1978 - Psychoanalysis
by Bill Ectric
“You should stop blaming your parents for your quarrel with reality,” said Dr. Carnes, casually. He leaned back nimbly in his chair, hands behind his head, framed diplomas on the paneled wall behind him. I almost thought he was going to prop his feet up on the desk in front of him. My psychiatrist wasn’t much older than me - maybe thirty.
“I’m not blaming my parents,” I said to the shrink. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
“Well, go on, then. You say your mother gave you paregoric?”
I studied the pastel Aztec pattern in the arm of my comfortably stuffed easy chair. Nice texture.
“You know what paregoric is, right?” I asked, still looking down.
“They stopped making paregoric in the late fifties,” Dr. Carnes answered correctly. “It was a medicine made from camphor and alcohol with a small amount of morphine. They gave it to children for cough medicine.”
“Very good,” I said, looking at him. “Well, my mother says she used to rub it on my gums when my teeth were coming in. When I was a baby. I have this memory of lying in my crib in my bedroom. There were these cartoon pictures on my wall. Eight pictures – two on each wall. They were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You know, Happy, Sleepy, Doc…”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the dwarves,” said the shrink, a bit impatiently, I thought. “But you were very young. You actually remember this?”
Ignoring his question, I continued, “So I’m lying there, and I look at the picture of Grumpy, and he seems to be frowning at me. It was scary. His eyebrows moved up and down and he blinked. Then I looked at Happy, and his red grin got wide and crazy and his nose started stretching and bending sideways. His big eyes were crossed and his tongue stuck out! It scared me so I looked away and closed my eyes. Then I could see stars glittering, and a big, bright golden crescent moon. In slow motion, a cow floated up into the black, starry sky and sailed over the moon!”
“Were you traumatized?” said the doctor, stifling a laugh.
“I think so. But I felt so good I didn’t care."
“But, Bill,” the shrink frowned. Relying momentarily on his neck muscles to support his head, he used both hands to brush back his hair in a motion that ended with his hands clasped again behind his head. “You were too young to even know what paregoric was. How…”
“No, listen,” I said. “Years later, my mother found those pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was cleaning out the attic. She said, ‘Do you remember these?’ and I said, ‘Yeah’ and then she told me how, when I was a baby, teething, I would cry and cry, because teething hurts, so she said she rubbed paregoric on my gums. After that, she said, I stopped crying and just looked up at those pictures until I fell asleep.”
“Did you use any other drugs when you were a kid?” asked Dr. Carnes.
“I had bad hay fever.”
“Allergic to pollen?” the shrink clarified unnecessarily.
“Yeah,” I said. “It made my eyes itch I sneezed a lot. I had to take antihistamine for years. Sometimes the antihistamine allowed me to dream these amazing Technicolor dreams if I took it at night.”
“I’ve dreamed in color,” said the shrink. “Some people say we only dream in black and white, but I’ve dreamed in color.”
Whoop-de-doo, I thought. Big deal. I never doubted people dreamed in color.
“Sometimes,” I continued, “When the pollen was extra bad, I had to stay indoors. While other guys were playing baseball, I was inside drawing pictures and writing stories. Our kitchen had a linoleum floor with all kinds of squiggly designs in it, and if I stared at those squiggles I saw faces and other things.”
“People do the same thing looking up at clouds,” said the doctor.
“I’ve seen big shapes in the clouds,” I said. “But there is something more … intimate, when faces emerge from the floor tiles. I also saw them, sometimes, in the towels hanging in the bathroom. In the little threads.”
“Is that why you are so interested in Richard Shaver’s art?” asked Dr. Carnes.
Very astute.
I should explain who Richard Shaver was. Primarily a writer of science fiction, he also created some unusual art. He split rocks open and saw patterns in the grain, then used paint and ink to enhance the images so that other people could see them. He called these "rock books" and said that an ancient civilization had created them.
Shaver was, by all accounts, a strange man. You can read about him on the Internet, but I’ll give you a little background.
A man named Hugo Gernsback created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, in 1926. Amazing Stories is the magazine that Forrest J. Ackerman famously says, “jumped into his hands” when he was a boy and inspired him to become a literary agent and later the editor of Famous Monsters magazine.
Around 1940, Richard Shaver sent a story to the magazine about a race of evil mutants, called Dero, who lived in underground caverns and sometimes captured humans to torture and eat. According to Shaver, aliens from another planet had abandoned these subterranean creatures on Earth, back in ancient times, and centuries of inbreeding underground had made them insane and sadistic. Shaver also claimed that the Dero were using some kind of energy beam to send disturbing voices into his own mind. He called this mental harassment "tamper." The story was all the more remarkable because Richard Shaver claimed that it was entirely true!
It was never clear whether Ray Palmer, the magazine’s editor, believed that Richard Shaver was serious or not, but Amazing Stories continued publishing Shaver stories because it increased their sales and thousands of letters poured in. Some of the letter writers claimed that they, too, heard strange voices in their heads. This annoyed the more serious science fictions fans, who looked upon the "Shaver Mystery" as a ridiculous hoax.
Years later, in an interview, Palmer admitted that Shaver, like me, had spent some time in a mental institution
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[Telegraph]
