Giving Meaning To Your Dreams: Interpreting.

In Chapter Two Freud talks about interpreting dreams. When we try and interpret our own dreams, it is like trying to give the dream a meaning,“for to interpret a dream is to specify its meaning, to replace it by something which takes its position in the concatenation of our psychic activities as a link of definite importance and value.” We connect it to our daily life and try to give that dream an important role. Interpreting dreams depend on us, on how much farther we want to interpret the dream or not. As Freud states, “I could still spend much time upon it; I could draw further explanations from it, and discuss further problems which it seems to propound. I can even perceive the points from which further mental associations might be traced; but such considerations as are always involved in every dream of one's own prevent me from interpreting it farther.” Interpreting ones dream is like interpreting a quote, one chooses to go as far as he or she wants.

Once my mom had a dream that me and my sister were in a forest and that my sister got kidnapped. Two weeks later it was the trip to the Amazon, so my mom interpreted the dream as a warning that something bad was going to happen. She really didn’t want us to go, but she let us go and told us over and over again to be careful. Nothing bad happened to my sister, yet she did get home sick and cried the night we slept out in the forest. As Freud says, “they are intended as a substitute for some other thought-process, and that we have only to disclose this substitute correctly in order to discover the hidden meaning of the dream.” So what was the meaning of that dream? Was my mom’s interpretation good enough? Could she have gone farther? What was that “thought-process”?

All dreams have a meaning and we are in charge of giving them one. Dreams are very important and deserve to be looked at, “If the method of dream- interpretation here indicated is followed, it will be found that dreams do really possess a meaning, and are by no means the expression of a disintegrated cerebral activity, as the writers on the subject would have us believe.” Dreams are far more complex than as Freud says “a disintegrated cerebral activity. Dreaming is a “psychic” activity.

A Story That Truly Touched My Heart!

October 13, 2009, 9:00 pm

The Distance Between
By Lee Kelley

Courtesy of Lee Kelley The author in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006.In retrospect, my 11 months and two weeks in Ramadi, Iraq, felt stretched to their absolute fullest length across the continuum of time. Now I recall them in thousands of digital photographs or by the folded flag in a wooden case here, in my living room, some three years later. I have made major changes both personally and professionally since getting home, and it is kind of strange now to look at that person in the photos. Hard to think about what was really going on behind my own eyes, my phony smile.

Looking back, I still I cannot explain why my experience of war did not include being physically injured, or taking another human life. I also cannot explain why my year in Iraq brought the deepest anguish and loss I had experienced so far in my 35 years. Why was it so bad? Suffice it to say that halfway through my tour, I lost my mom to breast cancer and my seven-year marriage absolutely fell apart.

I didn’t allow myself to grieve or complain at the time. I had work to do, soldiers that depended on me, and I guess I was afraid to let those flood gates loose. Instead, I inventoried all of those swirling emotions, performed an internal recon and secured them in a mental footlocker to be dealt with at a later date. For the rest of my tour, the footlocker strained to hold it all in. I made it home in the summer of 2006 and the life I came home to felt utterly different than the one I had left. I was granted full custody of my two young children, and I was also promoted to captain and given a company command. I opened up the footlocker and started to rebuild.


Courtesy of Lee Kelley On vacation in Tybee Island, Ga.Because I am unwilling to leave the kids again, I ended a promising military career and created a new path for myself. Specifically, I started my own writing company, and I’ve been going strong for two years now (more about that in a later post). I won’t say it’s all been easy or that I liked having to wake the kids up at 5 a.m. for almost two years so that I could get them ready and off to day care before my morning commute, not picking them back up until after 6 p.m. And I won’t say that I enjoyed the transition back into “normal” life, working through grief, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness and confusion while still getting used to being a single parent. I won’t say that it was easy for my kids to adjust to the divorce and all the changes associated with it. Finally, I won’t say that it was easy to leave the medical benefits and predictable paychecks of being an Army captain behind, especially in this economy.

But I will say this: In the last couple of years, so much has changed and healed. No regrets. Joy has manifested in every aspect of my life, and I have never felt more content and grateful towards life, love, parenting, and the pursuit of financial freedom. I’m not sure what I would have done without the unconditional love and support of my family and friends. That, truly, has made all the difference.

Now my days are filled with the unending complexity and welcome challenge of raising two creative, energetic, and intelligent kids who know of no other way to live than to rise each day with the subconscious desire to find the boundaries of their little worlds and lean up against them. O.K. … they find the boundaries and then jump back and forth across them whenever I’m not watching!

Not long ago a recruiter for an overseas contracting company called me. He found an old resume of mine on Monster.com and offered me $165,000 to go to Baghdad for one year as a civilian public affairs representative working alongside Army personnel. I know that my kids feel safe and protected and free to just enjoy the variety of their lives without fear of abandonment. They know I won’t leave them again. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their hugs, and hear it in their uncontrollable laughter. I’ve been to Iraq, and for my little family once will just have to be enough. I called the recruiter back and graciously told him no thank you.

First and Fourth grade just started. I’m not going anywhere.


This op-ed really touched me. It was full of pathos. I could tell the author wrote it straight from his heart, “I know that my kids feel safe and protected and free to just enjoy the variety of their lives without fear of abandonment. They know I won’t leave them again. I can see it in their eyes, feel it in their hugs, and hear it in their uncontrollable laughter.” I can just picture this scene and it makes me smile. The tone I would say is caring. He talks about how important his kids are for him and how he wouldn’t trade anything for them, “Not long ago a recruiter for an overseas contracting company called me. He found an old resume of mine on Monster.com and offered me $165,000 to go to Baghdad for one year as a civilian public affairs representative working alongside Army personnel. I called the recruiter back and graciously told him no thank you. First and Fourth grade just started. I’m not going anywhere.” Throughout the article he shows all the love he has for his kids and what a great parent he is. He portrays himself as a responsible and great dad.

The way he narrates the story is very attention dragging. He uses tautology to emphasize all the hardships he had to overcome, “I won’t say it’s all been easy or that I liked having to wake the kids up at 5 a.m. for almost two years so that I could get them ready and off to day care before my morning commute, not picking them back up until after 6 p.m. And I won’t say that I enjoyed the transition back into “normal” life, working through grief, anger, frustration, resentment, loneliness and confusion while still getting used to being a single parent. I won’t say that it was easy for my kids to adjust to the divorce and all the changes associated with it. Finally, I won’t say that it was easy to leave the medical benefits and predictable paychecks of being an Army captain behind, especially in this economy.”

I love the way he gives such a positive optimistic mood even though he starts of talking about war and death. He then goes on saying, “But I will say this: In the last couple of years, so much has changed and healed. No regrets. Joy has manifested in every aspect of my life, and I have never felt more content and grateful towards life, love, parenting, and the pursuit of financial freedom.” He faces change as an obstacle that helped him and shaped who he is today. If I was him I wouldn’t have done a single thing differently. He set his priorities balanced them out and combined it appropriately with time. This is not an easy task to do.

Final Destination

Towards the end of the book Parsell falls in love for the first time with this “boy”. His name is Paul. While reading I asked myself if Parsell became gay because of all the rape he had gone through did it really affect him?

I find it ironic how towards the end of the book he is separated from Paul because they fall in love. Why do they separate boyfriends and not gang member who sexually abuse other criminals, “You mean because we spend a lot of time together, but don’t get into trouble-that were a problem” Maybe this is where the problem comes in they don’t want to see anybody happy, for they enjoy seeing others suffering.

At the very end we can see how Parsell has been dramatically changed. He is a total different person and this experience in jail, really affected him in an optimistic way. In one of the last pages Parsell states, “I didn’t want to mess up again, like I had before.” Now he recognizes his mistake and shows he has learned from them, he doesn’t want to repeat it again. Also I was amazed when he said, “I thought about the old timers I met at Riverside, the ones who were doing life on the installment plan, and drinking paint thinner and Mountain Dew. I was not going to become one of them.” He has it clear he is much better than that, and I going to do whatever it takes to not fall into that world again.

This is a very interesting memoir at first I was bored reading it, but as I continued I realized it wasn’t the same old jail story. Parsell has a way of making it unique, by sharing every single experience he had to go through, you almost feel like you are living it. In some parts I even got goose bumps. Yet, Parsell did more than just writing this book I researched his biography and it’s quite interesting take a look…

“T.J. Parsell is a writer and human rights activist dedicated to ending sexual abuse against men, women, and children in all forms of detention. He is currently President-elect of Stop Prisoner Rape and serves as a consultant to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. Parsell has testified before numerous government bodies and was instrumental in passage of the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003, the first ever federal legislation to address this issue. He lives in Sag Harbor, NY.”

Why Fish?

Have you ever wondered why the book is called fish? Is it because he is trapped in prison like a fish in an aquarium or maybe is it because he is different from the rest? Finally I could answer this question, “You motherfuckers are going to get the floor wet, I must have looked puzzled. He means you are dripping wet, fresh out of the tank.” Here we can infer that “fish” is a synonym of a first-timer or new arrival in prison slang. This is shown through various scenes of the book, “I responded, smiling like a fish.”

It is shocking to read about all the sexual abuse going on in the prison. Specially the fish which are the easiest targets. I would have never imagined that in such a controlled, full of guards prison there can be such crimes going on. I mean crimes going on in a jail, how ironic.

As I read the book I could conclude that in prisons, the boundaries between gay and straight men disappear, they begin to see sex as a necessity. They don’t consider having sex with another man gay, but a simple need. The question is how can these sexual offenders not be prosecuted? How can such behavior be allowed? Why is it punished outside of a jail, yet permitted once in jail?

I was stunned by when they describe his first night, “four older inmates drugged Parsell and took turns raping him. When they were through, they flipped a coin to decide who would “own” him. Forced to remain silent about his rape by a convict code among inmates (one in which informers are murdered).” How can a human being watch another do this and not do anything about it? What are the guards there for? Isnt it their job to have everything under control.

Vocabulary

“What did you rob?” A fotomat I said.
Fotomat: was a once widespread retail chain of photo development drive-thru kiosks located in shopping center parking lots.


“He opened the dayroom door and once more bellowed, Scandalous!”
Bellowed: a very loud utterance (like the sound of an animal)



“That boy is half a bug, and his thorazine must be running low.”
Thorazine: a drug (trade name Thorazine) derived from phenothiazine that has antipsychotic effects and is used as a sedative and tranquilizer.



“She worked the streets for me, Chet Bosted.”
Boasted: To speak of with excessive pride


“His walk was what inmates called cattin”
Cattin: short for catwalk




“Even if a cop or a shop owner shoots one of the criminals, the other guys involved are charged with murder, the rationale being that if you weren’t committing the felony, no one would have died.”
Felony: One of several grave crimes, such as murder, rape, or burglary, punishable by a more stringent sentence than that given for a misdemeanor

"Await Your Reply"

October 2009
Michael Schaub
fiction
Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
“An invader arrives in your computer and begins to glean the little diatoms of your identity,” writes Dan Chaon in his new novel.

Your name, your address, and so on; the various websites you visit as you wander through the Internet, your user names and passwords, your birth date, your mother’s maiden name, favorite color, the blogs and news sites you read, the items you shop for, the credit card numbers you enter into the databases -- Which isn’t necessarily you, of course.

But maybe it is. “Identity” is a tricky word, with different connotations, different levels of meaning, but in the age of the Internet, these details -- user names, search histories, social networking profiles -- might as well be you. Maybe we give up more than we know; maybe we’re less now than we used to think we are. Maybe not. But when we talk about “identity theft,” we might be talking about more than we know. It’s hard to speak or write about how the Internet has changed art, has changed culture, the way we define identity. And when someone tries to talk about it, you should, generally speaking, run.

But there are exceptions, and one of them is this: Await Your Reply, Dan Chaon’s novel about identity in every sense of the word. It’s the first great novel about the Internet; it’s one of the best books of any kind I’ve ever read about identity on any level. It is brilliant and it is essential; it should be required reading not only for anyone who uses the Internet, but for anyone who cares about contemporary American fiction.

Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.

All of them become embroiled in issues of identity. Schuyler goes to work with his biological father, an identity thief in rural Michigan. Lattimore’s lover is engaged in a vague moneymaking scheme that she knows little about, but suspects it involves fraud. Schuyler goes to Canada to try to find his brother, who has changed his name and his appearance a number of times, sometimes even using his brother’s identity.

Await Your Reply starts off with incredible tension -- the first pages describe Schuyler being driven to a hospital, his severed hand on ice in a cooler -- and it increases from there. There are close calls, bad omens, frightening encounters with strangers, suspicious instant messages. But for all the suspense, the characters in this novel -- lovingly, accurately, realistically rendered -- are at the forefront. This is a suspense novel in the same sense that Lolita is a romance novel; it’s brilliant in the terms of the genre, but the description is insufficient to describe how breathtaking it is on its own. It’s not a book that’s easy to put down -- I finished reading it, perhaps unwisely, late at night, looking up only to suspiciously glance at the monitor of my computer, glowing ominously on my desk. When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites. It’s that kind of suspense novel. Every single part of it works.

Chaon is one of the best writers of fiction in America, and this is, by far, his best work yet. No living American author is as good at describing the Midwest and the people who call it their home -- which isn’t to say that this is a Midwestern novel, necessarily; it’s an absolutely universal work. But Chaon, a Nebraska native who now lives in Ohio, understands the landscape and the people of the American Midwest more than any author I can remember. Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.

Chaon also does an amazing job with writing about the Internet itself, particularly in one tense scene where a young man logging on to his computer gets an unintelligible, ominous instant message from a stranger. It’s one of the most frightening moments of the novel, though there’s no explicit threat, no danger immediately spelled out. There’s only the sense of danger, but it’s hard to imagine any other author setting the mood as effectively and perfectly as Chaon does.

As flawlessly as Chaon renders the characters in this novel, you end up with a sense of unknowing, of wondering whether you know these people at all. And that is, perhaps, the point. The epigraph of the first part of the novel comes from Anna Akhmatova:

“I myself, from the very beginning,
Seemed to myself like someone’s dream or delirium
Or a reflection in someone else’s mirror,
Without flesh, without meaning, without a name.
Already I knew the list of crimes
That I was destined to commit.”

Maybe we already know our potential for good and for evil, and maybe we are capable of seeing our own reflections, in mirrors, sure, but in other people as well. Chaon seems to suggest we might not have earned that kind of certainty about or identities. We sometimes say, when sick or confused or depressed, that we don’t feel like ourselves. The characters in this book don’t feel like themselves, or they do, but they don’t know what to do with that feeling. They don’t know who they are. Maybe none of us does.

I can’t think of very many contemporary American authors who have tackled as ambitious concepts as Chaon does in this book, and who have done so without making a single false step. The spare brilliance of Chaon’s prose, and his uncanny skill at creating unique and uniquely American characters, calls to mind writers like Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, and Mary Robison. But with this novel, Chaon has surpassed them all. Await Your Reply is a perfect novel, and it is an American masterpiece. We needed this book.

In this book review the author talks about mostly the common place of the book. The common place is internet users, having so many advances in technology most of the world uses the internet daily, “When I reached the last page, I checked my bank account online. I changed the passwords on my email accounts. I burned my bank and insurance statements, and I priced paper shredders on office supply websites.” If you are an internet user you are exposed to all this dangers, the internet is full of thieves and strangers. You can be in touch with the world, just a click away. By using this commonplace the reader might become more intrigued, because it has to deal with his daily life and could help him out. The author uses sympathy to gain readers attention.

This is a very well written book review for it is clear. It uses proper vocabulary making it easy and enjoyable to read. It uses a lot of vividness while describing sections of the book, “Chaon’s novel follows three people, all Midwesterners, all, at first, unrelated. Ryan Schuyler is a Northwestern University dropout who is terrified of failure and disappointment, and tired of himself, tired of his family. Lucy Lattimore is an Ohio teenager who just graduated high school and ran away with her former history teacher; they have fallen in love, and left Ohio behind. Miles Cheshire is a Cleveland magic store employee who’s been searching, on and off, for his missing twin brother, a brilliant schizophrenic obsessed with geodesy, symbology and cartography. Schuyler and Lattimore are running away; Cheshire is running toward something he knows he might never find.” From just reading this quote the reader can decide if they will like the book. It gives straitghout information, not hiding anything and giving the reader a taste of what the book will be like.

The Midwest is very important symbol for the author so much that the author of the book review uses personification to emphasize this significance, “Even when Await Your Reply takes two characters to Africa, the Midwest is still a major character; we see and consider the country through the eyes of a small-town Ohioan, and we feel for her, and we experience what she does.” By simply inductive logic, we can infer that the book is going to talk about all the dangers of the internet.

The author does a great job with rhetoric, making this book review reflect captivating interesting book it is. I even got the urge to read it, for I am an internet maniac and I live on the internet. I should be aware of all the dangers out there before it’s too late.

“The Art Of Defying Death”

October 14, 2009, 9:25 pm

The Art of Defying Death
By Elizabeth Kadetsky
On a misty spring night in 2005, I approached my apartment, on a tony block on the Upper West Side facing the Hudson. I felt relaxed and calm. Earlier that day I had attended a yoga workshop with a guru from India, then completed a writing assignment for a health and spirituality magazine about, as it happened, instinct — or antar-jñana, inner knowledge. I opened the outer door to my vestibule, then crossed through its inner door and into my lobby, leaving my back to the entrance. I got a prickly feeling, I don’t know why. I turned. There I saw, pushing open the inner door, an ink-black, gloved hand, exaggeratedly large, controlled and deliberate. It charged toward me. It was trailed by a body, the picture of death.

It is difficult for me to render the horror of the image of that man entering my building lobby that night, so great is the disparity between its emotional charge for me now and the stereotypical, almost comical picture he presented. He was a figment from a nightmare. I guessed his height and weight at 6’3” and 230 pounds, with the physicality of a boxer. The cops later told me that was right. His clothes were dark and innocuous — clean black jeans, black sneakers, a midnight-blue hoodie — as if chosen to leave no

When I was attacked, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga.
impression whatsoever. In contrast, on his face was a neoprene thermal ski mask, the type that tents in front to create a ridge and thus evokes to most anyone who’s heard of him Darth Vader. I later discovered while searching on Google that this type of mask is favored by shoppers also enamored of vigilante-style military clothing and toy AK-47s — in other words it is meant to provoke a reaction. Of the figure’s actual face I saw only slit-shaped, yellowed eyes and a broad, acned, coal-black forehead.

This image seared in my mind, and somehow, thinking without thinking, I reminded myself to keep hold of it. Yoga’s mental training, it is said, enables the yogi to “act at once… not stopping to think.” I felt superhuman, unburdened by the back-and-forth of everyday deliberation, in possession of ekagra — single-pointed — concentration.

In a half-second, I seemed to recall everything important I had learned in 20 years of practicing yoga. I remembered the feeling of command — of flexibility and control. I remembered the words of a writer on instinct I’d cited in the article I’d just written, Malcolm Gladwell: “Take charge of the first two seconds.” And I remembered a women’s self-defense course I took in college 20 years before, and practice we’d done screaming with every bit of might in our bodies. This was a physical scream, performed with the same degree of exertion that, as it happened, we held our yoga poses.

But in truth, unfortunately, I was not so formidable as I’d have liked. The man’s weight was more than twice mine. My heightened awareness, my attuned and trained amanaskata — intellectual clarity — was sufficiently developed to give me merely the certainty that this man could, and would, kill me. Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.

Then, that palm became a fist, and met my face. I heard a loud crack. I was unconscious.

I came to consciousness on the ground. The man was lunging toward me with fists. None of my knowledge left me. He intended to kill me. I remembered a dream I’d had once in which I’d been in an elevator that was plunging to the ground, its cable severed. In the dream, I held my breath and clenched everywhere, and then stared, hard, at the ceiling. I willed the elevator to stop plummeting, and it did. The dream felt mystical, more like a vision — a premonition, perhaps. Now, I created the same sensation in my body as when I stopped the elevator. And I executed the scream.

What happened to me next in that lobby seemed no less numinous an experience than the single pointed mind-state described by the adepts as Samadhi. This is sometimes characterized as “pure awareness.” The thrill of it is said to be a manifestation of spiritual, mental and physical harmony — which may be why the medievals called yoga “the art of defying death.” Tennyson described Samadhi as “the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words.” I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.

I was bloodied, my cheekbone was broken, and I was in a state of shock. Eventually the cops, and a friend, came, and I learned that an attacker by this same description had sent another woman for an extended hospital stay, with multiple broken ribs and other injuries. She’d taken longer before she screamed, they said. The cops not-so-helpfully also explained that the man was “an animal,” his motive violence. He’d been stalking women of a certain physical type.

They never caught him. I moved out from that apartment, and moved on, but suffered significant emotional trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder.

I do believe that yoga, and other things, gave me the mental clarity that saved my life in that moment. And I also believe that my training helped me survive in other ways, in the aftermath.


That night, I finally got to bed around 5 a.m., my friend bunkered on my sofa. I survived, I thought, over and over, lying in bed. But when I closed my eyes, I saw three things in succession that drove home to me how nearly I hadn’t: the ink-black hand on the door, the neoprene ski mask, and my face in the mirror bruised, cut and bloodied. I opened my eyes and watched the sky turn rosy pink. I closed them, and saw the same three images.

This pattern continued, with lessening frequency, for month upon month. They were a natural, limbic response, I learned later: flashbacks. Flashbacks, like the Samadhi described by Tennyson, exist outside the realm of language and cognition. This, say trauma therapists, explains why survivors often manifest unresolved memories of trauma in non-verbal ways — for instance as inexplicable pains in the body or through a dissociative escape reflex. Samadhi is mimicked in “moments of spiritual or material emergency,” wrote Geraldine Coster, an influential British yogi and psychotherapist, in 1944. Contemporary therapists have noted a tendency for survivors to enter that state of “pure awareness” so celebrated by the yogis during, and then repeatedly after, a trauma. This, they say, can become a bad habit. I learned this when, eventually, I did go in for counseling for P.T.S.D.

This paradox has been acknowledged elsewhere. A “survivor who used dissociation to cope with terror” may eventually learn to use a “trance capability” towards otherwise enriching ends, allows Judith Herman, a pioneer psychologist in the study of trauma, in her seminal book “Trauma and Recovery.”

Before I sought the wisdom of the professionals, though, I did jury-rig my own program for managing those flashbacks, using techniques of “mental mastery,” as it were, that I’d learned in yoga. For instance, I tried to recast the images playing in my head, sometimes imagining they were moving around physically to different parts of my brain. I also inserted into the sequence of flashbacks the image of the man’s miraculous turning and fleeing, and my mystical feeling of omnipotence in that moment.

My therapist later gave these methods a stamp of approval. Being able to re-conceive the meaning of an assault to one of empowerment versus self-blame proves a deciding factor in overcoming trauma. “You didn’t almost get yourself killed,” she said to me. “You saved your life.” Recreating a narrative also helps a survivor overcome a fragmenting of memory that is typical in trauma. “It is difficult to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time,” writes Herman, “to retain all the pieces and to fit them together.” The sufferer struggles to reconnect disjointed visceral and rational memories of the trauma. Healing, writes Herman, “involves the active exercise of imagination and fantasy.” The psychologist Mary Harvey includes in her seven-point checklist for the resolution of trauma simply to gain “authority” over the memories.

Perhaps every survivor overcomes trauma differently, and at a different speed. My flashbacks continued. Nightmares catapulting me directly back to that horrific episode lasted for years. The dreams were often a feeling, of prickly dread, or they were more literal, about being trailed on a dark street or ambushed in an enclosed space.

I charted my recovery through the evolution of those dreams. Eventually that feeling of palpable terror subsided. Once, around the time it did, the black figure appeared as a comical-looking, blob-like character in a black body-costume; he was like one of those actors dressed as a piece of licorice in a movie trailer. I told him he could remain in my dream as long as he stayed in the background and didn’t hurt me. He agreed.

In a dream several months later, the man with the mask was sitting in my hallway waiting for me to come home, holding the mask in his hand. At first when I saw him, I was scared, but when I saw his face I also saw that he was human. He told me he was struggling with guilt over having hurt someone. I tried to imagine if I could forgive him.

The author of this article, used a dramatic tone throughout his article, “Alas, I had not yet acquired those other metaphysical powers supposedly at ready call to the ancient yogi, or siddhis — to make myself minute as an atom, or bulky as an elephant, or isatva: supreme over all. I knew only, with crystalline sureness, that I had to marshal every bit of force in my body and spirit if I wished to survive.” We can see how he uses tone, to make the story so interesting. It is a story full of suspense and emotions. As I read it I even got goose bumps, I was truly dragged in the story, and felt like if I was living it.

The author’s purpose is to tell a story about a girl who saved her own life, with the use of yoga. You may ask yourself how can yoga save someone’s life? Yet it did, “I was in possession of no less miraculous a power than what stopped the elevator in that dream. The man paused, mid-punch. As if in reverse motion, he then coiled backwards, slowly, his center of gravity solid and low. Assured, with graceful footsteps, he loped back out that door, and then disappeared into the black night.” Through her control of mental power she was her own savoir. When she talks about a dream, it was basically the same situation of saving her own life, yet in a dream. The elevator was falling straight towards the ground, for the cords loosened, and with her metal power she stopped it from falling. It sounds too magical to but true, yet there is no fiction to it, it happened to her in a dream and then in real life.

I do believe in metal power, and am aware that very few people can attain this level of superiority. I admire them for that. She used this powerful tool for something positive, which saved her own life, “You didn’t almost get yourself killed, she said to me. You saved your life.”