The Corn Shaman

So I had the nightmare and it reminds me that recently strangely many people including doctors have offered me an exorcism, or suggested one might be useful. I have said nothing of spiritual matters and don’t think that my illness has its origins in the spiritual realm. But there is something afflicting my body, and it seems that people do get the impression that it needs to be separated from me, removed from my head, as if this thing is an entity of its own.

I wonder what that says about it. That it is like a cancer or a parasite? That somehow I am host for this maddening pain that is not me or mine? Virus? Bacteria? Bad spirit? I am certainly willing to approach it from all angles. Whatever will work.

Will something please work?!?!?

I do know this. Six years ago I was in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island and I got very severe poison ivy. It did seem to blister my brain. It would not go away. It spread through my bloodstream and appeared in all sorts of places it only reached by traveling internally. It lasted weeks and weeks and weeks. I was on fire with it.

It changed my life plans. I was headed to grad school in California and I declined the acceptance. There were other factors also in why I chose another path, but I recall that at that time, I described the poison ivy odyssey as ‘hippocampus blistering’.
Like many things, it nearly killed me.

Around that same time, but not necessarily as a result of that, I had a Sleeping Waking Nightmare that involved a black cat creature. I think this experience came right before the poison ivy itself turned into a nightmare. At that point, I think I had just a tiny blister on my hand or ankle I had gotten from the dog, and it was going away, but then I would take the train to RI, and my friend’s cats would sit on my inner arms as I greeted and petted them. Soon I felt I was on fire, and I could not think how I could have been so burned. But then the blisters rose and I knew, and could not believe I had been so unthinking.

And then the blisters continued to rise and fill with fluid and spread and did not leave any skin untouched. It was like a plague.

On the train ride back to PA, I spent much of the time in the tiny bathroom, taking off my clothes and applying compresses of witch hazel. (I would return to PA. Then to WA. I would have had to cancel the trip to the admissions interview in CA but for a dear friend who went with me and drove me around etc.)

When I got back to PA, I was trying to rest and sleep. My mate and I were new to each other and he could not understand how sick I was. When I did sleep, I woke in the dark, in a sweat, covered in hot blisters, paralyzed and fighting for my life as a strange dark creature, a giant cat like thing, was on top of me, crushing my chest, biting me with all its force, and I could not scream for help, and I was paralyzed.

I knew I had to find the strength to scream, a voice told me that to scream would summon enough of my strength to break the animal’s hold on me, that a scream would help me get the poison out.

Finally I somehow mustered the strength to scream, it took every ounce of my strength and more, and in those moments I was focusing and rallying myself, I was trying to figure out what this thing was, where this jaguar had come from.

I realized it was not a real cat. It had been made by someone. It was as if inside it were wooden, and the outside was strange fake black fur. It was also strangely like a poisonous spider though it was a cat. And as I screamed, I looked over and saw there in the doorway, the keeper of this creature. In the doorway stood this tall figure, draped in robes, sort of made of triangle shapes. On its head was a very tall and pointed straw like mask.

I know this creature from some ancient tribe. It seems ancient, likely African. But I cannot say. It was clear to me that while the being appeared supernaturally tall they might also just have their shape and size enhanced and modified by this strange outfit. So while it seemed like a tall lanky man, I really had no idea of gender or size or age. I knew that the appearance was deceptive, was a costume.

(Is this some metaphor for my illness?)

From that time on I think I referred to it as the corn shaman, though that is not exactly who it is, and I often wondered, why would they come for me?

The creature is more like a bad witch or warlock, not a shaman really, though I have never really figured out who or what it is. It has come to attack me several times, though until this nightmare today, I have not seen it in a couple of years. (And I did not see it today, but this cat/black hole/bomb nightmare is like its handiwork. It has its fingerprints.)

As soon as I screamed, the creature flew off me, the corn shaman turned and went down the hall, my mate woke up in concern as I lay there practically unable to move and drenched in sweat and what felt like poison.

A week or two later when I went through security at the Seattle airport on the way to CA, the woman at security asked me if I had been mauled by a cat. I had covered much of my skin but indeed as I looked down at my arms, they looked like giant cats had scratched me. “That would have to be a pretty big cat” I said, honestly thinking that the woman was silly and that if I had been scratched like that I probably would not have survived, and explained to her it was just really bad poison ivy, but then later I was like, “Oh, she was right. I was attacked by a cat.”