Survey Time

[Timothy Toner]

>What kind of experience of/opinions on 'the occult' in Real Life do you
>all have?  I'm interested to see whether there's a higher proportion of
>'believers' here than elsewhere in RPG's.

Hell, I can't believe I'm going to out myself on a mailing list.  No, not
that, but I'm sure some of this will come back to haunt me.  Okay.  I'm one
of eleven kids, which is weird enough, but you can imagine the identity
crisis I had when growing up.  It manifested as a feeling that I was somehow
more than merely human.  I was an angel, sent by God, to help this poor,
pathetic family deal with the enormity of their decision to have so many
damn kids.  ANd, from the stories my family tells (I never admitted that to
them, BTW), I was a weird little kid.  Sick most of my young life, I was
rail thin, and a frequent visitor at the emergency room.  I guess my parents
thought I was a holy fool, and they always dragged me to funerals (me and me
alone), to the point where I dread going to one today.  I'd say weird things
that seemed blessed, coming from the mouth of a kid, and I firmly believed
that I could make things happen.  One such example was when I was forbidden
to go trick-or-treating (I was only three), and instead watched as my
brothers dumped their enormous loads of candy on the spare dining room table
(yes, your family is big when you have a "spare" dining room table, just in
case).  It was the mid-70's, and the stories of maniacs with apples and
razor blades were rampant.  Every piece needed to be checked.  And there I
was, left alone with the largest horde of candy ever amassed.  I pulled over
a chair, and climbed on the table and stuffed my pockets.  While I was doing
that, one of my brothers grabbed the chair and dragged it to some new task,
so when I turned to leave, it wasn't there.  No problem, I thought.  Hell,
if superan can fly, so can I.  And I jumped.  And I broke my left arm in two
places.  ANd it was another trip to the hospital.  That, of course, didn't
dissuade me from my angel shit.  No, it took something far more
earth-shattering to rob me of my innocence.  I went into my parents' bedroom
to ask for a glass of water.  I suppose I could ahve gotten it, but it's so
much better when done by mom.  And as I walked in, my big toe connected with
the corner of the steel frame that held up the matresses.  Yes, that secret
pain that everybody's felt, when they've encountered the corner of a table
or a chair in the middle of the night.  And as I unleashed a horrific scream
that probably aged my parents 10 years, I realized in some small part of my
brain that something like that wouldn't happen to a real angel.   Thus my
fall from grace.

Still, I never got over the feeling that I was weird, so I pursued weird
topics, becoming the youngest ripperologist ever at age 8 (I was convinced
that I could crack the case by the time I was 16).  After a series of night
terrors, I learned to lucid dream, and the nights were mine to paint with a
thousand vibrant colors.  All this interest in the occult attracted the
wrong sort of people, and finally, the OU caught up with me when I was a
sophmore in high school.  Some Earth Muffin turned Dark found out that I
knew a thing or two about magic, and came after me with her boyfriend.  He
used to play on the football team, and I still did.  Needless to say, I
wasn't a rail anymore.  As she pulled him off the ground, she screamed,
"Wait until tonight."  And fuck if I wasn't reading Serpent and the Rainbow
at the time, so my mind was ripe for the power of suggestion.  I had a dream
that night that I was in a corn field, and they were coming after me.  Of
course I couldn't move, and of course they were wielding various farm
implements.  I finally managed to reach a clearing, and in the center was
the obligatory scarecrow, and I gave out my obligatory scream and awoke with
scratches all over my body.  Very unnerving to say the least.  I couldn't
sleep for days, and each morning, she'd track me down and ask me how I'd
slept.  Then, after a particularly intense roleplaying session on Saturday,
I fell asleep, realizing that I had never tried to lucid dream.  It was as
if I had forgetten how.  I had the dream again, but this time it was
different.  I was above me, watching me try to get away.  They caught up
with me in the clearing, as I fell before the scarecrow.  And as they
finished with me, I allowed my point of view to shift.  I was the scarecrow.
And it was my turn.  I ran into her on Monday.  He wasn't around, and she
took one look at me and ran in the opposite direction.  A month later, her
parents withdrew her from school, and that was that.  I never knew if it was
anything mroe than the power of suggestion coupled with a little
coincidence, but it sure felt good.  The only other weird dream shit I've
pulled off was when I was in college, and had a series of dreams where it
was as if I had actually managed to contact another dreamer as she dreamed.
It was exciting at the time, but the lack of evidence gnaws at me (if only I
had told her to write a letter, or something).

Oh, and I've seen a ghost.  Boring story.  I was all alone in my fraternity
house, and caught motion out of the corner of my eye.  I looked down a
hallway, and saw a young man standing at the end of the hallway.  I looked
down the stairs, to my right, wondering if I should call the cops or
confront the intruder.  I once again caught motion out of the corner of my
eye, and he was gone.  No, no one died in the house, or anything like that.

Oh, and I'm a member of no less than three secret societies, all three of
which made me swear an oath that I was a member of no other secret
societies.  Order of the Arrow was fun for a while, and the Royal Order of
Iuventian Bucks got me hammered on many a night, but nothing creeped me out
more than when I initiated Chi Psi, my college fraternity.  I'd read a lot
of books about Masonic initiation, and knew pretty much what was going to
happen.  What I wasn't ready for was the Riddle.  We were told that it was
important, and that we couldn't initiate until we figured it out, so I dove
right into it.  In retrospect, I read way too much into it, but there was a
moment when a shiver ran down my spine, and my throat dried instantly.  It
was deep.  I then realized that there were two meanings.  There was the one
for all the people who wanted to take advantage of the discount rate on bulk
alcohol purchases, and another for the handful who really cared about ideals
such as brotherhood.  And as I realized that, I saw that I'd been played,
and that the founding fathers, who'd written the Riddle and the rest, were
smiling at me across the oceans of time.  It was there for those who sought
it, and it was my first truly sublime moment.

I believe, and at the same time, I arm myself with the wickedly sharp tools
of science and reason, to stave off slef-delusion.  I have a friend who's on
a shaman's path, and another who knows a little too much about the IRA and
the Rom, and, after a bout with the Green Fairy, decided  that he would join
the FBI.  I know that there's more out there, but, thankfully, it remains
out of reach.  We life in a paradox of primordial chaos and predestination.
Reality gives us just enough cherries to keep us hungry for more, and to
give up the chase too early and too quickly is life's greatest tragedy.