Kangaroo spirit (a shamanistic experiment)

(Tongue in cheek:)  the first experience in the new tent -- I tested it by sleeping in my back yard. Who would have known my back yard could have been so noisy?  One is sheltered from most of the noises that take place during the night by brick walls and glass windows.   Mike had warned me that it was pure madness to test my new equipment on a night when it was destined to rain heavily.  By virtue of his hefty warning, he put it into my head that I may go mad.  There is a thin line between insanity and normality.  I've always been intrigued as to where that is, and what exactly one must do to cross it.

That night was a test of my metal -- if not my mettle.  I heard some funny noises.  The stirring wind that accompanied the heavy rain produced a lively clatter.  Planes passed over.  Loose debris in the neighbors' yard seemed to ricochet from one position to the next.

I should mention that, whilst not exactly claustrophobic  I am acutely sensitive to the quality of air.  As a kid, there I had an outright hatred for large department stores, or Hypermarkets, due to the very bad quality of air below an adult's leg span.  It's likely that carbon dioxide and nitrogen sink, whereas oxygen rises.  In any case, I could never get enough of the good quality of air, and usually began to feel nauseous, ten minutes into the trip.  After that, I would feel deeply fatigued and refuse to go any further, much to the adults' chagrin and assertions that I was just whining.   So, pulling the lid of the small tent (called a 'swag') over my head, whilst sleeping, was never going to be a good idea.  It wasn't inevitably a bad one, either.  But fraught with uncertainty, it surely was.  Uncertainty is just subjective.  It doesn't matter.   One gets over a fright, because it happens only in one's mind.

There was the time I shut the bedroom door to sleep -- and window, too. That was because we had a guest to stay, and the wind had rattled the blinds.  I woke up suddenly, with a screech.  I feared that square  white objects were falling off the wall behind me. I had to leap out the way, lest they land on my head.  Another time the window was almost shut and the air wasn't circulating.  I screamed because someone seemed to be coming in the window.  Apparently my shriek was so piercing, I totally shattered Mike's peace of mind. My heart was racing and I thought, when he grabbed me to reassure me, that I had stood up and he had led me back to bed.  I had not been standing up, in truth, for it would have taken him longer to lead me back to bed had that been so.  In fact, a lack of oxygen to my brain had led to another hallucination.

There were two more of this sort -- and always with the common cause of air circulation being cut off.  In one case, there was a man standing over my head, wearing cowboy attire. In the other case, Mike and I were sharing a swag and had pulled over the lid to stop the rain from getting in. Whilst asleep I had imagined a large ant, waving its feelers at me.  I screamed and smashed the ant as hard as I could.  My finger remained jarred for several months after that:  I had lashed out at it pretty hard.

The night of the event where I became a kangaroo, due to my haunted swag, was that night when I did my testing.  This was in our own back yard.  This was the night a Melbourne woman was being murdered.  But that is irrelevant either way.  I'd shut the lid, due to the rain, then tossed and turned. The air quality was not good.  A small backyard, bounded by fences, does not allow the air to circulate.  A lid above my head does not improve this. I am in my coffin. I am dying of poor air quality.  I have to prove my metal and my mettle, otherwise I won't be born again.

I stayed in the back yard with all the mysterious items racketing around.  I endured it for several hours, but my sleep was light, or not at all.  Suddenly, neither awake nor fully asleep, I had the feeling I should make a dash for it.  I could get back into the warmth of the house and cross from death to life.  I had to find my confidence, because once I reversed the process of dying and started living, I might find anything at all.  The first step was to open the lid and peer out at the sky.  But the sky was terrifying. I felt a predatory animal, no doubt a pterodactyl lurking just above my head, ready to swoop and take me as its prey the minute I revealed myself.  If I unzipped myself, I could die.

An image carried me forth, however. It was a mental image; a hallucination. I saw myself bounding to the back door and entering it.  I became a wild kangaroo, and my legs were carrying me, driven by pure animal terror, in through the back door.

But I was human -- and so, limited.  As a kangaroo, I could enter the back door, but my human skills slowed me down.  What if the zipper did not unzip?  As a kangaroo, did I have the right to expect it would? Also, I would be using a human hand to turn the back doorknob.  What if the door knob did not respond to a human hand, because I had forever been condemned not to be human?

There was a huge risk in testing whether I was still human or not.  I decided to make a run for it.  I unzipped quickly, and like the kangaroo in my dream, bolted for the door.  In a weird way, two miraculous things happened.  One:  the zip that bound my lid unzipped in normal human fashion. Two:  the door knob turned and let me in.

I had escaped the radiant of evil.

It was unbelievable to be human again. I moved up near to Mike and reveled in the sheer humanity of it all.  Being human meant comfort, and protection, and solidarity, in a way I hadn't recently understood.  I lay there basking in the warmth and wonderfulness of humanity.

This had not been my only experience of the kangaroo spirit that embodies my swag.  It may not be my last.  I had another, similar experience, on the recent trip. I'd put the lid down to protect myself from pollen, and was going asleep, when suddenly a kangaroo was standing above me.  I saw it in three flashes, the same outline of a kangaroo -- and screamed.  Only, the scream may have been silent this time, even though my heart rate was high when I woke myself up.  Of course one does not see a kangaroo through an enclosing cover.

The body has an amazing way of alerting you when the quality for living isn't all that good.  Supposing I had really been in danger of falling into death, due to a lack of air supply, my body would be doing an amazing job. I don't condemn it for being alert.

At the same time, it is weird that I see kangaroos in every instance when I'm dying. Mike says he also thought a kangaroo was sniffing around us on that night.

Imagination and reality; these sometimes curiously combine.