Here is another excerpt from my upcoming novel, "An Autistic Life — Visions of Past Lifetimes' Futures."
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After being awakened in her mid 40s, Steve began remembering many other details from previous lifetimes. She also distinctly remembered all the things in her current life that were automatically forgotten. For instance, just as on the ranch in Colorado, there had been a live-in autism researcher on the Smith Ranch in Montana. She remembered noticing that the supposedly brain damaged brother of the ranch's owner, who lived quietly in the basement, was actually closely watching Steve, Clyde, and their friends at play. He also scribbled in his little notebook during 'dream reenactments' Steve led. Whenever Steve noticed him, he would suddenly completely shut down and turn away.
She was astonished to remember that Joe, Steve's father, would complain of having nothing to do on that ranch, after all the cattle were sold and the owner was not buying any more to replace them. The "owner" was the old autism researcher. Joe took long naps on the floor behind the living room sofa. Of course, he showed the horses a lot of attention, also. Her mother was also acting strangely. Rosey collected many strange curios and, for once, took an interest in major home interior improvements.
After settling into a new grade school in Montana, Steve became fast friends with a brilliant young artist, Dale Zimmerman. Dale was also a budding storyteller who accepted her as a very close friend. Of course, Steve was living as all boy, back then. Dale invited Steve for sleepovers at his house. Steve found Dale's family home quite different than any she had ever experienced. The family seemed rich to Steve, although they were actually barely considered middle class. Normally, Steve found rich people repugnant, usually. Steve found a friend who also declared himself to be straightedge; both eschewing any type of drug. They were both 11 years old.
Whenever Dale showed Steve his cartoon drawings, she was astonished at how quite excellent they were. Steve encouraged Dale to become a serious philosopher and artist, which is exactly what he did, a couple of decades later. Dale once recoiled from Steve and spent less time with her after she attempted to kiss him. And, Dale never knew that Steve's female intersex side was the one with the crush. Intersex is the 'i' in LGBTQIA+.
Other than Dale and a couple of other peers, Steve was not interested in socializing with any of the other kids at school. She was usually bored at school and often went off on her own little adventures, sometimes in the middle of class. Steve remembered past lifetimes of much sexual adventure. Slight memories of such vision dreams fueled much of her stranger behaviors. She would suddenly get an intriguing idea, stand up, and walk out of the room. Sometimes she walked out of school and down the street.
Her first teacher in Montana was a severe, narrow-minded, middle-aged woman. She often ridiculed Steve, which caused Steve to be unfairly ostricized by some of the other students. She railed at Steve for writing a book report on the science fiction novel 'Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters'. She did this in front of the class, shaming Steve for ever daring to be thinking such alarming science fiction counted as any kind of literature to ever be read, much less having an opinion about. This teacher was visibly alarmed by the ideas of the story and acted outright paranoid as she placed a large red 'F' on the paper for the whole class to see. This small-minded school teacher publicly humiliated Steve. The ignorant teacher made it clear that in her xenophobic, frightened, prejudiced, stupid opinion, all science fiction was garbage, never to be seen as literature. She warned the class angrily that no one else had better read, much less write a book report about such "trash". Several other teachers treated sci-fi similarly throughout Steve's childhood. It unfolded as no mystery as to why Steve became a committed autodidact.
Fortunately, such narrow-minded stultifying teaching did not prevail. Never in history has such blatant censorship overcome truth. Many great writers have long produced giant tomes of true literature, classified as Science Fiction. Starting in 1893 with Gustavus W. Pope's 'Journey to Mars', and soon after that, H.G. Wells’ 'The War of the Worlds'. Of course, Ray Bradbury and many other sci-fi authors have written fine literature, that was misunderstood by such tiny minded idiots in the so called "Great American Education System".
Steve checked out of any interest in public education completely, at that time; labeling adults outside her immediate family as blind, deaf, stupid animals, incapable of thinking critically about any actually important issue. She tuned out most teachers, ever after. She became absorbed into her own little seemingly random world. She began to notice the deep beauty and dramatic natural landmarks of the Ruby Valley, in Montana, where they lived many miles south of Dillion.
On the very long bus rides to and from grade school, Steve tried to stay disconnected from the loud, uninteresting spectrum of country kids, very unlike herself. She tended to hang around with Dale at school, but with Sid on the bus. Sid lived on the same southern school bus route, while Dale lived in Dillion. They spent up to 3 hours a day, 5 days a week, riding the public school bus. Most days she was teased and hazed by someone on the bus, usually an older kid. This constituted a real hardship for a high-functioning autistic kid, contributing to Steve's growing hatred of the dysfunctional rural U.S. education system. To cope, she learned to continually dissociate and develop a rich internal fantasy story life.
It was during this time that Steve dived headlong into her own private, undirected scientific explorations of our shared reality. She became a genuine junior scientist, using a small microscope to study plants, earth, water organisms, bacteria, and micro-surfaces of everyday objects. Understanding the basics of electricity, electronic circuits, and remote control. She invented many gadgets, mostly in secret. Occasionally she devised something which could not be hidden, such as remote control of her bedroom's light switch by the door. She rigged up a system of tiny picture-hanger eyelets across the ceiling and down the walls to conduct very small gauge fishing lines; one pulled to turn the light off, the other pulled to turn it on. Everyone who saw it in action expressed amazement, including Joe. Steve was happy with the positive attention, but did not see what was so interesting about such a simple invention. She had invented much more interesting things, but did not feel safe to share any of that, even with her family.
She also had many vivid vision dreams during this time. She tried her best to interpret what small parts of vision dreams she could remember. She sometimes entered meditation reveries that led to a childish acting out of events she saw in vision dreams, especially those she had no personal knowledge of. These vision dreams included flying various aircraft, living apart from all other humans, strange sexual experiences — for which she had no local references — being prepubescent. And of people she had known in previous lifetimes while employed in fascinating occupations. She had been a person who, in previous lifetimes, had nothing to do with the simple agrarian lifestyle practiced by Joe and Rosey Gandy.
Steve did not feel accepted by her peers, nor understood by her family. She was expected to always be all 'boy,' while in reality being also physiologically 'girl'. Her intersex reality was hidden from everyone, including herself, by her autistic automatic forgetting. It also helped that her vagina was mostly hidden.
Part of the way she coped with her situation was to isolate in a way that made her feel safe. In the big three-story ranch house in Montana, she found a small cubby hole in the attic that she made into her own little private space. She ran a hidden extension cord up to it and installed a small desk lamp and an old AM radio there. She would stay up secretly, long after her parents thought she was sleeping in her bed, listening quietly to radio stations hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
Steve had a great many heavy vision dreams during her 10th, 11th, and 12th years of age. She lived on the Smith Ranch when she had most of these, including some early dreams about the sky being on fire:
Within months after the end of One World, the galactic pulse arrived. The sky was completely on fire with falling stars — micrometeorites by the billions. A wall of fast moving sand-sized meteors came burning down the sky. The dust extended throughout the solar system, a giant wave front of exploded matter moved quickly passed the Sun. Even though it moved quickly, the band of dust was still large enough to block most sunlight for a few months. The sun became a dark light in a very dark months of dark. The moon could be seen, but just as a barely lit crimson red haze in the sky. It is possible that the fiery radiation event Steve and others experienced deep underground was caused by a Solar Flare, coincident with the arrival of the Galactic Pulse.
After a fire blasted the whole face of the globe, possibly caused by a solar flare, the surface temperature of Earth quickly dropped to less than -200 °F. People had only a few days to get deep underground before this extinction event occurred. If anyone took the One World ID chip into their body, they did not survive. No one who took "The Mark" was allowed to live; they all died in screaming pain, their flesh melting off their bones. Steve personally witnessed this happening to another person, hiding underground with the few others and her, who did not take the chip into their bodies. Extreme radiation made everyone else sick as well. Those who were already sick or weak, died. Most of the people huddling underground with Steve survived. Only one of them had accepted the One World ID chip. It seemed to be the reflected radiation from the ID chip in his body that sickened them more, as it melted him.
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