Grab Your Best Hold Socially Correct People, World War II Combat Aviators, Psychiatry, Christianity and Atheists

Grab Your Best Hold Socially Correct People, World War II Combat Aviators, Psychiatry, Christianity and Atheists

    Since I started writing this unfolding book, my dreams have been kinda all over the place: pro, con and mixed. I get glimpses and snatches, which cause me to take a breath, step back and ponder. 

    However, a good friend, who gets talked to regularly in his dreams by angels known in the Bible, has reported dreams in which those angels are fully behind my I telling it like it was. 

    This morning, my friend reported a dream he had last night, in which I was asking angels to comment on what I'm writing here, and they were demurring. Then, Archangel Michael told my friend to tell Sloan not to use Vaseline.

    Gloria Steinem once wrote a book called, THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, BUT FIRST IT WILL PISS YOU OFF.

    As I look back over the first two chapters, all of it happened. I seek no reward, such as book sales, royalties, speaker engagements. 

    I imagine any reward will be cyber attacks and perhaps something more solid, like exploding anti-aircraft shells my father's B-29 somehow weathered during bombing runs over Japanese cities in World War II.

.................

    When I moved out of my third wife Deborah's home in June 1998, I started dreaming and the horrible 16-months black night of the soul began to lift.

    I went daily to the Downtown Birmingham YMCA, to take steam baths, to help flush out of me the chemical buildup of the lovely pills the well meaning psychiatrist had gotten me hooked on, to treat what he viewed as my psychosis and major depression. Three times I had tried to wean cold turkey from the pills, and each time I went into a horrible withdrawal, which convinced me the pills were addictive, like heroin, although the psychiatrist said that was not possible. 

    When I realized the black night was lifting, I tried a different weaning schedule, which was: for a week, I took 3/4 daily dose of the two prescriptions; and for another week, I took a 1/2 daily dose. Then, I went to see the psychiatrist for what I figured was the last time, and to thank and tell him goodbye. He had been my constant ally. I had really depended on seeing him once a week, to help me keep hanging there. 

    He had told me that he was a devout Methodist and he believed in spiritual warfare. However, believing is one thing, living in it, and knowing what it is, is something else altogether. I had lived spiritual warfare for a good while before the black night came, and I was living it again after the black night started lifting. 

    What the black night itself was, I can only guess was something I caused, or my soul needed to experience, and it was implemented from the spirit realms, of which psychiatry is somewhat unacquainted, to put it in a kind light. 

    Anyway, during what would turn out to be our last visit, I asked the psychiatrist for a weaning schedule, and he suggested the same exact weaning schedule I already had chosen. I took that as a sign from Above that I was on the right track, and to take 1/4th of a daily dose of the two prescriptions for a week, and then stop taking the pills. 

    Yet, it would take many months of steam baths, drinking spring water, eating a special diet of no fried foods and no alcohol, and drinking fresh-squeezed leafy green, carrot and beet vegetable juices, for all the pills' chemical residues to leave my body cells. I even had a dream about a rough patch of chemical detoxing headed my way. 

    Parallel, angels were doing things in me day and night, to bring me back to the land of the living, so to speak, and to fix broken things in me, and to heal me of stuff I had no clue even was broken or had happened to me in the past, and to flush the psychic toxins of all of that out of me through my eliminating organs. In all, that took about a year, and it was all I could do to hang with it.

    My New Age friend, who had dreamed of my half-Anglo-African half brother Travis, suddenly had what commonly is called audio spirit hearing. He told me two or three times a day on the telephone what he was hearing from angels about him and me. And about what angels were doing inside of me, some of which was terrifying beyond human imagination. I doubt I would have survived it psychically, or otherwise, if my friend was not on the phone talking me through it.

    He said he was told by angels that my mother had molested me many times in my crib. The angels then took me through each infraction, as part of their healing me. It took about three weeks, two terrifying beyond human imagination sessions a day. 

    So, in the midst and grip of all of that, I was sweating in the YMCA steam room one morning, when another naked fellow about a generation older started up a conversation. When I got around to telling him my name, he asked if my father was the Sloan Bashinsky in a B-29 squadron on Guam during World War II?

    I said, yes. 

    The fellow said he was there, too. And, my father kept getting his B-29 lost during flights to Japan, and he had to drop his bombs into the ocean on the way back to Guam, because it was too dangerous to land with all those live bombs aboard. 

    I was lost for words.

    The fellow said, nobody wanted my father on their B-29, and he kept getting moved from one aircraft to another. 

    I was lost for words.

    My mother had told me when I was a boy, that when my father's B-29 was returning from Japan to Guam one night, a propeller had flown off one of the right wing's engines and had soared spinning just over the fuselage (body) of the airplane and then had plunged spinning down toward the Pacific Ocean. If the spinning propeller had struck the fuselage, the plane would have plunged into the sea and all aboard probably would have died.

    My father never talked with me about his service in World War II, but, one night, he was at Dianne's and my home for dinner, and several of our friends were there, and the guys somehow got my father talking about his experiences on the B-29. My friends were fascinated, and I was wondering why he had talked with them about it, but not with me? Perhaps he'd had enough to drink, to loosen him up? Perhaps something in him knew I needed to hear something about what he had experienced?

    My mother had told me that it had really bothered my father that he was killing people he did not know, from a distance, by dropping bombs on them.

    Maybe a year after hearing what the man in the YMCA said about my father and his B-29, I took up with a woman, who was clearly arranged by angels to meet me. The angels took her through a searing, lightning-fast healing that blew her and me away. She emerged as an entirely different person, who was hearing from angels when she was awake and in her dreams.

    When I told her what the fellow had told me at the YMCA, she said she was hearing that my father's soul did not like killing people, and that's why he kept getting his B-29s lost over the Pacific.

    From time to time after the black night lifted, I wrote my father a letter I didn't expect to be answered. Often my letters didn't have a return address, because I was not in America, or I was homeless. 

    In one letter, I told my father, the reason he kept getting his B-29 lost during World War II, was because his soul didn't like killing people. I felt he needed to hear that from someone, before he died and took his shame for that with him into the afterlife.

    Now, I left out something about my father and the psychiatrist and my wife during the black night.

    My psychiatrist's father was a psychiatrist, who had worked at the famous Menninger (psychiatric) Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. My psychiatrist had grown up at Menninger. After medical school and his psychiatric residence, he had run Menninger's free clinic for people with little or no money.

    I think my psychiatrist knew very well that I was not getting better, and that I would not get better because of his efforts, and perhaps that is why he suggested during one of our sessions that I should go to the Menninger Clinic. He said it was a great place, I would really like it!

    I shared that with my wife, and she told my father about it. He said he would pay for it, if it would help me. 

    I shared that with my psychiatrist during our next session. He now was very excited for me to go to Menninger. I asked him, what would Menninger do that he had not already tried? 

    After taking a short course in electro-convulsive therapy, which used to be called electro-shock therapy, he had suggested I let him do it on me. I had replied, I was not going to let me be his first experiment with electro-shock.

    I was not stupid. I still could think. But half my brain, the right side, seemed to have gone away. That's the feminine side, the dream-making side, the creative side, of the brain. The side that connects a person to angels and to God, or to whatever started everything.

    The psychiatrist was not able to tell me what Menninger would do that he could not do. Yet, he kept saying I needed to go there, and my wife was all for it. Can't say I blamed her. I was a mess and a huge load. Can't say I blamed my father. I was pretty sure his second wife, Joann, would like to see me gone.

    My New Age friend wasn't getting many messages from above about Menninger, because he was not yet captured by angels. 

    However, my friend, who had been in top management at Golden Flake, had been harassed by angels since around 1990, and he'd had many dreams about me, and we'd had many talks about all of that.

    I told him about the Menninger thing. He asked what I was going to do? I said it was pompano season on the Gulf Coast. Nos were running close to shore. I could sight fish them off a public pier. I wanted to drive down there and stay in a motel where my Uncle Leo and I had stayed when he took me fishing for speckled trout in Phillips Inlet. And, I wanted to think about Menninger.

    I didn't have fishing tackle any more. My friend was an expert bass fisherman, and he had lots of bait-casting and spinning rods and reels. He loaned me what I needed. I would buy  pompano jigs when I got to the beach.

    Leaving Birmingham on US 31 South, I stopped by an outdoors store to decide if I was going to buy a shotgun to off myself after I got to the beach. I stood a while, looking at shotguns on racks attached to the wall, and at boxes of shotgun shells under the glass counter. I walked back to my car and drove south.

    I caught some pompano off the public pier, but nothing else happened to cause me to feel better. 

    When I returned to Birmingham, I returned my friend's fishing tackle. He said he'd had a dream.

    Grab your best hold.

    In the dream, he and I went to the Menninger Clinic. The front of it was beautiful. The reception area inside was beautiful. The doctors and staff were wonderful. While I was talking with them, my friend snuck through a door and explored the interior. He came back out and said to me, "Sloan, there's nothing back there but dungeons and padded cells. If you come here, you will never leave."

    I shared that with an older woman friend, who had been a Christian intercessor all her life. She said she was hearing, Menninger would keep me until my father quit paying for it. Then, I would be put in the Kansas state mental hospital, where I would live out my days.

    My wife Deborah's mother was visiting. I told them about my friend's dream. They could not take it in.

    When I saw the psychiatrist, I told him about my friend's dream. He could not take it in. I wanted to ask him, "Do you believe in God yet, Doctor?" But what I said was, I was not going to Menninger.

    I began the pill weaning schedule.

    In all fairness to Menninger Clinic, I have never been inside it, and I doubt all that's behind the front entrance is padded cells and dungeons. Angels made that dream my friend had, to tell me God had something in mind for me other than Menninger.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com