I might have talked about this before, lord knows I’ve thought about it enough times. I don’t remember. This could be normal forgetting, unsurety of whether I’ve discussed this before, or something sinister and hidden. This sort of gives me the willies. Thinking about it that is. It begins, like so many other things, when I was little.
Since I’ve always had an overactive imagination it probably isn’t surprising that I thought my parents were aliens. In fact, eventually I sometimes wondered whether everyone but me was an alien, all dressed in human costumes and playing a trick on me. [I never felt that the aliens might be in their natural skins and I was in costume] I wondered if I was an exhibit in some sort of alien zoo, or whether I was being experimented on by simply living my life. I wondered who my real parents were and I missed them without knowing them. Since I was fed and watered and hosed off now and again, I was content to be raised by aliens and usually dismissed the thought from my mind.
I also used to think, especially in church, that everyone, everywhere, everytime, could see what I was thinking. My thoughts appeared above my head in Garfieldesque thought bubbles. They weren’t just words though, they were live action, little movies being played in the thought bubbles for everyone to see. Once I started thinking about sex, I’m sure my ratings picked up dramatically. Especially in church. I was puzzled as to why I could not see the thoughts of other people and decided that either they were aliens, and had this ability, or were keeping my skill at thought-seeing from manifesting itself.
Oftener I thought that I was an especially empowered person. That people knew this but pretended not to in order that I might not realize my potential or get some sort of God complex. I was surrounded by a yellow bright corona; I fairly glowed and people who could sense my power were scared of me. I felt that I could levitate things, walk through solid objects, conjure elemental forces, speak with animals and bend people to my will. Or, I could have done those things if I had been trained to tap that potential. I tried to figure it out myself.
I’m sure some psychologist would quite enjoy picking those things apart, the fact that my parents were aliens is a symptom of my own early recognition of my autonomy and the subsequent alienation that resulted in my realization that I was not a part of what was closest to me. The feeling that everyone could read my thoughts is the result of my childhood anxiety that knowledge was being withheld from my thirsty mind. The repressed supernormal powers are obviously a representation of the developing battle between my id or ego or superego or whatever.
Perhaps it is even a manifestation of an early Cartesian paranoia regarding the Great Deceiver. [That was Descartes, right?] I’m mostly over that now, I think. I still wonder at it, at times. The aliens least of all, because, by now, I’ve become like enough to aliens that I might as well be one. The others I’m not sure… The fact that I don’t think about them could either be a sign that I have outgrown such childish things, or that all you great deceivers have pretty much convinced me of my normalcy. The other possibility is that I have critters living in my head.