I've been having such a tough time lately. I do sessions that either have minor contact or none at all. One after the other they're just weak-sauce sessions. Sometimes I get the feeling that I'm devolving haha.

This has happened before. A bit over a year ago I was cruising along, viewing daily with half-decent results when all of the sudden it was like I hit a pit of quick sand. The harder I tried to break out of it, the deeper I sunk. For nearly a month and a half strait – every. session. sucked. every. day. Not to say I didn't have observable target contact here and there but accurate data was minimal and low-level at best. As where before I was getting used to the feeling of progress, learning new things all the time and having some good results on paper.

The angst became so great that the episode earned it's own moniker:
"The Dark Night of Psi" (cue scary organ music).

I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn with a bowling ball. But, I powered through it and eventually the streak broke with one of the cooler session experiences I've ever had, and a string of decency thereafter. Not a second too soon either. I didn't fancy going prematurely bald for tearing all my hair out. It's just so frustrating because you know you can do better. You've the past sessions to prove it. So why the hell isn't it working any more? Racking your brain over anything and everything that might be the culprit does little good.

Some viewers say that when you start to have trouble it's a good time to take a break. That's awesome if it works for them but personally I always seem to come back from a break feeling twice as incompetent as I did before it. Am I alone on this one? Maybe.

It appears the Dark Night of Psi (scary music) has returned. Shrouding my soul in blackness. Smiting me from the shadows! Destroying Hope and all that is sacred! Chewing a path of destruction through eternity and…….

Ahem… Sorry about that. You can tell it's a sore subject. Anyway, my viewing has been consistently pitiful for a nearly two months. I hate to whine but it's hard as hell to keep the right frame of mind when every session starts to feel like an exercise in futility before you even start. I know, poor me. I pick one of the most mentally challenging pursuits a person can, and then I bitch because it's hard. Heh.

Not sure what causes these long 'dry spells.' I think it's probably just an exaggerated bell of the learning curve. A valley canyon that precedes the next higher peak. Maybe it's worse for some than others. I'm not sure it's any easier the second time around and it probably won't be on the third either. C'est la vi. All there is is to keep at it. At least I'm lucky enough to have a girlfriend who pretends to never tire of listening to me belly-ache about it.

The last time I hit this wall, a friend of mine (and a more experienced viewer than I) gave me this advice:

"… hang in there. This too will pass, as they say. No matter what the cause is, you were doing great before so you know that you can do great again, right? The cause or source of your recent missing WILL pass. But YOU WON'T PASS. …Even if you take no steps to try to correct the problem, the problem will STILL eventually either go away or will solve itself (possibly from your subconscious figuring out a way around it while, from your conscious perspective, you have just kept plugging away)."

Leave it to good friends to make the night seem a little less dark.

I was with a friend in a pawn shop that doubled as a governmental office that handled minor tasks related to immigration. My friend was taking forever doing whatever it was he had to do there and I couldn't wait to leave. While I was waiting, I noticed a beautiful Italian woman at the counter who was there applying for a visa or some such. She was deaf and her friend was translating her sign language for the government employee/pawn broker. They finished up and left and so did my friend and I.

I've always wanted to learn sign language so I thought I'd stop by a nearby college and try to sign up for a class. When I got there, it just so happened that sign language class was starting that day and in just a few minutes. I went in and took a seat in the front row of the large lecture hall. The professor came in a second later; an older man with a receding grey hairline, a short grey beard and thin round glasses. He started speaking about something (can't remember what) that had absolutely nothing to do with sign language. Making a lot of hand gestures as he spoke, I wondered if he was imprinting sign language on the class through some kind of advanced NLP.

He hardly looked at the rest of the class. Almost the entire time he spoke it was directly to me. Nearly like I was the only one in the room.

The class was then out on a field trip. We had been brought to the edge of what appeared to be a strip-mining operation. We stood in a half-built structure, mostly just concrete floors and ceilings and an occasional metal beam where walls might someday go. The building was positioned on the edge of a sizable drop-off – a steep slope that went down maybe two hundred feet into a giant hole in the ground. In the bottom of this huge crater was a collection of heavy machinery, tractors, bulldozers etc, all at rest.

A black curtain hung in the building, partially blocking the classes view of the inside of the crater. The professor looks around and then pulls back the curtain as if it was time to start the show. When he does, all the machines in the crater come to life. Cables turning, hydraulics pushing huge metal arms around and men in little plexiglas boxes making all of them work. I had the impression that the professor had made arrangements with the men who ran the machines to start them on his cue of opening the curtain. I didn't know what for though. It seemed a regular construction-type site.

Then I saw them.

Several 'beings' emerging from somewhere deep inside the crater. Nearly humanoid, one at a time they came walking out and they were BIG. Each of them around a hundred feet tall. They all looked mostly the same. Each one was wearing what looked like a close-cut, silvery-grey evening dress. Over the dress they had a burnished, shining breastplate that was sculpted like muscles, each one's a different color that represented…something.

Armor on the top, dress on the bottom and no arms. None of them had arms. I'm a little foggy on what their faces looked like but they had strong jaws, no hair, and no visible eyeballs. The epitome of androgyny, they had the waist and curves of a woman, but no breasts under their upper armor. They were both male and female and neither. (I made a feeble attempt to sketch one here).

One by one they walked towards us, silently climbing the slope out of the crater and walking past us. They didn't even seem to notice the class standing there watching. No one spoke. We were witnessing something very rare and very special. It was obvious that these things were spiritually some very heavy hitters – almost on the level of being 'gods.' It was an awe-inspiring experience to say the least.

I had the idea that this was sacred ground and whatever was going on with the construction below had triggered this.

As one of them with a violet colored breastplate slowly towered past, I had the thought that even though they looked perfectly solid, they might not be. I stuck my head to the side and the dress of this giant passed through my head and shoulders. As it did, it 'activated' something inside me and suddenly everything in my vision was a shade of deep violet, revealing a certain energy in the surroundings that I couldn't see just a moment before. The effect lasted a few seconds and faded.

-*-

Then I was in a room alone with the professor. On a high table in front of us there was a body wrapped head to toe in white linen that I had a sense of being me too. I was telling the professor that I can't seem to get out of my body consciously. As if on cue, a short stocky guy with an odd face comes into the room. He was dressed all in orange robes and I took him for a monk. He opened his mouth wide and pressed his face against the side of the body wrapped on the table. It was like some sort of trigger and I was suddenly absorbed into the back of the monk. It felt like I had been magnetized and instantly, physically assimilated into the guy. Startled the hell outta me. Immediately I felt like I was in a different realm completely. Like the monk was a doorway that I literally traveled through to this new place. I had left my body. Full OBE.

In this new place I was formless. There was no up and no down. It was a bit frightening to tell the truth but my excitement and awe nearly balanced it out. I encountered a person whom I quickly avoided. I wasn't sure about anything and slightly feared for my safety in this possibly vulnerable astral state that was very new to me. I moved on and came upon an amazing white pattern thing. It was like a cross between a spiderweb and a lace doily, but all made out of some bright white energy. Changing and folding inward on itself, it was beautiful. I had strong thought that all of this was totally real. "This is not a dream. This is really happening."

After a couple minutes I was 'sucked back' into my body with a final sort of 'click.' It was the same kind of magnetic sensation of being pulled into the monk. My skin tingled like pins and needles as I awoke in my bed feeling very privileged, and very grateful.

As I was taking off my belt, I felt something rough inside my pants near the top of my butt. I put my hand back there and all of the sudden something bit me hard on my right cheek. I tore off my pants as fast as I could. Standing there in my birthday suit, I looked back at the big red mark on my ass that was starting to burn and throb. I thought maybe it was a bee or something.

"Damn, that's really starting to hurt!"

I moved my pants around a little hoping to shake whatever it was out and find out what got me. Nothing was coming out.Then, all of the sudden from the folds of the denim emerges a giant dragon. OK, it was actually a centipede but it looked like a dragon at the moment. About five inches long. Those things are mean.

While most bugs and spiders don't want anything to do with you, the centipedes here are fearless and known for charging directly at people and carrying off small children (ok, so that last bit isn't true, but I wouldn't put it past them if they could).

I grabbed one of my trusty boots and smashed that sucker 'til he was dead.

I've heard more horror stories about centipede bites than I could recall at that moment. "It'll make you sick for weeks…" "…It swelled up the size of a baseball…" "…she had to have a skin graph…"

I had flashes of what of venom-ridden horrors may lay ahead. I called my boss. He's a local, he'll know what to do. Mostly he just laughed at me. Heh. Then he told me if I wasn't allergic to them he didn't think there wasn't really anything to worry about. Hell, I don't know if I'm allergic to centipede venom.

Just to be sure my internal organs weren't about to liquify, I called poison control. The lady was really nice. She said there wasn't much I could do about the pain. She also told me that it's very rare, but if it started swelling really big, or I got nauseous, a bad headache, dizzy etc that meant it was extremely serious and to call her back right away. She also said that these often get infected, and if it does I'll need to go to the doctor and get some antibiotics. She was more comforting than my boss at least lol.

Anyway, to make a long story short (too late), I took a shower, got dressed and went to work. The pain and swelling mostly subsided after a while. I still have two red holes in my cheek about a centimeter apart, one where each fang sunk into me. I count my lucky stars. If I had to have one of these guys crawling around in my pants, I guess my ass is the best place I could have taken the hit. Criminy.

-*-

Driving home tonight after work I was thinking about the incident. I thought about the way the centipede looked when he crawled out of my pants (now removed from my horror of the moment). It looked like he didn't know where to go or what to do. I had the thought that he was probably just scared and trying to find his way out of my jeans when I stuck my hand back there and freaked him out. I felt bad for killing him.

I don't like to kill things if I don't have to. Spiders have free reign in my house for the most part. When I see one build a new web in a corner of the bathroom, I might name him Henry or Sir Charles or Betty and talk to them when I'm in there. If one looks particularly threatening, I'll scoop her up in a glass and relocate her outside.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a meat eater and I'm not loosing any sleep over the death of my assailant. He was a predator in my house (let alone my pants). I thought it interesting though to have such a different perspective from the total satisfaction I got out of smashing it into oblivion earlier in the day, asking it how it liked me now and flexing at it.

Of course if the centipede was 140 lbs and I was 0.5 ounces (shiver), he would have smashed me.

Reminds me of the movie "The Fly" with Jeff Goldbloom

Seth Brundle: Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects… don't have politics. They're very… brutal. No compassion, no compromise. We can't trust the insect. I'd like to become the first… insect politician. Y'see, I'd like to, but… I'm afraid, uh…
Ronnie: I don't know what you're trying to say.
Seth Brundle: I'm saying… I'm saying I – I'm an insect who dreamt he was a man and loved it. But now the dream is over… and the insect is awake.
Ronnie: No. no, Seth…
Seth Brundle: I'm saying… I'll hurt you if you stay.

Having compassion for a compassionless creature is truly a good way to be. A rare and venerable human trait that brings about a very old and very human grey area – When the insect is awake and he's in your pants, you gotta do what you gotta do.