me, having absolutely no effect. I was alone for the first time in my life, but I was happy. The things I considered real began to merge with things I considered impossible, and, before long, I began to remember my dreams.

After midterm exams passed, I became a dragon again. The second “draconic” dream was a welcome dose of solace to exam time disgust, and, since then, I’ve been a healthy mix of a dragon, a human, and a human-dragon hybrid in my dreams. Overall, I would estimate about 30 or so such dreams have occurred since the first, with some definitely more vivid than others. But there was another problem, because all the dreams seemed to contain the same dragons and the same general landscape. Sometimes, I, a human, would face down my dragon, and, other times, I possessed both of his wings, his tail, and even his fangs. The female was there, too, as real as ever, alive in my eyes. So I could live as this creature, in the depths of my heart, but I couldn’t ever show people who I was when I slept. Not then, maybe now.

What really bothered me about this girl’s drawings was the fact that someone I didn’t even know could draw my dragon better than I could. That was unfair, so I began teaching myself how to draw, learning only by trial and error. I never read any manuals, tutorials, or guides on how to shade or draw shapes, so I’ve come as far as I am now completely alone. My most recent (finished in mid july) drawing of my dragon:

We Are Memory

The general hysteria surrounding my dragon and this girl has provided me with more than enough insanity for my age. Ever since the 9^th grade, I’ve been very introspective, constantly racking myself, demanding information and clues to my mind in ways that sometimes might seem harsh, mentally, but I usually end up with the answer. As one can guess, I’ve asked myself every possible question and answered only a few.

In conclusion to that little division of my life,

Until June, 2006, I didn’t know her in real life, but only as a friend through instant messaging programs. It was, as hard as it is to believe, by chance that we met over the summer.

I’ve been alone in dealing with all sorts of problems, mentally, but I don’t want help with them, because I’ve only been hurt when accepting help in the past. I know that, in apology to all the teachers that I most likely insulted last year, it would be nice for them to understand that, since I’ve been conscious of my adhd, I’ve slowly become aware of the symptoms and different complexes affected by it. One of the most integral symptoms that I didn’t realize until just last year was that I was, to a large extent, unaware of consequence. It is hard to articulate such a concept, since I can easily say I understand actions have consequences, but actually acknowledging this and installing such a LAW into the way one thinks can be difficult for someone like me. I’ve gotten a lot better, but I still have trouble with it.

Whenever I’m sitting down at my desk to work on homework, when I’m typing up reports or messages to my friends, or when I’m hanging out with people, in general, I find that my drawing hand always hurts. The vessels and arteries seem to constrict, rerouting the liquor elsewhere, to my core and brain, like any human does under short term stress. Unfortunately for me, that’s how it is, all the time, unless I’m drawing or somehow working to bring my dragon to life by any means necessary. To explore the more abstract perversions of this idea, consider that, since Biology AP teaches me about intercell mechanics and other things essential to life, then when I’m learning about this stuff, I feel no pain. I guess music sometimes helps this, so that the numbness and pain that accompany the loss of blood goes away, allowing me to do things like English or Math.