I saw a woman and I knew it was me. I was running across a field, my feet barely touching. I saw Gloria, she was a child of seven and her father was there and he picked her up and she was flying, happy, and excited. Then all around, I could hear a voice I knew was his, “Go back Gloria,” he said, “it’s not your time.” I wanted to stay there with Gloria and her father but I felt myself falling and woke up. I hated to let the memory or the feeling go. So much for tonight. I can’t help but wonder why all of a sudden Gloria keeps dreaming of her father and horses so often. I guess she’s happy and saying goodbye to her treasured father. See you soon.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 193
Sunday night
Dear Adam,
It took Gloria a long time to fall asleep tonight. She turned out the light and tossed and turned. Later, enough later for the layers of sleep to deepen into a dream cycle, Gloria found herself walking in a tangled wood. Heavy vines covered with clinging dead leaves twisted around the trees and formed a tunnel.
Carefully, she picked her way through it, walking in a crouch. It was dark seeming to be like night. Then she turned a corner and saw a circle of daylight ahead at the end of the tunnel. She hurried toward it. When she emerged into the sunshine, she was in the back yard of Robert and Susan’s house where the swimming pool is. The pool was much larger than she remembered it but the water shimmered – it was beautiful. The Pyramid Lady set by the pool and Gloria saw someone in the water. “Strange,” she thought. “Someone in the pool. This is our pool. I’d better go see who it is.” She walked closer to the water and peered down. A woman’s body was floating and bobbing in the water face down. “She’s drowned,” and then she noticed her outstretched hands wore rings and Gloria thought, “That’s my ring and my watch,” the body was rolling over slowly and she was looking down into her own dead face. She tried to scream and then the Pyramid Lady was at her side. She told her not to be scared, that all it meant was that the skin was bleached and the cheeks bloated because she was the Gloria of the past and her old body was dead so she could be reborn. This dream gave us a lot to think about – to think that we are reborn and all that means – we’ll see you soon.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 194
Wednesday night
Dear Adam,
Tonight in my dream, I saw my friend the Pyramid Lady again and we discussed a most revealing session. She told me that I gave so much love and it wasn’t my fault if people didn’t recognize it. Sometimes I didn’t recognize it myself because I didn’t really understand what love is. So, I asked her, “What is love to me?”
She said, “I’ll try to explain it so you’ll understand. I’m not smart enough or fluent enough to say it in the way that preachers and poets have expressed it. I guess that to you and to me love is a service of little hearts and big rewards. It’s a kind of joy that needs an occasional pain to make us appreciate it that much more. I’m sure it’s a special blessing for anyone who reaches out for it. But so many aren’t grateful for it. Maybe not even aware of it. It’s not a great self-sacrifice or martyrdom. It’s fun to give love, for the pure, selfish pleasure of what one gets in return.” She took a little card out of her pocket and said, “This message seems so honest and pure that I’ve just hung on to it. It says, we give love away and it becomes the best part of us.
It’s a lesson you’ve learned well; my dear Gloria – being able to give love, I mean or at least letting people know you love them. Let that be your joy and don’t ever change this about yourself. You have already learned the true core of happiness. I too love and I love the beauty of you. Till next time my little one, I’ll be ever by your side.”
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 195
Sunday night
Dear Adam,
In our dream tonight Gloria was a little girl walking down a long dark street, and there was snow in jagged piles along the sidewalk. She could feel the cold knifing through her and off the end of the street, standing under a streetlamp was the “Other”. He was a hulking figure, huge and tall, and he was standing there in the shadows, waiting for Gloria. He was coming toward us now, moving with purpose and we weren’t entirely sure of what he was going to do but we knew it was something. When we met him, his first words to Gloria was, “You didn’t do the dishes before you let for school this morning?” She said she hadn’t had time after finishing her homework. “So,” he said, “Your punishment starts now” – “take off your boots and your coat and we’ll freeze the badness off of you to start with and no supper for you tonight.” By this time we couldn’t concentrate because we we’re already cold so cold and by the time we got home we were frozen. In the dream Gloria got his supper ready and went to do her homework but all we could hear was his voice and the noise was so bad she couldn’t think at all. Then the dream got all mixed up with Gloria running out of the door and the “Other” after her – he was catching up to her with raised fists when Gloria came out of it and woke up. Then she fell asleep again and dreamed the same dream.
These dreams are like a symptom. It’s like when once a person is diagnosed as crazy, everything becomes a symptom. What for a normal person is a need for privacy for a crazy person it becomes withdrawal. Anger becomes agitation. Refusal to submit to the will of others becomes passive aggression. And disagreeing with other’s perception of reality becomes loss of contact or thought disorder. And real fear over what the people in control can do becomes paranoia. So with labels like iron bars, the people who claim to want to help build cages from which there is no escape.
Our dreams were often like this, we built cages with the “Other” in which there seemed to be no escape. But now we have knocked down the walls of false labels and kicked the walls down of that sick, crazy and pathetic “Other”. A victory for us – and a victory for all those who have suffered barbaric and appalling abuse in their lives.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 196
Wednesday night
Dear Adam,
As I go into a trance I’m thinking “Dear Adam, I would love to return to a time when we were both younger. I would love to tell you that you will never die, and neither will I, and I would say so because I would not want to believe otherwise. But if I told you that now you would never trust me again and I’d never believe myself again. Instead all I can tell you is that even if your life ended tomorrow, the love I feel for you would live inside me forever. I can only tell you that because it is the truth, the love I feel for you would live inside me forever.
You never push for a recovery that feels beyond my reach, you always listen when I need to talk, and you always hold me when I need to cry. Your love never changes. Not once. If there was anything that carried me through these turbulent days that turned into years, it is you and the ever-present love and support you gave me. And it is the love I feel in return that makes my survival during the bleak periods seem worthwhile.
Now about our dream tonight. Gloria started walking but I had no sensation of walking. The warm May sunlight seemed a perverse counterpoint to my feelings and filled me with despair. I shivered with cold. The streets of the neighborhood were gray and unfamiliar. I walked as in a stupor, turning fearful corners like some blind and unthinking creature, coming upon my own street, filled now with no playing children like other streets, only old women on their stoops and men returning from work.
Only the “Other will not be returning from work, he’ll be coming from the cemetery after a visit to my sister’s grave. I am nine years and five months old and I too often go to the cemetery sometimes too often to hide. I’m scared, I didn’t like the look in the “Other’s” eyes were wet and his lips were trembling. Suddenly, I’m awake and I feel the rush of all the weeks of grief and the ocean of pain pouring forth. And I weep like the child I am. I weep for myself.
But now, I understand the “Other’s” hatred for me. He blamed me for my sister’s death, his wife, an
d made me pay for it. Now, I feel a sense of relief having said it and knowing it was untrue, a lie concocted in the “Other’s” deranged mind but, nevertheless, I paid dearly for it because I became the focus of his insane rage at the world – his rage at God. Me, the innocent focus of his relentless pain. Funny, after all these years, I feel liberated.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 197
Wednesday night
Dear Adam,
The dream Gloria had tonight made me feel as if I’d been beaten up, but having no visible bruises to show for my ordeal. It forced me back to times and places I would have preferred to avoid but I guess such travels are necessary to find the answer to the question that puzzles me from time to time.
It was (the dream) about Gloria and her mother. In the dream it started with her mother whispering, “The family was so much happier when you weren’t here.” Then her voice got very loud and it was not the sharp words that stabbed at my heart. It was the coldness in her voice, the conviction of her tone, and the hatred in her eyes that dismayed me the most. It brings a trembling to my body now as I relive this incident.
“You’re disgusting,” she said to me. “You turn my stomach Gloria and you always have!” Gloria said, “Why are you doing this Mom?” “I can’t remember a time when I could stand the sight of you. You’re always made me sick.” She continued while I tried to hold back the tears – “I hate you. I hate everything you are, everything you’ve always been – and I can’t remember a time when I didn’t.”
She was in a frenzy and the hostility, I was hearing as before was not in screams it was in words and intensity. She meant what she was saying and we both knew it.
“What’s the matter Gloria? Are you going to tell me you didn’t know this before?”
I could not answer her. Of course I had felt it before. I had thought of it before. But I guess I never knew it before. I had never been ready to know it and I guess I wasn’t ready now either. I was on the verge of tears when she said, “Remember you I hate!
When she said that, I was struck by a thunderbolt of awareness it was not my mother berating me it was the “Other”. I was dumbstruck by this vital memory and insight that flooded me with immeasurable joy. I now knew that I really loved my mother and she loved me too despite what the “Other” said. What do you think of that? Kind of an earthshaking progress, isn’t it.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 198
Wednesday night
Dear Adam,
The dream tonight was strange but a healing one for us. Our dear Lady gave us a gift that I think ends this horrible nightmare. We saw the Three Eyed Lady in the dream and I stepped closer and saw the “Other”, his head was bent so I could not see his face. What shocked me was how the Pyramid Lady treated him as gently as the little Gloria. She said, “He had suffered too, that’s what made him what he was.” Must have been strange for the little girl to see the big man cry when he didn’t want her to cry. Very pathetic that explains a lot. He wasn’t really violent in the sense of being evil; it was a violence he couldn’t control out of his own suffering. First time it hit me with a bang and a shock that he wasn’t violent out of evilness that he was violent because he suffered so much. He didn’t know where to turn. He took it out on someone else. He was frustrated and the little Gloria didn’t make it better, she was miserable too. Two miserable human beings trying to cope. I see him as a sad, pathetic creature.
It opened my eyes but it wasn’t the dream – it was the depth of his despair, hopelessness, depression, and emotional pain he was in – he was the man in despair the Pyramid Lady led me to in another dream, who at the end of the dream said, “I just knew you’d know me someday.” His despair and pain reminded me of little Gloria. Then the shock wore off and my hate melted away, I was only left feeling compassion and forgiveness. Now, I understand – I’m glad, I washed my hands clean of hate.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 199
Wednesday night
Dear Adam,
I dreamed of the forest again tonight but for the last time. Ever since earliest childhood Gloria had been terrified of the forest and our dream tonight told me why. This wasn’t the forest of school fairy tales this was a mush of corruption, the dumping ground for murdered bodies the “Other” had told her of it when he threatened to lose her there if she didn’t behave. The forest was a dark and foreboding place as the “Other” was. He was filled with pessimism. Life for him was tragic – a series of days to be somehow got through, not a privilege to be rejoiced in but a burden to be endured. He was always surprised by joy. The thought of death held no fear for him; it was life that called for courage. But Gloria was different. Nothing but intolerable panic or utter despair could make her kill herself. The heart of her personality was buoyant with optimism; all her life she had been nourished by hope. She hadn’t survived the terrors of her childhood to die so easily now.
This is what Gloria told the “Other” in her dream tonight when she met him in the dreaded forest. She said, “You no longer control me or my dreams – you are dead and buried.” The “Other” said nothing only faded away. I woke her up telling her in my way that she didn’t have to keep on dreaming senseless dreams.
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 200
Sunday night
Hi again,
Wish I could put myself into a trance the way you put me. The psychic way you project fills me with such hope that I recognize myself zipping along on a high that only the most confident, trusting patient can feel. Guess the degree of our success will depend on some factors we can’t control like the silly dream I had tonight.
Tonight in my dream, I left my body and was up in the stars – light but it wasn’t light. Brighter than light, but no glare no heat from it. Out of it spelled LOVE, not the fake broken syllable but LOVE that IS! Like no love, I’ve ever imagined and LOVE IS ALL: THAT MATTERS! Words but they weren’t words or even ideas. Has this ever happened to you? I mean an oneness with life, with nature and a universe so beautiful, a love so powerful it made me want to beg it to stop, and it made me sad and want to cry. Why did it happen? Can you imagine a joy so much you can’t stand it, you almost beg to turn it off? It was like those times when Gloria thought she died.
I had another dream almost the same. I floated numb in glory. It wasn’t light, I knew, this immense heart-stopping brilliance bursting through what once had been me, it wasn’t light. The light it merely represents, if stands for something else brighter than light, it stands for LOVE! So intense that the idea of intense is a funny feather of thought next to how colossal a love engulfed me.
I AM! YOU ARE! IS ALL THAT MATTERS! Joy exploded in me and I tore apart, atom from atom, in the love of it, a matchstick fallen into the sun. Joy too intense to bear. Please no! The moment I pleaded. LOVE retreated but it told me that all the finest part of my nature will come forward and grow stronger as I make my way through what’s ahead for Gloria. When it’s over we’ll not only feel better, we’ll be a better person than before, happier, more whole. And when we show you what the three of us (Gloria Adam Me) can do together, other wounded persons will get to know all about a miracle too. How’s that for dreaming while partly awake!
Gloria’s Helper
AUTOMATIC LETTER 201
Wednesday night
Dear Adam,
I have dreaded writing this letter and put it off as long as I could, a letter I write with sweet-sorrow. But Gloria and I are strong enough now to put it into words. Gloria is finished with her nightmares and the awful past. She now sleeps like a baby and feels reborn, feels alive and happy. I am at a loss for words. To say this is the end terrifies me, yet we knew and hoped someday we could say goodbye to the past and to nightmares. However, saying goodbye is harder than we could have imagined; saying goodbye to you is the worst. I even thought to make up nightmares (imagine that) and then burst into laughter at the ridiculous thought. What
’s the old cliché all good things (must) come to an end. Know that our friendship and my love for you, Adam, will never ever end.
I guess we cleared away the debris and wreckage of Gloria’s life, so now she can live her life with human dignity and hope, no longer a victim but a survivor. Her story will help other wounded souls find their way out of nightmares, hopelessness, and despair. I am so grateful for you, for what you gave to us to save our lives. You have the magic touch, no, a miraculous touch like a shaman’s incessant beating drum, beating and beating and beating until Gloria cried out, “I am born!” Thanks to You!
I guess we have discovered new worlds to explore and adventures we never imagined. This whole experience has been a horrible mystery we solved, yet the real mystery of our lives has just begun. The Guardian and Pyramid Lady said they would help us. I wonder what we’ll discover. I am only sad we have to leave you behind. But will we? You’re quite a shaman yourself and maybe, just maybe, we’ll bump into you on our astral travels into other worlds. After all, the universe is a small place when your mind is open to its infinite powers. Wouldn’t that be grand? Yes, it would. I will miss you.
Lovingly,
Gloria’s Helper
LETTER FROM GLORIA 202
Sunday night
Dear Adam,
Finally, I see a face, a grotesque face, a blur of a monstrous face peering down on me. It is a face that sends chills and terror through me—a face that almost destroyed me—looming high above me menacingly to kill me. I had banished that face from my mind and all existence—never to torture me again.
Yet I must see this fiend’s face, the “Other,” whose sole purpose was my utter destruction. I gasped for breath and tried to steel my body and soul to recognize it. I did not want to. I did not want to give it life. I wanted it to die and go away, but it wouldn’t. I had to face the ugly truth I had hidden from myself. Why? Why did I have to suffer this once more? I had to; I had to bury my persecutor to have peace of mind. However, the face would not leave me in peace until I uttered its name, the reality that symbolized my agony and pain. But the face had refused to give up its secrets.
Gloria Rising: A Story of Hope and Survival In Dark Evil Places Page 28