So, apparently, I am going to start a cult.
More specifically, I am supposed to go and start some sort of time-traveling, immortality cult. This is all so bewildering. I am still out of breath, trying to write all this down before it begins to slip back from memory.
She talked to me. I talked to me. She was me. I’m not having some sort of episode. She was as real as this keyboard in front of me. I appeared to myself in the hallway behind the cafeteria, and I talked to myself. This happened twenty minutes ago.
She, me, just came up to me and started talking to me, like I can just come up and talk to you. She told me a bunch of information I am supposed to say to myself in the mirror.
No, wait, that is wrong. It was not “information.” It was “affirmations.” I told me a bunch of affirmations that I am supposed to say to myself in the mirror, over the next seven decades.
The affirmations are for when I get discouraged.
Because apparently I am going to get discouraged a lot.
Because I am going to be the founder of a time-travelers’ cult.
And it is going to be really difficult getting the portal built.
I guess the portal is the time-traveling machine that me and this cult are going to build.
There is a lot I don’t know. It all happened so fast and then it was all over. She only spoke to me for two minutes, tops. She told me not to worry. She told me to finish med school and become an internist like I planned. But she said that I’m supposed to start “collecting people” very soon (for the cult, I guess). She said I’ll just know who I need when I see them.
I only got out one question during all this.
“Why would I start a cult to build a time machine?”
She said these very exact words.
“Creating a cult ensures perpetuity through deep time. And at some time, deep in the future, death will be solved, and your cult will then go back in time and save everybody.”
She said this to me in reply to my answer, and then (I swear this is the truth) she turned to her right, faced the green paint on the hallway wall, and walked straight into it. She vanished into the wall at a steady pace. It was as if she saw a door there where I could only see a wall, and walked right through that door. She is gone now.
She was me, just older. White hair. Black trench coat. Come to think of it, she seemed taller than me actually, which now seems odd. But maybe she was wearing heels and I just didn’t have time to notice. It all happened so fast.
But she was me. She looked like me. I could just tell, it was my own self, talking to me right there in that hallway.
This is all so odd. I wish I could remember more. All I can remember is I was going to lunch because my next lecture doesn’t start yet and I was hungry. I took the shortcut I always take, through the back hallway that isn’t being used any more, where now they store all the extra tables and chairs. I was walking along right beside the wall because that is the only space available to walk in that hallway, and then she was suddenly standing right there in front of me.
She must have stepped out of whatever magic door she stepped into a couple minutes later. I mean, I never saw her coming from anywhere else. She was suddenly right there, hands in trench coat pockets, white hair, looking down at me, with my own eyes.
She smiled real quick, and said my name to me.
Then she said “You’re going to start a perpetuity cult.” Yes, that’s it! That is what she actually said. That’s right, then she said “You are going to build a machine that moves people back in time.”
Hold on. Wait, she used the word “shift.”
“You are going to build the machine that shifts people back in time.”
Why “shift”?
And I asked her why. “Why am I going to do that?”
It’s funny, now that I think of it, I never asked “Who the hell are you?” Nope. I knew exactly who I was talking to. I just wanted to know why we were talking.
I asked her why I was going to start a cult, and she said to me “Because if you go far enough into the future, eventually they are going to eliminate death.”
And then she said, “The cult will serve to provide perpetuity in time until that happens, so that members can shift back in time from there, to retrieve the others.”
Yeah, that’s right. I think she used the word retrieve rather than save.
Then she told me I was going to suffer from discouragement a lot, and told me the affirmations to say to myself when this happens. I am going to build the time machine that this cult will be centered around. It is going to take a long time. Decades.
I bet.
Ok, this is nuts. I’m nuts.
I’m in med school. How am I going to build a time machine? That sounds more like an engineering problem anyway. I wish I could have asked her that. “Hey, I am training to operate on human bodies. How am I also gonna find the time to do advanced electrical engineering?” But, of course she left before I could think of that.
OK, I have to get to the afternoon lecture in a minute.
What do I make of this? I mean, I certainly have absolutely no plans to change what I am doing. This was just an extremely odd event.
Oh, my. This was a very profound hallucination. That’s all it was.
I mean, I have been under a tremendous amount of stress since starting med school. The end is finally near and I am feeling relaxed for the first time in about three whole years. Maybe this emotional “shift” triggered a hallucination?
I will talk to a therapist as soon as the semester wraps up and my break begins. There is no shame in seeking help if your mind begins to fray a little. It happens to everybody. Some people get depressed. Some people start hearing voices. Some people drink. I guess I just got a full-blown whopper of a hallucination. It is best just to keep my chin up until the end of the semester, and then get some help from another trained medical professional. I am just going to nip whatever this is in the bud. That’s way more better than pretending nothing is wrong and letting it get worse. I have put so much work into what I am doing. It would be dumb to neglect this now and allow mental problems to derail my medical career later.
Anyway, time to post this and then get to the lecture. We have a guest speaker today, a pioneer in the burgeoning field of ‘quantum-biology.’ He will be giving a talk on the confluence of the biology of the brain and the deeply weird world of quantum physics. Should be interesting.