Schizophrenia Has No Borders or Boundaries




DEAN JOHNSTON'S STORY

In Toronto I managed to get a job changing lightbulbs at a large department store. I ran away twice, to England and Jamaica expecting to be welcomed personally by the Maharishi. When a terrorist bomb blew up a plane over Lockerbie Scotland I thought it was an attempt on my life, which prompted me to fly immediately to the Maharishi in England but he wasn't there and I came back the same weekend. I saw a movie called "Oedipus Rex" directed by Passolini and immediately flew to Jamaica expecting to meet the Maharishi. I was looking for Strawberry Fields mentioned in the Beatles song and there are two in Jamaica. It was a memorable trip. I ran out of money after one week and mostly learned the importance of money.

 

I was just a pawn in a secret war. I didn't have any friends, any lovers, and very little contact with my parents between 1980 and 1990. My parents had moved to the States while I was in Victoria and I never told anyone what was happening. I lived in a cockroach infested rooming house never even realizing that Diazinon will eliminate cockroaches. I had a strong sense of mission to help humanity instead of myself and in my poverty I believed the cause of suffering in the world was overpopulation. My solution was to hybridize the AIDS virus with the common cold and eliminate 3 - 4 billion people.

 

I got a lot of messages from favorite Rock and Roll songs, from movies, cartoons and library books. The library was my special friend who could show me what I needed to know by having me open and read exactly the information I was looking for. Someone was leading me to the books I needed and that was too much for humans to be capable of. I started to believe I was in contact with aliens from outer space. At first there were two kinds. I learned humanity was going to become extinct from a nuclear holocaust that would break up the continental plates. The oceans would evaporate with all the molten lava and I was going to live in a box out in space with a woman the aliens had been breeding since life started on this planet. She had dark blue skin like the Hindu god Krishna and we were going to have children who would be turquoise in colour. We were going to be the only survivors of Armageddon and we would propagate the species. Only girls would be born as identical twins and they would be able to impregnate each other from a single drop on their funny long noses. I would be the last surviving male although I would only live a thousand years.

 

I believed that to be my destiny completely and got a lot of messages everywhere I went. I heard voices several times but mostly I experienced telepathy. I had what are called "ideas of reference" where things are thought to have a particular meaning just for you. For example, a license plate on the street could be an important and appropriate message for me from the aliens. By the end my fate had changed a bit. I was going to become an alien and have eternal life and be capable of time travel and my companion was going to be a part time anthropolgy professor at the University of Toronto. Sexuality was as important as intelligence to the aliens and they had evolved beyond the use of machinery to doing everything with their mind. I thought they were turning on my nervous system with experiences of pain so that every neuron was active, so that I would be able to experience greater pleasure as an alien. I asked them once if a machine might not make the process less painful and I remember them laughing, saying "Machines... Dean, we don't have any machines."

 

My delusions changed as the aliens instructed me on the real nature of reality. Three things happened as my contact with reality became very tenuous. I got in trouble with the law, I became alcoholic, and I lost my job.

 

One night after convincing the aliens to transfer my mind to another body I got mad at the aliens, and started breaking windows in the rooming house I was living in. The police came, subdued me and I spent a couple of nights in jail. The judge realized I was a psychiatric case because I carried a pocketknife to defend myself against homosexuals. The world's most powerful man was a homosexual and he was trying to make me a homosexual. By then the Maharishi was my second worst enemy. I believed they both knew about the end of the world and my destiny with the aliens and they wanted to take my place. I didn't mention that in court though.

 

Nobody asked why I did what I did. I got three years probation with the condition that I see a psychiatrist for those three years. Psychiatrists are only human though, while I was almost alien and they wouldn't have understood what was happening so I never told them anything. I went to my appointments to stay out of jail.

 

Jail was such a shock to me. I was so mad at the aliens after that experience I tried to force them to give me a new body by killing the body I was in. I bought several bottles of vodka and guzzled them like water until I passed out knowing that people overdose and die from alcohol. I got pneumonia but lived and decided that the aliens wouldn't let me die, only experience pain until it was time for me to go.




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