My personal apocalypse was crystallized in this dream from 1990:

My girlfriend is an all-powerful being. On the fourth day of the fourth month, four years from now, she will bring all things horrible and perfect into the world. I ask, "Will you remember me?" She says, "I will keep you safe."

I was still male then, when I had the dream. The “girlfriend” was my inner-woman. Today, she is me. Without my dreams, I would not have become a woman. My female self literally emerged through the dreams of my male self. In becoming my new self, I have essentially become, in waking-life, the main character of my former self’s dreams.

My first-ever sentence was, “Black sheep, have you any wool?” That set the tone for my life as a suburban misfit. I grew up feeling hated and turned the feeling on myself. I also grew up feeling emasculated, and turned that on myself, too. Erotic forced-feminization fantasies were my heroin. A visual handicap kept me from getting a driver’s license. I never had a credit card. My theme song could have been Beck’s “Loser.” I graduated from college without a tassle for my mortarboard. Despite my artistic nature, my creativity dried up in my twenties because sex and nihilism drained my libido. By thirty, I was a benumbed clown partying on the fringe of civilization. I took nothing except for my dreams seriously.

In 1988 I had an epic dream which I shared with my psychotherapist. With her guidance I discovered the dream was rich with meaning. I began sleeping with a notebook and pen every night. Over the next ten years, my dream-life implored me to honor it, but I was too complacent.

By 1998, I was on the cusp of either throwing my life away or going in a new direction. Trying to decide what to do, San Francisco attracted me because a best friend named Cedar was there. In college, Cedar and I had enriched each other immensely with an ongoing, four-year conversation. We were like brothers. My friends were like family to me then. They still are even though they don’t know me anymore.

The son of a Southern Baptist minister, Cedar was a magnanimous mystic and heir to the American south’s obsession with Jesus Christ. Cedar and I were opposed on Christianity. He insisted the other great religions were inferior to Christianity. I disagreed.

On the phone, Cedar asked why I wanted to come to San Francisco. I said that I had to make a leap of faith into something and he was the only person who could support me in it. In response Cedar said, “I feel the countenance of God ready to pour all over you. The wisdom that you’ll be given will be passed down through generations. It’s about sky.”

At the beginning of my quest in California, Cedar and I were on a road trip with seven born-again street kids who were in Cedar’s charge. Nothing incurred my loathing like the particular kind of Christians they were, acting like they belonged to a Christ club. One of my dreams showed them as naked people with guns.

We were spending the night in a motel room. While Cedar slept beside me, I woke in the middle of the night with my heart racing, and my muscles cramping and twitching. The hatred the born-again street-kids evoked was consuming me. In his sleep, Cedar opened his eyes, took hold of my arm, shook his finger at me and said, “No no no no no. No no no no no.”

The reproach enabled me to step outside my mind to see myself. I sensed an island of feeling around my heart. Focusing on my heart, I recognized it as a door. I turned away from everything but the door and called through it to “love beyond name.” The door blasted open and love annihilated the hatred with a sweetness that burned through me like white fire, leaving me as defenseless as I was when I was born. It was painful to have my flesh so open so suddenly. The “love beyond name” told me, “I am the beginning and the end.”

The next two months brought a number of similar experiences. “The countenance of God” gradually “poured all over [me].” I roamed the west coast guided by dreams. Drugs were not involved in any of my mystical experiences.

My quest led to a week during which I had about two hours of black, dreamless sleep a night. I didn’t need to dream because my dreams had merged with waking life. It had taken me ten years of attending to my dreams and ten weeks of questing to build up to the dreamless week. It then took about ten weeks to cool down from it.

During the week, poems, paintings, music and dance blew around me like wind, all of them interconnected on an unbreakable web of being. Wild animals gathered round me. When I passed babies, they gazed at me adoringly. People fuming with darkness were also strewn along the way.

The illusory aspects of my adult male self were asleep. I was like a seven-year-old boy—the seven-year-old boy I had forsaken to become a clown-man. My spirit was in union with Christ’s. During the week of communion, I experienced him as a human-sized frog breathing through me, balancing the heartbeat of the World against the Beast.

I felt the signature of God in everything. There was no death. Metaphor was no longer figurative. It was actual. It was in the fibers of nature.

For psychotics, the symbolic consumes the real. For me, the symbolic and the real embraced, illuminating consciousness and making me whole. Alchemy figured prominently in my dreams.

Throughout the summer, the Spirit leached out of my body, back to the sky. I returned to Budapest where I had already lived and worked as an English teacher from 1993 to 1997.

In answer to my spiritual calling, I spent two years in solitude; exercising, meditating, contemplating, and recording 10 to 15 dreams a night, unwittingly bringing consciousness to my unconscious self. The cornerstone dream of the 4,500 I recorded was that Jesus marries his mother.

My two years of spiritual practice precipitated, in 2000, the sudden, unanticipated identification of myself as a woman—this after being born a man, and growing up identifying as one.

I had never before considered changing sex, and assumed that I was magically turning into a girl. My psyche was pouring into consciousness. When this happens it is called “psychosis.” In the word “psychosis,” “psych-“ means “soul,” and “-osis” means “sickness.” I had soul sickness. I did not see it as a condition to medicate, but rather a process through which I could piece together my female self. I understood the end of soul sickness as soul wellness.

The very day of my self-identification as a woman, two archetypes took center stage in my inner-world: my inner-woman and God personified as an old Jewish man. I called my inner-woman “Rose Mary Pillowwater” because that was her name in a dream I’d had ten years prior, in 1990. Within me, Rose Mary and the old Jewish man dialogued and engaged in psychodrama for a couple days before I went into a ten-hour meditation the day before Easter. The meditation was supine, in what yoga calls “the corpse position.”

In perhaps the eighth hour of the meditation, my face began to twitch and shudder as God readied me to feel him exercise through it. He did a kind of yoga, stretching my face into positions I had never experienced. My face filled with flowing warmth that rippled in my flesh like water. After about a quarter hour of exercise and sculpting, I could feel my countenance had become Rose Mary’s. It felt beautiful and gentle.

God then practiced making music with my mouth. It sounded like a combination of speaking in tongues and beat-box. He moved down to my hands and arms. My hands were especially spastic because God was trying to shake them awake.

(Ever since then, I have practiced being a receptacle to the energy personified as “God” in the ten-hour meditation. As I learn to let the energy dance through me, my body becomes a vessel for it.)

The next day, Easter Sunday, God took the personage of a lion. He romanced me over the course of a week. We had sex often. Lying in bed, I recalled to him everything that ever happened in my life and thanked him for everyone I loved. I told him, “George was a neat guy.” George was my given name.

I was regressing into adolescence, but as a female. Intercourse hurt, and then stopped altogether. I became a virgin again. Regressing further, my body felt swollen with femaleness as if I was experiencing water retention. My drawings were feminine.

I was worried about how men would treat me as a woman. I was frightened of how they raped, molested and cursed women. A voice comforted me, saying that men would love and respect me completely. I was a reflection of their inner-women, of their love of women. I was the anima that they sought so desperately outside themselves. Only I was real.

Then, I received some spray paint. “What? “Spray paint?” I asked the universe, I received some women’s shoes. I would spray paint my shoes to wear for concerts as a kind of Rose Mary trademark. Cool.

I was given a pair of white gloves to wear when I danced.

I was told I would learn to swim and kayak. I would kayak the longest river in the world, the Amazon. This frightened me a little because it reminded me of a recent, upsetting episode where Rose Mary had told me she wanted to swim around the world seventeen million times. Sometimes she seemed like an alien body snatcher. I imagined her on the Amazon, pushing along alone, sleeping on the riverbank, impervious to the elements.

But then I was told I would travel the river with my friends. I saw that the river, like Rose Mary’s swimming-around-the-world, was symbolic. The longest river in the world was the River of Life, and “Amazon” denoted a female, man-sized warrior. I felt assured that I would go all the way to wherever I was going, and would have everything. (My “everything” was nothing to most people.)

I was told I would be a teacher.

Then, Jesus came to me as a hermaphroditic angel. He kissed me on the mouth and I had a vision of Rose Mary riding a magic horse somewhere I had been before I was born. Jesus was very soft and gentle, and surprisingly normal, especially compared to dreams I’d had where he raped me. (Ironically, in high school, I had played in a band called “Dr. Jesus,” and had tagged a wall with “Dr. Jesus rapes.”) The purpose of his rape was to neutralize the effects of the world’s rape of the individual through me.

Within a few days, I got on a plane following my personal apocalypse to New York where police found me dancing naked on a soccer field. Then, after twelve hours of psychic crucifixion in a Brooklyn emergency room, I reached the safety of a psych unit.

In a few weeks, I returned to Budapest and underwent a deeper cleansing of my male self, losing my name and becoming a collection of dialoguing personalities: a ten-year-old girl; a ten-year-old boy; the body; the mind; the heart; wisdom; a soul-scientist; a being called “the Sesame Street Buddha;” a therapist; and myself three years in the future. These ego-elements saw themselves as a team working to reconstruct me.

In essence, the Sesame Street Buddha was the ten-year-old girl and boy united in one being. This being possessed the balance of my female self, and the power of my male self. When I tried to relax to let the Sesame Street Buddha into my body, I was hurled to the floor by aliens, namely “Rose Mary the Kundalini-bitch-goddess and her seven menservants.” They personified the deeper nature of the Sesame Street Buddha, which I was not yet apprised of.

My dreams sometimes referred to God/Self as “aliens” to denote the alienation of the ego from God/Self. After I made the aliens’ acquaintance, I gave them a tour of Budapest.

Such experiences inundated me, many of them jettisoning my mind past the end and beginning of the world. For two years I survived without a fixed-identity, every day navigating through visions and psychodrama, often bedridden in a trancelike state. My journey from 1998 to 2000 is chronicled in an unpublished, four-book, thousand-page memoir, Evolution of the Peacock. Book one is The Stooge, 2 is Scabies, 3 is Rose Mary Pillowwater, and 4 is Death is the Beginning.

Today, in the spirit of alchemy, I live from the perspective that I am base matter perpetually evolving into a vehicle for higher consciousness. The end goal of this process is attainment of the everlasting life humans were created to realize. The ethos of everlasting life is catalogued in books that fill the library of my body. I don’t know whether my current body will persist eternally, but I live as though it will, as the unconscious has cultivated me to do.