The Dream Raper
by Patrizia Ahlers-Johnson

Perhaps I should have shared my story with her? Perhaps, but I had far more fear of being misunderstood and mislabeled than I had guts. Perhaps it would not made a difference, but I am telling it now, for her death has made a profound difference to me.

I realize that what I am about to write, what you are about to read, may be disturbing. There is nothing about depression and suicide that is not disturbing.

Sadly, often it is white washed in our society.

The Dream Raper.....

I did not perceive it as Lyme disease. No one did at the time, not the doctors or even the scientists. Lyme disease did not 'exist' to them. Anyway, that was not what my mind called it. I recognized it as part of a much older and larger beast which had lived within the depths of my heart and stomach since early childhood. Over the years it had devoured my soul and dreams, bit by bit, spitting out only the empty shells thereof - trading my life for its. Not even asking my  permission.

I had even given this 'beast' a name. The year was 1970. Janis Joplin was number one with her rendition of "Me and Bobby McGee". I remember hearing the lyrics, over and over again, on the small radio that stood next to the couch on which I lay, "One day near Salinas, Lord, I let him slip away. He's looking for that home and I hope he finds it. And I'll trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday..."

In trade for a single yesterday. What yesterday? Yesterday had never been that great, and yet, it now proved worlds better than today. Today? Today I was lying immobile in a dusty screened sun-room. On an old sofa covered by old blankets - in my boyfriend's house in Glendale, California. I had been laying there for days. Partly unconscious, partly in delirium with fever from an unknown disease. I was fifteen years old. I was still a virgin.

In this darkness that surrounded me, there was no room left to turn or to run. Only to survive. Days passed like an insect caught in tree sap. Enveloping. A strangely warm, amber struggle in slow motion - a quiet resignation to a world that was filled with nightmare images. Trapped in a mind that knew it had gone insane.

And at the core of this, I knew, was "The Dream Raper". That is what my mind called it. This thing, this entity which had taken my hopes and dreams by force for years, holding me hostage, never giving anything back except the quiet sound of myself collapsing from within. And even deep inside the tiny confines of the collapse, within the air pockets that still existed, there was The Dream Raper.

Ever present, because we were not separate. My soul was there, too, somewhere - hidden - very thin from the weight, but it was still there because the pain was great. And for this one reason, I knew I was still alive. And so I began to hate my soul, for even there, on that couch, it spoke to me about "other" things. Things that could be. It spoke about Life - a life which I was certain could never be mine, one that had never been possible before. But it didn't matter now anyway, because The Dream Raper had finally won. He had taken the only thing I had left. He had taken my mind.

They say when you are contemplating suicide to wait two weeks and then reevaluate your decision.** But I had already been thinking about that for some time.

The days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months. I missed two entire weeks at the beginning of the second semester of my sophomore year. The long absence was heralded by the fevers and hallucinations that occurred as I lay on my boyfriend's couch. Then, as if nothing about my life had changed, as if I had not changed, I began noting the passing weeks with trash collection days again.

Every Thursday morning before 6:30 a.m., it was my designated duty to dump all my mother's beer and whiskey bottles in the trash cans of our neighbors, a job I held since grammar school. (Heaven forbid that the garbage man would suspect my mother was an alcoholic.) But she was the "town drunk" and everyone "knew". She certainly was not there for me to turn to. If anything, I was now more vulnerable than ever to her drunken rages.

And I resumed noting the passing of months with the passing of my periods. I quickly came to realize they only exacerbated my bizarre list of growing symptoms - symptoms which no doctor or psychiatrist seemed to understand. Over the next three years I would drag myself from one doctor to another: the blinding headaches, the nausea, the joint and muscle pain, the stiff neck and shoulders, the chronic bronchitis and chronic urinary tract infections and the constant fatigue. But all this paled in comparison to the visual hallucinations that continued to plague me throughout those high school years. Hallucinations that were often in black and white. Hallucinations which I knew were not real. Hallucinations which the doctors whispered to each other as perhaps "schizophrenia"?

The constant fear that now took over my very existence was immobilizing. I was unable to focus. I couldn't remember anything. I dreaded doing anything new. I never went to a school dance.

Test days made the asphalt outside the classroom buckle in undulating waves, matching the nausea in my stomach. I became fearful of even interacting with fellow students at lunch. The more fearful I became, the more powerful The Dream Raper became. My fear was his food. And the more he ate, the more my world would shrink, collapsing in upon me  a heavy, black, suffocating box. Before sealing it shut, he added all the horrors that only Fallinie could imagine.

Then, taking the box, he gleefully shook it, tumbling me, my fears and hallucinations together, leaving us trapped in that black terror for hours at a time.

So, I tried to feed him little. Keeping my panic suppressed kept him at bay. I would stay in my fourth period art class during lunch. I carried a switch blade to give people a reason to leave me alone. But people did not need a reason. They left me alone. I needed the reason, not them. For the beast inside me now had a death grip, and it would spring out at almost anyone who ventured too close. Anyone who appeared to be threatening. Anyone who knew my secret.

In the Dream Raper's grasp, I was powerless. I would helplessly watch myself saying things I did not mean, hurting people who still cared. I saw myself burning with a hatred so intensely consuming. Yet, it was within this smoldering vengeance that I hated myself the most, for somehow I had let myself down.

Above all, I hated that tiny, quiet voice inside me, telling me all would be okay.

Someday...

Someday? Like I have the time to wait. You would think that the tiny voice would have died by now. Wouldn't you? It was weak, nauseating and always present at the moment of choice...

But there was a way to silence it forever.

They say that if you are contemplating suicide to wait two weeks and then reevaluate your decision.**

If Life deals you a bad hand, do you have to play it out? Or do you have the option to fold?

Is this Schizophrenia? Or some other bizarre yet unknown psychiatric, psychotic illness? Well, that is a hand I do not wish to play out. One day, not too far away. I will become the pain. I will become the hallucination. There will be no separation between me and what is wrong with me. I will no longer know that I am sick and that my sickness is separate from who I intrinsically am. I will no longer recognize the reality of my illness. They will lock me up. Turn me into a zombie with drugs. I will lose the option to fold the hand that I no longer wish to play.

I will lose the option of suicide.

Months became years. And this dance between life and death continued. In the beginning, I was horrified to awaken knowing that I was still alive and had not died in my sleep. What a great cop-out, I would think, except the nightmares were actually worse than reality.

Sleep was difficult. Upon awakening, I would often see 'Fred' stretched out on my floor next to my bed. A skeleton hallucination in black and white, looking at me, grinning a very toothy smile, head cocked, propped up by one arm.

Fred was not always with me, but he was around often enough to be given a proper name. At first he terrified me. The panic would set in. I would quickly turn my head away, squeezing my eyes shut in hope that he would vanish. Vanish?

Sometimes, yes. Only to be replaced by something more bizarre and yet equally disturbing. But as any intended suitor, his feelings were never hurt when I ignored him. He just calmly hung around, greeted me on many mornings, and I sort of grew accustomed to him. He never reached for me or acted rude. He was quite the gentleman, ever so patient, waiting for me. Waiting for that final embrace. He knew I wasn't going anywhere.

Is life supposed to be fair? Are there shades of gray in amongst the stark pillars of black and white? Is everything either good or evil? Everything either of life or of death? Is there only a right and a wrong answer? A 'yes' and a 'no' to any and every question? A positive and a negative. A push to every pull? A destruction to every creation? An end to every beginning? Does everything collapse into entropy? Does Life have an ultimate meaning?

Is there a God? Is he the guy that deals the cards? Would he be pissed if I folded?

At 17, I found myself at the crossroads of all the 'absolutes'.  Is God The Dream Raper in disguise? Is he Death? Could they be one in the same? A gigolo, a courtesan who waits with open arms for the final dance? The final surrender? A vast ocean to where all weary rivers must finallylead...

Being drawn in, dissolving into nothingness? Oblivion?

Sometimes one can't hope for better. One can only hope for different. Death is definitely different.

Paradoxically, these years in which I struggled with Lyme disease, depression and death, I also continued to draw, paint and write. This was not a choice. Perhaps destruction and creativity do have a common ground. They did for me. I wrote these two poems among many between 1970 and 1972, with the back drop of  the Vietnam War, Watergate, the right to vote at 18, all in the dying glow of what was left of Hippy movement:

THESE WORDS
As I write these words, 
It is the present to me.
As you read these words, It is the present to you,
But the past to me...I wonder if I am dead?

A LULLABY FOR MY GENERATION
 We have seen the morning sun uprisewarm
sparks alighting against the mountain sides.
We are the watchers of life
We are the discovers of dawn
Through the shining windows of our eyes.

We have felt the tingling that the morning sun
displays as it burns warmly upon our skin.
We have come to know the colors of day,
The oneness of the night,
From the memory of moments that have been.

We have journeyed through amber meadows under 
the quiet gaze of a midmorning sky.
We've learned the conformity of the grass,
The singularity of the weeds;
We even took the time to patiently sit listening to the meadow cry.

We have bravely held hands, together daring the
world to even move at the peak of high noon.
We felt we had the answers.
We, the to-be rulers of a destroyed world,
Let our hopes vanish all too soon.

We changed, lied, forgot what we once had, fearing the afternoon sun,
We had lost a war, not a battle;
We had let our self be categorized,
As if we had never begun.

I stayed behind; afternoon had yet to pass the darkness wall.
I could hear the cries of my friends through smiling faces,
Facades of what they must be.
No longer could be heard the intrepid calls.

Darkness came like an avalanche of black velvet
crushing the glowing embers that once were a day.
I am the watcher of life.
I am the discoverer of dawn.
I sit quietly and listen to the games my old friends play.

In darkness there are no colors,
just false neon lights and psychedelic dreams.
I cry to again experience morning;
I long for lost moments.
But the day is over it seems.

In the morning I called to the countless, faceless numbers
who ventured upon the hazy unknown shores.
I told them of the measure of dreaming.
Of yesterdays and tomorrows.
But they mechanically walked over the meadow,
Wooden soldiers over my remains; over the day that was no more.

You can wait for the rest of your life for someone to come and rescue you, someone who would pick up that 'losing' hand of yours and play it well. Maybe change the course of things? The course of your life? Three years were far too long for me to wait any more.

A losing hand should fold.

Besides, He wanted me to fold. The Dream Raper. It no longer mattered to me who he was, where he had come from, that he had been with me to one degree or another since I was 4 years old - since my grandfather died. All that mattered was that he had won.

So, in April of 1973, I gave God an ultimatum, a God who I no longer believed in. A God, IF he existed, I no longer respected.

I said, "You have until my graduation to fix me, or I will commit suicide. I hear that is not okay with you - to commit suicide. Well, I don't care anymore what you think, or who you are, or what you can do to me that hasn't already been done. I am not asking you. I am telling you. So there, you have it. MY deadline.

And as far as I am concerned, you and that cloud you rode in on can just go and take a hike!"

And I said more, which is unprintable...

And, strangely, things "appeared" to get better, like a giant weight lifted off me. Actually, I was no better. I was just Free. Free to be sick. Free to be an atheist, because no bolt of lightning hit me for cussing out God. Free to commit suicide. Free to do what ever I felt like doing for the rest of my going-to-be-short life.

I told people off that I had wanted to tell off for years. Said how I felt to everyone and anyone who cared listen, (and wished they hadn't). I ate what I wanted, had sex with whomever I wanted, and finally had a strange brush with confidence. Not a confidence born of self-esteem. Genuine self-esteem was a long journey from where I was. But another form of confidence, because I just didn't give a damn anymore.  I would not be around to be held accountable for the repercussions or consequences of any of my present actions. I had a one way ticket out of life, and I was leaving in less than two months.

"Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."

So, nothing left to lose, huh? Well, that tiny voice was still nagging me.

"Things will get better," it said, "Just wait. You have so much to lose!"

The anger inside me would well up, "Ugh, shut the hell up!" I'd answer."I've got my ticket out of this stinking place. I have done everything. Tried everything. Nothing works. I'm out'a here. And You, who ever You are, are History."

You see, I already had the answers to the questions. Unbeknownst to the conscious part of me, and on the verge of suicide, I knew that Life was more than just the pain I was presently experiencing, that "I" was far more than the overwhelming pain and despair. The tiny voice had known all along. The tiny voice was my soul. What my soul knew, my brain and mind had been oblivious to.

Miracles happen every day - sometimes in small bits and pieces  sometimes all at once, but they are real. They have the power to change... Everything.

It has been a long and complicated journey. My chronic Lyme disease, (with obvious neurological complications) was not diagnosed until 1992. I was in my late 30's. My daughter had already been born with congenital Lyme disease. I had suffered from Lyme disease and its effects for 27 years.

In that time, I never really, until recently, said good-bye to The Dream Raper - AKA Mr. Death, Fred, the Grim Reaper - because they had all been a part of me way before I became ill with Lyme disease. Lyme disease gave them enormous power, but I was familiar with them. Or should I say with It. Depression.

Paradoxically, I did not recognize it as depression until I was no longer depressed. It has taken five years of continuous antibiotic therapy, both oral and IV, to give the proper name to something so common, yet so powerful.

And the self-esteem? That took an incredible amount of work  work begun three weeks before I graduated from high school. I found myself walking into the doors of a 12-step program at eighteen years old.

"One day near Salinas, Lord, I let him slip away. He's looking for that home, and I hope he finds it. And I'll trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday..."

It seems just yesterday that Kris Kristopherson wrote "Me and Bobby McGee" and Janis Joplin made it famous. Just yesterday that Janis died of an overdose, and Kris Kristopherson decided to become sober.

We all have our demons. Our dragons. Our enemies. Our Teachers.

I would not venture to say that Lyme disease or depression or alcoholism or a terrible childhood have made me a better person, for some would think that sacrilegious or even insane.But, they have been among the Teachers that have helped guide me through this wondrous journey of life. Wondrous? Yes, sometimes very painful. We are all searching for our "home", as in the song.

Home? There IS a mansion. It is within each of us. Also, within so many of us, there is an incredible soul sickness, an emptiness, a desolation, an abandonment of the self, a depression that can come from a chronic illness, or even from life itself. Still, there is a yearning for that safe place called home. It is a place where we find ourselves, and like what we finally see.

This journey within can be so very long. Sometimes, the best we can do is reside in the outhouse next door, but never forget that the mansion is real and it is there for anyone who seeks it in this life time. This struggle is our legacy. It is our humanity. Our journey. And it is unique to each of us. It is in being so lost, that we find the way home, and this journey itself is worth the coming home.

No mansion would ever have been realized, had I never picked up the first brick, or placed my hands on the proper tools. The hand that Life dealt me was not a losing hand. I just had to decide to play it honestly and bravely one day at a time, and to quit waiting for some person, place or thing to rescue me. It was and is a winning hand.

Does God fit in here somewhere? Of course he does. The tools? For me? (There are many more  tools out there.)

MY TOOLS - in no particular order.

WELL, DOING SOMETHING FOR OTHERS WILL MAKE YOU GET WELL FASTER. It can be viewed as a really selfish thing. If selfish is motivating, so be it! This is an enormous key to getting better. It is no secret, 12-step programs have been suggesting this for decades. A "zillion" sober and clean alcoholics and drug addicts, gamblers, etc., can't ALL be wrong. It really and truly does work! It works because it gets you outside of yourself. It opens wondrous doors. Get involved on any level. Lick stamps to mail out newsletters. See a friend who is worse off than you are. Write and send in your story. But DO something.

And keep doing something.

For those of us with Lyme disease who are involved getting information for newsletters, running support groups, etc. - we are actually doing better than if we did nothing. Decide to volunteer your time or energy, no matter what little you have. You will find that you are no longer powerless and alone.

And miracles do happen. Every day. Bit by bit.

Patrizia Ahlers-Johnson  Ahlersart@aol.com
9145 Mallory Canyon Road,
Prunedale (Somewhere near Salinas), California 93907
 

(Editors note: Please remember that the preceding article is copyrighted. If you wish to copy or reprint, you must get permission from the author, Patrizia Ahlers-Johnson)


For more information on Lyme disease see: Lots Of Links On Lyme Disease

Last updated on 29 December 2000 by
Art Doherty
Lompoc, California
doherty@utech.net

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