Move the Death-Ray

Recently, I was talking with a good friend of mine who was describing to me some very deep, transformative experiences they've been going through. I told them it sounded similar to something that happened to me a long, long time ago, before I started seeking community and connection in various shamanism circles.

I knew that at one point, I had written about my experiences in one of my typewritten journals. I told my friend that I would go back through some old boxes of writing and try to find those stark, white pieces of paper, imprinted with my indelible truths I had hammered onto those pages.

I don't remember what year I wrote down this true story. I don't even feel like I am 100% this person anymore. I've changed so much, since that time in my life. Still a story worth reading, though. Glad I wrote it down. And the lesson at the end of the whole ordeal is a powerful teaching I still reflect on now and then. 

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Move the Death-Ray


by Adam Bosler


For many, many years I was visited in my dreams by a pair of spirits. They always came together. One was very thin and lanky, more than seven feet tall. When we were indoors, he had to crouch down to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. The other spirit was small and short. She often stood closer to me, and helped to explain the things that the two spirits were trying to show me.

There is a strange time-bending effect in the dreamworld, where a person can live for many years, can have multiple lifetimes of experience, in a single night. This had been happening to me for quite some time. After a single night of dreaming, I might wake in the morning with memories of a seven-year journey through a mysterious “other world” that included hundreds of visits from the two spirits.

My process was to sit at a manual typewriter every morning, to write down all the lessons these spirits seemed to be trying to teach me. The pages piled up. Over months, then years, I began binding these typed pages into notebooks, which I then stacked in boxes in the corner of my writing room. I was spending so much time, so much energy in the dreamworld, that it became difficult to get out of bed in the morning.

But eventually, once my wife was off to work, and the house was quiet and cool in the early part of the day, I would make my way over to the typewriter and begin documenting another night of time-bending lessons from the spirits. This pattern was somewhat sustainable because my wife and I had chosen a life without children. She was a grounded person with two feet firmly in the reality of the physical world. She was dedicated to her career, and to the stability of our household.

My job was to get up in the morning and cook breakfast, to pack her a lunch, to send her on her way, out into the hostile world to make a living and bring home a paycheck. I stayed back, doing laundry, the dishes, shopping, cooking, cleaning. But as my soul was gradually turning further toward the dreamworld realities, I found it increasingly difficult to function during the waking hours, when the sun was in the sky. My true work in this world was happening at night, as my wife lay sleeping next to me in our bed.

There were many times when I would wake in the morning, before any alarms went off, to find myself weeping, sobbing. After a few minutes I would open my eyes, thankful that I had returned from a decade in solitude, or from a lifetime of hard lessons. The spirits were compassionate, but no part of me was being spared. I was being asked to face the darkest of my demons, and to figure out how I could make real and lasting changes.

During the daylight hours, I had signed up for some master’s degree classes in "consciousness studies,” to learn about and explore the nature of the human perceptual system. Perhaps the experts who had come before me could help me understand what was happening to me. Any outside observer would say I was going through some kind of mental breakdown. And yet, inside, in the parts of my soul that were sensing the most honest and real aspects of our universe, something was telling me to continue, telling me that this exploration of the dreamworld and the messages from the spirits, that all of this was the work I was supposed to continue with.

My 10-year career as a high school English teacher had already slipped through my fingers. I no longer had the energy to get up early and plan lessons for other people’s teenagers. I was still struggling to figure out my own truths. I could no longer put in the time it took, just to show up at my classroom every day to teach. I no longer had the energy or the motivation to motivate others to find their truths, their voices, their insights. It was a solo journey I was being called to undertake. And so, at the end of the school year, I resigned.

I stopped consuming fiction. My voracious reading habits were turned away from the novels and short stories I had been obsessed with in my earlier life. Now, I spent hours and hours every day studying and writing papers for my “consciousness” classes. I spent my waking hours filling my mind with the theories and discoveries of many of the “giants” of the intellectual search for meaning. I participated in online seminars where I could interact with Ken Wilber, Stanislav Grof, Richard Tarnas.

Through my studies, I was introduced to the phenomenon of the Near-Death Experience, and I spent another two years devouring anything I could find about that subject. I studied spiritual awareness systems throughout human history from different cultures around the world, many who never communicated with each other.

I began to see a pattern emerging. The sages of the past, the saints, the enlightened ones who had gone off into the wilderness, who had followed that strange voice to the farthest reaches of the known universe, and beyond... They were all telling the same story. And these two spirits who for so long had guided me in my dreams, they were voices in that same choir. It was all the same lessons, over and over again, all for the benefit of the dumb ape (me) who was sleeping his life away, refusing to fully participate in the alleviation of the suffering in the world around him.

I had retreated and receded from the world around me.

I was no longer a high school teacher. It had been years now. I was a “house husband.” My daily responsibilities were simple domestic chores, rote patterns I performed easily and automatically from muscle memory. I stood at the kitchen sink, scrubbing dishes, but my mind was in another world. I was reviewing, remembering, memorizing, re-playing the dreamworld events and teachings.

Part of me felt guilty that I wasn’t able to contribute more. I knew in my heart, this wasn’t just some ego-trip I was on. I felt deeply inside that the things I was being shown were going to help me to one day become an effective healer of others. I held firmly to my belief that all of this would some day make sense, that all the work I was doing in the dreamworld would eventually help me become the compassionate helper of others I felt myself called to be. But I was painfully aware of how much work I still had left to do on myself, before I would be ready to return to my tribe with anything of value.

The nights became increasingly weird. I began to have two separate conscious layers existing in my mind, at the same time. One layer, one “consciousness” was asleep and dreaming. I felt my body reclining horizontally on my bed. I knew I was in a dream somewhere, but now the two spirits were no longer meeting me there. The other layer of my consciousness sat up in bed. I looked over and saw myself laying and dreaming. I had this second layer of awareness now, an aspect of myself who was sitting on the edge of my bed. I felt the electric fan blowing a cool breeze across my skin.

I gradually became aware of the two spirits huddled together quietly in the dark corner of my bedroom. A chill came over me, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling with sensitivity. Never before had the spirits come out of the dreamworld and into my physical space. And then, like a jolt of electricity, the spirit informed me that, No, I was wrong! They had been sitting there in the corner of my bedroom all along, they said -- and I knew this to be true. Finally, I was starting to wake up, they told me. Finally, I was starting to perceive the truth.

I glanced over at the spirits sitting together on the floor and zang! another bolt of electricity: they were not two spirits. They were, in fact, ONE BEING. They were an entity who had been split apart a long time ago, even before their own birth. But now they had found each other, and now they functioned as one entity, as one spirit.

What did they want? Why were they here? The darkness of my bedroom at night made it difficult to see the spirit’s facial expression, but something in me sensed that they were laughing at me. Their communication was almost a kind of telepathy, but I could also hear their words in my ears. There was a mocking tone, a sneer of ridicule on the spirit’s breath. They nodded toward the nightstand next to my bed: “What the fuck is that?” And I felt my fingers moving to slide open the drawer.

It was a handgun, a loaded revolver I always kept next to me as I slept. “You keep claiming you want to be a healer, right? Well, what kind of a healer sleeps with a death-ray sitting right next to themself?” They were chuckling privately to themselves again, but nothing was funny. I felt the sarcastic snickering between two old friends: “Get a load of this guy...”

“No, no. You don’t understand,” I pleaded with them. “I live in a very violent world. This is normal in the world I come from. A lot of people sleep with a gun next to their bed. It’s normal where I come from.”

“We’ll say it again: What kind of a healer sleeps with a deathray within arm’s reach?”

“Where I come from, people are insane. There’s these crazy people out there who might come crawling through my window at any time. I have to protect my wife, sleeping here in the bed next to me.” I looked over at my beautiful wife, sound asleep, so peaceful, so tranquil. I took a deep breath, let sink in this pause in the conversation. A few minutes of silence passed. There was this moment of deep and tender sadness as the spirits sat watching me gaze over at the woman I loved more than life itself.

The moment passed, and the spirits toughened up. “You know what, we’re not even going to continue working with you until you move that deathray into another room. It needs to be tucked away somewhere out of reach, high up on a shelf, in another room, far away from this place where you sleep.”

And then, jarringly direct, a thought arose simultaneously in the mind of the two spirits, and in my own mind. “We’re still not convinced you aren’t suicidal.”

“No! I would never do that,” I protested. “This isn’t about me! I’m serious! There’s crazy people out there who will break in here and rape my wife! They’ll try to kill us! Normal people around here have guns, to protect themselves! I’m not suicidal!”

The spirit was not convinced, and just sat there shaking their head in disbelief. Again they directed their questions at me: “So, what’s really going on here? If it gets too bad one night, you’re just gonna reach over and take yourself out? Haven’t you been listening all these years, all these lessons about your diet, your health, your addictions. The way you live is suicidal. We’re trying to help you, but you just keep resisting us. We’re just not sure why it is you keep refusing to see the true answers to all these questions. And so we just keep asking, why is it you feel the need to sleep with a gun by the side of your bed?” Another moment of deep silence passed in the dark. “Well, all we can say is, if you want us to continue coming here and working with you, you’re gonna have to move the deathray into a different room.”

I was so damn stubborn back then. I remember feeling this small remaining sliver of my petulant willpower still protesting this final ultimatum from the spirit. I remember sitting, stewing in silence. There must be some way I could explain it to them -- using some kind of imagery that they could understand -- how we have these violent, insane people who roam the streets breaking into people’s houses when we’re sleeping at night – to rape us, to steal from us, to kill us.

“Don’t you get it?” The spirit let loose its final stinging jolt of truth for the evening’s lesson: “It’s the crazy ones coming through your window -- those are the ones you’re gonna have to heal... -- NOW GET UP and MOVE THAT DEATH-RAY into another room!”





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