For 7 years straight, I have been commemorating the day I survived drowning.
It was an accident, in some strange and, in my memory, fuzzy circumstances, late at night on the coast of Lima. The sea was particularly dangerous those days, with El Niño raging across South America’s coast. A short cliff caved in, some strong waves made me lose balance and a current took me into the night, away from the shore. I managed to get away from it, only after I let go of my clothes, which were dragging me down. It was only a few minutes, I guess, but it shook me deeply.
I wasn’t well those days. I was euphoric, happily unbalanced already. I hadn’t slept a complete night’s sleep in more than a month, trying to prove to my family that I could drop out, search for my path in life on my own means. Happily unbalanced is the right way to put it, because I had begun to collect some initial wins that gave me reason. At the cost of my stability, it seemed.
But I was just trying to get some night breeze. I wasn’t counting on the sea.
What followed was the refusal for hours of police’s help. They just helped me once other people intervened, who had seen me get dragged into the sea. But after a few questions and giving me something to wear and warm myself (Lima’s sea is very cold), they just let me in the street. With no money, no cellphone, not anything.
My memories afterwards are not logical.
After 18 hours of not giving signals to anyone who knew me, my family got news from me from another’s district police department. Medical analysis of all sorts later revealed I was going through a short psychotic episode.
It lasted a few days.
And then it took me weeks to finally come to my senses. Or most of them, as I was heavily drugged, by my medic’s recommendation.
They thought maybe someone had tried to drug me to rob me, or kidnap me. I was in a district where the police were known to collaborate with some criminals, so that was never discarded. Or it could be a side effect of a traumatic experience.
Truth is, I had begun to feel uneasy weeks ago. While not sleeping and spending the night thinking and reading, I had started to have some strange ideas. I started to question what I believed in, not only what were the rules of my world, but also what could be possible to do, build or create.
And I had very strange dreams. Dreams that felt like memories. Some distant, some from someone else who felt like me in another place, some from times ahead.
But I was ok with all of these. They felt natural, not something weird. Confusing, yes, but only at first.
I didn’t discuss this openly with my medic. His diagnosis was that it was an episode, just that, and because I didn’t show any physical or mental anomalies for years after, I eventually got off my treatment.
And I never experienced something as strong as those days again. But those ideas and dreams became something else. Sometimes I knew things I hadn’t studied or read. I just knew them, somehow. As a certainty, or memory somewhere in my mind. These could be facts about stuff, things that helped me at my job, or things about other people.
Some of my dreams started coming true, not in a figurative sense, but actually happening like I had dreamt. And, as weird as it may sound, this is the one thing that is most normal about the whole situation. My dad has the same thing, actually. He sometimes shares or warns my mother about stuff that happens later that day or week. It’s something we have come to accept, so I do the same when it happens to me.
A few months later, as I tried to make sense of what I had seen or felt, I stumbled upon the making of a documentary. It was a blog where a photographer and filmmaker who had been studying tribal communities described his process of researching how doctors and specialists compared what the western world called psychosis to what the native communities of all around the world identified as the beginning of the shaman’s path.
Phil Borges’ Crazywise connected dots that I was refusing to connect, for the reasons education and modern medicine had put on my head. I was accepting my dad’s and apparently my own gifts but only partially, not wanting to look closer. But after stumbling upon the case of Adam, one of the documentary’s subjects of focus, I came to peace with what I felt was true to me too.
I needed to learn how to become a shaman.
