Sylvia Wynter's Dream

When I was a boy, I lost my mind. The year was 2003. I was twelve years old and wallowing in the confluence of shadows cast by my parents’ divorce, my body changing, my sister cutting, and the impossible task of integrating into high school.

I couldn’t sleep more than two to three hours a night. I was trembling with anxiety when I left the house. And I was becoming discernibly more depressed and withdrawn every day.

A clever child, I had doubts and questions about all of the institutions and authorities that were in place to keep me regulated. I read Nietzsche and Jung and Marx and Schopenhauer. I read the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran, the Dao Te Ching, and the poetry of Rumi. My teachers weren’t equipped to answer my questions. I lost all faith in the foundational ideas and stories of my culture. God or Nation or Community or Family seemed dubious at best. So I dove deeper and deeper into interrogation of all the human systems I could perceive.

Then the visions began.

One day, when I should have been in class, I took the afternoon to stare at the sky. After the third hour, the sun had burned a blind spot into my retina and I found myself crying for answers. Tears pooled underneath my head on the concrete bench as I projected onto the cosmic empty all my sadness and despair, my hope and my love. The blank canvas of the sky took on every form I could imagine. All at once. Life and Death. Time and Space. Every end of every axis of every spectrum. Every possible past or future configuration. I was the player of all the parts. I was he who set the stage. I and the Father were One. The end of dualism in one shattered mind.

In that moment, I became a mystic, and in one way or another, I’ve been paying for it ever since.

Not too long after this, I realized I’d committed a very serious crime in the minds of the priesthoods of our culture. To the Christians, no man but Jesus is God. And though I told them that they too were God, and would be able to see it if they shed their egos, I was not welcomed in the Church. To the school board, I’d become a corrupter of the youth, encouraging an intolerable and premature rebellion. I could not, after all, reconcile in my conscience, prayer to false idols like a flag or a limited and preposterous understanding of divinity.

To the medical establishment, I’d become a psychotic. And it didn’t matter to them the fact that I had never lost the ability to distinguish between material and metaphorical spaces. My visions, my chasing ecstatic experiences, and my total inability to fit an acceptable mold convinced this class of materialists that I should be “treated” for one kind of madness or another. I was given powerful medications that removed me from the world for years.

hospital 2012

Only by studying yoga, western mystical traditions, the rhythm of Sufi Islam, and experimenting with psychedelics and various exercise routines did I manage to regain a kind of balance in 2018. And while things are in a sense, fine now. A part of my heart will always wonder, what if my mind didn’t leave me then, so close to the start of my journey? Would it have wandered off later? What if I’d been able to remain composed in the face of the near total chaos of my youth? What would Nietzsche have written had his syphilitic delusions not rotted him out on some ignominious cot so long ago? With just a little support, could I have been something else entirely?

I know it’s not the most helpful line of questioning, but it lingers like a ghost limb that I can feel in my quieter moments. Sometimes the memory pounces on me when I find the time look at the sky. I am that boy again, an authentic and misunderstood dreamer, helpless before the vastness of his curiosity. Sometimes it takes me a few moments to remember that All is One, things could be no other way,

and as Tolkein once said, “Not all those who wander are lost.”