The Sick Horror at The Lost and Found (6 page)

The sun came up and humidity came with
it. I regretted my heroism. We were exhausted and unanimously voted
to rest. Pablo smoked and Steve cracked the rum and we got
dangerously close to the bottom third of my water. The girls were
chomping at the bit, eager to prove themselves.

I heard them first and told the others
to sit quiet. They were coming up the steep path behind
us.

“
We are one in the spirit;
we are one in the Lord.

We are one in the spirit; we are one
in the Lord.

And pray that all unity will one day
be restored!”

A group of about 10 people, mostly
children, marched right by, smiling and putting us to shame,
singing gospel songs as they went. They were followed shortly
thereafter by a woman in her fifties on an ATV.

She stopped and glanced quickly at our
bottle of booze. “Want me to take your bags to the top?” she said
with a thick southern US drawl. As I said no, Steve said yes. I
shot him a look, and we agreed in an instant that surrendering our
packs to strangers, whether they be religious nuts or thieves,
would be a bad idea.

The rest of the hike was even more
grueling. The signs taunted us. I thought, ‘4 km to the top…okay,
almost there, almost there,’ and when I thought the next steep hill
would bring us to our final destination, I would see another sign…
2km… And then the clouds joined in on humiliating us by spitting
rain.

We reached the top!
Amazing.

We had clear views of the fog in front
and behind us. The only bodies of water that were apparent were
stinking under my armpits.

But then the fog cleared!

And we could see… buildings. Tiny ugly
shacks sprouting radio antennas; gray concrete and graffiti. Where
few white men have trodden?

But Pablo seemed triumphant. His
spirits suddenly picked up and he headed to one of the concrete
slabs and knocked on a door. We were making a house call. This was
not an empty untouched oasis… it was a communications outpost! But
we were happy to get out of the cold, and Pablo and our host were
happy to see each other -- they were brothers actually. When they
offered us water and coffee, I understood that this is what Pablo
had promised -- not his mountaineer expertise.

We were cramped in a tiny room with
bunk beds and rolls of copper wire. We had too many coffees and
rums and lost track of time. There was a short break when the TV
(with surprisingly bad reception for the amount of antennas here)
cut out. In the silence we heard gospel singing. We poked our heads
out of the antenna shack and saw the Christians that had passed us
on the path. They were far in the distance on the other side of the
volcano’s crater. They were holding hands and must have been
singing very loudly for us to have heard the music from where we
were.

Pablo’s brother pointed at them and
muttered something to Pablo. Pablo translated. Those people belong
to their own church… the local Panamanians believe they came to
escape something in the US … taxes, the law… they believe that the
Earth’s days are numbered and that God will return with a great
flood on a full moon in 2009. Every full moon they come here,
waiting for God to destroy the sinners below. And every full moon,
Pablo’s brother says, they return from the volcano disappointed
that the earth has not been destroyed.

We retreated to our bunker. Rain
started pouring heavily now, eliminating all TV reception, so we
played Texas Holdem’ with coffee stir straws and finished off the
rest of the rum. I managed to grab a top bunk and I wandered out to
take a leak. The rain had stopped and I felt dawn coming. Instead
of crawling over the bodies and copper wire in the bunker I stayed
outside, shivering. The fog cleared. I have no words to describe
what I saw at sunrise.

But after seeing this I believed that
Pablo’s brother probably had it wrong. I don’t think they were
waiting for the flood -- they came here to be closer to
God.

The Power of Your
Dreams

By Dr. Mike
Anderson

You are thirty something
years old. At ten in the evening, for some unexplained reason, your
old middle school friend pops into your head. You wonder what they
have been up to and you feel the urge to look them up in the
phonebook. You find them. You feel kind of reckless… what the hell,
you call them. You pick up the phone. There is no dial tone. Hello?
Hello… Oh, someone is on the line. You picked up the phone just as
someone dialed you.
Who is calling?
!!!
It is your old middle school friend
calling you!

If you were to say this is one in
million I would agree with you. If you were to say that this is a
kind of psychic connection I would also agree with you. But you
cannot say this was a supernatural event. It is really quite
natural.

Getting struck by lighting is unlikely
but natural. Winning the lottery is unlikely but natural. It is
human nature to ignore all of the daily uneventful situations. You
don’t talk about all the days you walked home and didn’t get struck
by lightning. You don’t read so much about all the UFO sightings
that are explained. We focus only on what cannot be explained and
then fixate on it.

Let me give you more details for the
above scenario.

Imagine again that you are that thirty
something. The city you are in has a population of about one
hundred thousand. Enough, say, for about fifteen radio stations.
You are in your thirties, about the time in your life when you
reminisce about the eighties and about the time eighties retro
radio stations come about. Now that morning you were driving to
work, busy concentrating on traffic, when one of yours and your old
friend’s favorite song was played. It triggered something in your
unconscious, a memory of your friend, but being busy it was filed
away in some recess of the brain. Like so many others, you spent
your day at work, battled traffic home, had dinner and watched CSI
at prime time, and then when you switched off the TV, you had time
to let your unconscious drift to your conscious. Without knowing
that the song on the eighties station had triggered a memory, you
thought it was some supernatural vibration that drew you to call
your friend.

Still it is one in a million. But
there are millions of people and millions of chances. We forget the
explained and focus on what seems unexplainable.

I don’t mean to belittle this
experience. Far from that -- I wish to marvel at the power our
unconscious has in our lives. My only point is that to dismiss this
only as supernatural is a disservice to yourself and the wonder of
your second self. Dive into it! Find out what it is all about. And
the gateway to your unconscious is your dreams. Pick up the remote
control to your dreams and discover lucid dreaming.

Try This at Home

By Steven Banks

Two nights ago my shrink friend taught
me and my friends the art of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is like
porn, chocolate ice cream and magic mushrooms rolled into
one.

Pick a day when you are not stressed
and draw a symbol on your hand, any kind of symbol. Then keep
looking at it as you fall asleep. Eventually you will start
dreaming, but you’ll still be looking at your hands. You will
notice that the symbol has changed. This clues you in that you are
dreaming. Dr. Mike says finding your hands in your dream is the key
to controlling your dreams. When you control your dreams you
remember them better. They are more lucid. And you can have sex
with Jessica Alba. (Tell her Mr. Spanky says hi)

My new favorite place is Isla Coiba.
It was the destination of my lucid dream. The prison was full with
shouting inmates banging machetes on the iron bars. Rasta Man was
there wearing his smile.

“
I'm the ghost-catcher!
Take your chance! Prove yourself! Oh, yeah!” he said. I was in his
former cell but there was a metal plaque in front of me. “Push on
through,” he said and so I put my hands on the plaque and this
seemed to give me control. I pushed and the plaque swung
open.

To give you an idea of the power of
lucid dreams, get this: When I googled what he said to me, “I am
the ghost catcher,” I found out that it is a Marley song. But I had
never heard it before. How did I dream it?

Isla Iguana and the Bomb
Craters of Panama

By Usnavy
Márquez

The United States of America’s navy
made holes in Panama.

I found one on Isla Iguana.

Two bombs missed and went under the
sea to the coral. Then they explode the bombs and kill the
coral.

Before we go to Isla Iguana, sit or
lie and do this dream with me. This was my very real dream but you
can follow it in your mind and make your decisions for you. I did
this as a lucid dream with a psychologist, a really dream, but you
have to practice to learn lucid dream. Now just imagine…

You walk in the forest. There is no
cloud in the sky and it is a perfect day. You are not hot and not
cold. There are nice breezes in your back.

Close your eyes. Relax. Put your
imagine here.

Look at your feet. Tell me what are
you see. A path? Tell me.

You are now in the trees. Smell. Touch
the air on your skin. Tell me, how are the trees? What type of
tree? How tall?

Continue walking. You see something on
the earth. You take it. It is a key. Tell me. Is it old or new? The
size? Touch? What you do?

You walk again. Walk and walk. Now you
see something after the trees. It is reflection of the sun. It is a
pond. Look into the water. What do you see? How is the water? It is
a warm day. What do you do? Swim? Sit? Tell me.

Walk again. There are less trees, and
you see something ahead. It is a house. Tell me, how is the house?
Do you see inside? Is the house old or new? What you going to
do?

After you see, something comes to you.
It is an animal. What animal it is for you?

After the house you continue. Then you
see something. You cannot see around it. You cannot go under. It is
a wall. Tell me about the wall.

Stop reading. I do not want you to
read if you not do the dream.

Finished? True? Can you learn what
about you? Then now it is possible for you to read what Dr. Mike
Anderson, a psychologist, says are keys to understand your dream.
He wrote in my email…

THE PATH is the course of your life.
Is it winding or straight? The less it winds, the further ahead you
feel you can see. Is it paved? Rocky? How hard is your life right
now?

THE FOREST represents your friends.
Are there a lot of them packed tightly? Is the forest deep and
mysterious, or light and airy? How sturdy are the trees? In other
words, how much can/do you depend upon your friends?

THE POND is your sexuality. What you
see reflects your desires and what you do reflects your
curiosity.

THE HOUSE is you. The amount of
interior you can see is how open you are with others. Its
sturdiness is a measure of security. A house is a common dream
symbol for the self.

THE ANIMAL is your ideal life
partner.

THE KEY is your father. What you do
with it is your relationship.

THE WALL is death. How the wall looks
and what you do when you reach it describes your attitude about
death.

The man that wrote that above here is
a psychologist, Mike, and he is my boyfriend. But when I meet him
he was not my boyfriend and I smoked a lot of cigarettes. When he
tries to hypnotize me for to quit smoking I only sleep. But I wake
up and have this dream. It was my first lucid dream. Together we
have a group of friends and we try to lucid dream more and more so
I was happy to lucid dream.

But I don’t remember my dream when I
woke up. I don’t remember until two weeks later I went to Isla
Iguana.

Do you know sometimes you can remember
your dream when something you see or smell helps you? I didn’t
remembered my dream but then I went with my friends to Isla
Iguana.

Isla Iguana is a protection park in
Panama. I was there with my new friends I met when I was their tour
guide, and now I travel all of Panama with them. So when the boat
goes near the island right away I knew I see this before in my
dream. This is a déjà vu. Everything was the same as my dream…. The
way I feel and what I smell is the same, and it was at that time I
remembered my lucid dream. In my dream the trees were palm trees…
okay I am Kuna so I always see the coconut palm tree… but
everything was the same. It was amazing when I go to the island and
I thought this is not new for me. In my dream there are not too
many trees but not only one or two. And there I was on the island
with 5 friends, Mike, (was not my boyfriend at that moment) María,
Matt, Steve and Estrella.

The path in my dream was like the path
in the Isla Iguana. It was direct, but the mangrove trees made
darkness, so I didn’t know where the path goes.

My house was small with not many of
the things inside. Maybe it says that I am young.

The wall is not on Isla Iguana because
really the wall is death. But the wall did not scare me. Over the
wall there is night but I see the stars.