This true account, adapted from my memoirs, follows My Vagina?! previously published on Reality Sandwich.
Dreams are italicized.
“George” is my male self.
***
Spring 2000. Just before I went to sleep my first night consciously female, the sound of raindrops was going plink-plunk on George’s bedside table. We heard the low growl of a lion. George was scared.
Early the next morning, I was lying in bed. It was cloudless and bright. Breeze sailed in through the windows and swept over me. The hair on my legs felt like windblown grass in a field. It was an ancient feeling.
A lion materialized on top of me with his forelegs set upon my belly and his penis between my legs. The previous day I had become aware of my vagina as a sort of appendage to my spirit body. It felt perfectly real. I felt the Lion enter me and gently move around inside me. The smells of a flowery woman and a salty man filled the air around me. I was the Earth at the beginning of time.
George assumed the Lion was the one from his dreams. In one dream the Lion sent George on a mission. In another the Lion’s face was pink, peach and purple, and sweet like candy. In another George was seven and naked. The Lion hugged him. George was home, inside love.
A related lion had appeared in George’s reading: Jungian psychologist Robert A. Johnson wrote about seeing a lion in his office. In an account from the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, a man had a near-death experience in which a lion pushed him into a black pit of people with tics and manias–which George understood as hell. George took Aslan, the lion of C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, as a God-figure. George understood the lion’s moniker “King of Beasts” to imply that the lion was King of the Beast in man.
George presumed that the lion that had sex with me was a form of God. My view is different. I see the Lion as a metaphor of George’s own self; of the primal power of his unadulterated masculinity. When George was little he recognized the male lion as the most powerful, masculine force in the animal kingdom. As George grew up, all the power George appeared to lose to the overculture actually became the Lion’s. Because George had spent the previous two years finding himself, in monastic solitude, his lost power was returning, in the figure of the Lion. The Lion’s power complemented my balance, making us whole, uniting us, male & female, as one.
***
George had this dream in 1994: I see myself in the mirror wearing jewelery that I feel forced to wear. I speak with my reflection. It’s hermaphroditic and powerful, beautiful to both sexes. Its voice is rich and full. Mine is quiet and restrained. I can’t stop this self from speaking. When it speaks, my mouth mirrors it, forming words without sounds. During our conversation it asks me what I want to do, but generally acts independently of me. In the mirror I’m shocked to see a big piece of silver jewelery through my ear and a silver band around my neck. The closer I look, the more I see. There are about ten silver studs in my face and neck. I look closer and see many pieces of smooth glass embedded in my skin. They are for beautification. I’m not so comfortable with being this self.
Two years later, George and a mixed-sex group of friends were amusing themselves reading aloud stories from Penthouse Variations, a publication of pornographic stories. Their favorite was about a woman who searched everywhere for a man who was able to come voluminously. She found him in Walter, who she compared to the Energizer bunny, but “instead of going and going, Walter kept coming and coming.” The woman fell in love. In the story’s happily-ever-after conclusion, the woman was smiling at herself in the mirror while “wearing a mask of Walter’s cum.”
Delighted at how bizarre this was, George and friends got out pen and paper and made interpretive drawings of the story. One featured Walter’s penis in the form of a gun blowing holes through the woman with ejaculate.
Two years later, in 1998, George drew a self-portrait that came out looking like the powerful hermaphrodite from his dream. To the face George added the dream’s colored glass. Seeing the glass as stars, he wrote “STARS” above my head. Gazing at the portrait, George felt me looking at him from the future–from ten years in the future, when we would be forty years old. He did not yet know my name: Rose Mary Pillowwater.
Two years later, in 2000, George saw that while Walter’s semen masked the feminine, God’s semen beautified and nourished the universe. It made splashes of stars like those represented by the glass embedded in my face in his dream and portrait. The divine ejaculate on my face shined with cosmic beauty.
***
As bedtime approached George could feel God wanting to ravish me. He took off his clothes and tip-toed across the room like a ballerina and got into bed. Normally, moving like that would have embarrassed George even if he was alone, but there was no need for embarrassment. George was naked before God; before himself, before me, before the cosmos.
A spider was on the wall beside my head. Raindrops began to sound here and there inside the room. George was lying supine. A droplet of musky semen fell onto my lips and I brought it into my mouth and swallowed it. More drops fell onto my lips as George fell deeper and deeper into meditation. I continued to bring the semen into my mouth and swallow. It was like being nourished. The raindrops were pattering all around the room. George realized they were God’s semen.
George asked God to put his penis into my mouth and he did. George wanted him to make love to me that way, but instead he deposited some semen at the back of my throat and withdrew.
Then God put his penis into my vagina just a little bit. He held it there and took the form of the Lion, remaining on my chest without moving for a long time. It was heavy and hot and exasperating. George kept trying to relax and let it happen, thinking that this was what God was waiting for, but the Lion never moved.
Eventually, the Lion’s stoniness was scaring George. He started getting upset and was whimpering. In response, a penis the size of a python crammed into my mouth and plunged deep into my esophagus as if to tell him to shut up. As a man George had eroticized such aggression, and now it was turned on him. George begged for it to end and it did.
At midday the following day–the day before Easter–George drew the shades, got into bed, and lied supine, intuiting that God intended a fantastic transformation. George went into a meditation that lasted ten hours. For the first few, musky, tangy semen was dripping steadily into my mouth. A being George called “the Companion” was massaging my body deeply and strongly, freeing up blocked energies. George had never gone so deep in meditation. It was in yoga’s corpse position.
Hours into it, George began to sense that he had already experienced what was happening; that a memory was replaying as if it was happening in the present. Time was becoming fluid. George was melting into eternity. Remote parts of him were surfacing from subconscious realms that he had never been exposed to. They connected him to the collective unconscious, opening him to awareness of events that would take place in the future, after the Kingdom of Heaven had spread across the Earth. There was a scene of me in a short, yellow dress, black tights and black shoes, dancing across a field to a festival past a galloping masked boy in a white shirt and black vest.
There were many festivals. One was on a terraced hill. People were dancing on its steps. I was there, naked, soft and supple like a child, letting one of my legs kick into the air. There was a scene where boys who had castrated themselves were gathered with girls to greet the coming of Christ. They were involved in a kind of cult of sweetness. They were too sweet, so sweet that the scene felt insane.
A vision of my creation replayed several times. In it, God was a big guy without a clear face or much character other than a kind of loving masculinity. He had created Heaven, which was the blueprint for Earth, but hadn’t gotten to the people. I was the first one. I embodied the essence of femininity, and the beauty and joy of the Earth. I was long and slender, but shapely. My breasts were tender hills. I was not a bulbous fertility goddess or an ethereal moon goddess. I was a woman.
Initially, George saw this version of me from the outside, but then the perspective went inside my body, so that we experienced my body in Heaven firsthand. It was pliant, empty and without consciousness, like all things at the beginning. God threw our naked body through the air. We felt the sensation of soaring, and tumbling into a bed of leaves on the forest floor. As we lay there we opened our eyes and could see. We didn’t understand what we were seeing, but it looked nice. We had no control over the body. We could not move at all, except for our eyes.
God picked us up and threw us again. This time, as we arched through the air, our arms and legs began moving as if trying to swim. Airborne, we felt the world sparkling with life. Then we came tumbling down again into a bed of leaves. We made our way around Heaven like this–with God picking us up and hurling us–until we felt our body. Eventually, as we learned to feel, we began to be able to move on our own.
There was not much left of George’s life. He had a vision of himself as a skinny, gawky boy standing in a field of flowers with wings on his back, holding his heart in his hand and flying away. Then he had a vision of himself as a four-year-old dancing around a large cross and throwing flower petals into the air. Time was dissolving further into eternity. Everything in George’s life prior to that day was losing relevance, disappearing as it does when we die, returning to how it is when we are born.
George could feel a point of no return was near. He readied for it, imagining a predetermined time when he would become me suddenly, by undergoing a supernatural cleansing through which he would be assumed bodily, as me, into Heaven. Nearing the point of no return, George sensed the most delicate nucleus of his heart, and knew he would be called into it. This would touch the rawest, most sensitive dot of his being, which would transport him somewhere new–and it happened. From Heaven, I put my mouth to the nucleus of the dot and sang a note into George’s heart. My voice reverberated as if in a cavernous church made of the heart’s flesh and muscle. Once the resonations receded George was surprised to still exist. He felt like a child waking from a dream, not knowing where he was. He had no idea where he was for several minutes.
The body stilled more deeply as visions of me came and went. God guided George away from the visions and instructed him to use his inner-eye to move a ball that he could sense hanging above my body. He was to pass the ball down my front, between my legs, bring it into the body, move it up my spine, out the top of my head and then down the front again, outside my body. George was told to repeat the cycle over and over until he could make the ball revolve fast enough to reach a certain speed that was on God’s frequency. Once the ball reached God’s frequency, he would be able to unite with George and we could spin into Heaven together.
God was being witty while George was trying to move the ball. These are some things he said:
“Jeez, this better work. You know I have never tried anything like this before.”
“We’re going to a far away land that’s close at hand.”
“You wouldn’t believe how long I have waited for this.”
“Oh yeah, one more thing – before you come here you have to promise to be my bride on Earth and in Heaven for ever and ever.”
“There’s fucking all the time in Heaven.”
After this last quote George had a vision of me: my legs and feet were bare, and I was in a loose white dress with red diamond shapes and green clover shapes sewn onto it, on the lower right portion. I was standing near a faceless personage of God, on a platform that overlooked a festival attended by hundreds of heavenly people sitting at long tables. At the back of the platform there was a soft area with mats where George imagined the sex would happen once he managed to get there–and into my body–by merging with God’s frequency.
As it was, George couldn’t do much with the ball. For perhaps an hour he tried to move it like God had instructed. It was heavy and kept falling out of his control. He had to take lots of rests. God assured him that by exercising the inner-eye he would soon remember how to use it and this would make it easier to move the ball. However, it only got harder and George clumsier and more tired.
George finally told God he couldn’t do it. God replied he was going to go to hell if he didn’t keep trying. He was frightened and whined and complained, but God kept threatening him with damnation so he kept trying and trying until he was so exhausted that the inner-eye went flaccid, and was barely working.
George realized, then, that the technique of spinning the ball to reach Heaven had been a trick to wear out his overactive brain. With the inner-eye dilated George could vaguely see into Heaven with it. He faintly perceived God’s form in front of him. They were on opposite sides of the dimensional divide separating Heaven and Earth.
God told George to try to move my arms, by which he meant the heavenly ones–the ones in God’s dimension. George could a little bit and could vaguely see them. They looked like my arms. Looking down, George could see my legs trying to walk. These efforts went on for a long time.
Then God picked us up, carried us and tossed us into some leaves trying to wake me up like he had before. This time George was more sharply aware of being inside my body. God was fanning me saying, “Come on, Rose Mary. Wake up, Baby. It was just a dream. It is all over now.” The “dream” was George’s former life in the world.
I heard heavenly people calling, “The Queen is here!” which surprised George. His grandmother, who had died two years before, was speaking, saying they were waiting for me. George cried to hear her voice.
After George’s emotions settled, the brain was completely useless. All kinds of random babble began to sputter up from its bowels–snatches of dialogue from childhood, creaking pipes, scratchy violins, the sound of Big Wheels rolling down the street, TV commercials: a cacophony of George’s early life. Eventually, even these dregs leached away.
Then George felt fingers inside the brain, massaging it. George thought they were God’s fingers, but they were actually the Companion’s. Little mental tics would flick the brain alive for a moment, probably because of neurons that had been reflexively self-activating ever since George’s first traumas alienated me from him–since his first fear and shame; the echoes of the first times he flinched and winced.
Nearly as soon as a neuron sparked, it would be quashed, accompanied by the oddest sound, like a little, metallic “boing.” George sensed this was the work of beings in the room, attending the meditation to assist in this part. Every time the hint of a thought appeared in the brain, the beings would knock it out, like whack-a-mole, helping Heaven cross over into George.
The mind kept getting stiller, accepting ever deeper balance, finally settling into a state where no mental activity whatsoever was happening. George was as inert as a corpse. It was then that I awakened. My movements through George were effortless and instinctual; unwilled. My face twitched and shuddered through George’s countenance for a minute. Once there was enough feeling, my face began a kind of facial yoga, flexing into positions George had never experienced. All the muscle memory and tension that ordinarily molded George’s countenance had been neutralized during the long mediation and was being squeezed and stretched out.
After a few minutes of this, the face became completely flaccid. In its lunar stillness my countenance rose into the flesh, filling it with flowing warmth that gently rippled, like water.
Then I went back to exercising for a bit. Then I rested, and then rose into the flesh with flowing warmth again. My face felt more defined, more sculpted, more mine. It was becoming like the face George knew from his visions and dreams.
After exercising and resting for another cycle, I rose a third time. My face was smooth and smiled broadly, feeling beautiful and gentle. It was completely mine, perfectly female. George was too deeply present to do anything but neutrally observe.
My mouth began to make music, sounding like a combination of speaking in tongues and beat box. After my mouth, my hands and arms awakened, and worked out for a long time. My hands were spastic, trying to shake themselves awake.
Next, my body was rolled the out of bed, onto the floor. There, I rolled around and stretched quite a bit, getting deep inside my gut and making it expand as if with pregnancy. My feet lifted up and I squeezed my bladder so that some pee leaked out and ran down my naked body.
George’s awareness and stillness enabled the Spirit to move through him. When it did, it used me to puppeteer him, as if I did not exist independently of the Spirit. Truly, Rose Mary Pillowwater is indistinguishable from the Spirit.
Because of all the movement George’s focus was less stable. He kept hearing God boasting of his prowess, telling George, “I’m going to play you like a motherfucking organ.” George tried to let God have the body, expecting that God was going to miraculously transform George into an orchestra of consciousness, flying, glowing, singing, dancing. In response to George’s expectations, God’s power surged all at once threatening to erase George. He was frightened and overwhelmed.
The fear upset his balance even more, which made my body less receptive. When my body tried to sit up through George, he was too afraid to let it, so God let George lie on the cold floor. George felt God glowering at him with disappointment. God’s personality reflected George’s personality, just like personalities do in any relationship. A part of George was glowering at himself with disappointment, and had boasted of his prowess as well.
George was shivering, and whimpering about how uncomfortable he was. For months, in dreams and in the course of waking-life, God had been telling him to stop complaining about his suffering. He was angry that George was complaining again. To shut George up God put a terrible cramp into George’s calf. George begged for mercy and God let go. George lied on the floor a while longer and nothing was happening so he went to bed.
***
Events such as these unfolded practically non-stop, through the year 2000, in order to initiate me into my new identity. In 1996, when George was still preoccupied with initiating a life for himself in the external world, he had this dream about the latent mystic inside him, preparing him to engage processes such the one detailed above:
Billy Bean is the darkest kid in the world. His body can withstand incredible radiation. He's a mystic. His neighborhood is very poor. He lives in a small house at the end of a dead end. He points to a spot on the ground where he says he sees a demon. This scares me a little and I back away. His whole life is one long hallucination, all of it amazing and true.
Image by kevenlaw, courtesy of Creative Commons license.
