After the nirvana-like experience of laughing in the summer of 1977, as related elsewhere in this site, I experienced:-

• a painful illusion after entering a Lutheran church in which I was pinned down
• pursuit by a few Danes. At first passively but then much more deliberately stalked by a veggie type food shop owner called Sven, a hippie who fancied himself to be some kind of Lennon/Casanova/Jim Morrison type called Charlie, A girlie hippie from Christiania called Joanna Øbel, a veggie family head called Thy, an amateur drummer called Sorn and the son of the then Prime Minister called Leonard Jørgensen. (Thy, Joanna and Leonard worked with me at the Titan youth hotel that summer). Somehow, from what Sven said in advance of the festival “Just for a Joke Nick”, they knew what was to happen and bizarrely, knew I would come with them to the festival even though I was feeling a little alienated from everybody after the pinning down
• a reaction by my non-blood relative uncle and his friends, when I returned to England from Denmark, (due to shock at the behaviour of Danes), to my revelation to him that I knew what his present was before he opened it, that seemed to be an attempt to act as though they were dismissive but could not hide a kind of slavering like wolves round dead prey
• pursuit in the Royal Exchange theatre Manchester by a former fellow chorister and school friend Michael Birch followed nine or so months later by his appearance outside my bed-sit in Whalley Range, Manchester.

The night Michael appeared outside the bed-sit he pointed with his finger when he saw me look at him from the first storey window. I had been uncomfortable with furniture arrangements in the room, perhaps for the reason some people call in Feng Shui experts. That night however I found myself in more uncomfortable illusions (I have been in hundreds more since but have never experienced such a change in my daily life which was to follow:

• The first illusion had me being held by the neck, as a wrestler grips an opponent in a wrestling ring under his arm, by someone rather Arabic in appearance. We were at the top of the stairs up from just outside my bed-sit. As I gazed down a sort of blind soul stumbled up the first few stairs towards us but the illusion stopped shortly after this.
• Next my own soul was dragged up the stair by an unknown force to the same position as the blind one I had previously seen, but preceeded by Joanna Øbel who went to the top of the stairs straight ahead and gazed out like someone being shown the future and Charlie, the hippy who fancied himself, who turned toward the wall just ahead of me and extracted a small black disc which he passed behind himself. It was as though I was being tempted or tricked into reaching out for the mark, whatever it was, because from where Charlie had extracted it seemed like where any dream consciousness I had would have been since I had oriented my bed so that my feet were in the opposite direction to the staircase but my body to the left of the stairs as I climbed them.

A matter of days after I ordered a Pizza in a restaurant on Deansgate, Manchester. I was thinking rather absurdly about what i would like to do now, since I was completely disoriented after about 15 months of strange dreams and illusions and weird occurrences in the material world of the day. Maybe a book about racial liberation without religious issues I thought. How would that start? As the Pizza I had ordered was placed in front of me, piping hot, I thought how about “The blacks began to reject their mothers ...........”. Looking back that seems a really bad start to a novel. What I was trying to do was combine my belief that my own liberation had come from staying away from church and that perhaps many blacks were being taken to gospel churches in good faith by their mums, which might be subtly used to get them to accept their lowly status in life. I would prefer them brought up to understand Darwin and be free to make religious choices of their own later in life. As I had these thoughts, I felt weight coming off my head but a desire to attack my self pursued that later. (Jesus says ‘he that denies me will hurt himself’ so presumably whatever God was at the time was taking advantage over the months after that).Over about the next year a draining of my head and the ability to focus or concentrate on things other than my situation grew. My brain kept repeating, “the blacks” and over time other issues went round and round in my head, the numbers of machines in the cotton factory I worked in became a focus simply to relive the boredom. The world around Manchester I bicycled, bussed or walked through seemed to become alive, almost like a radio receiving and transmitting to and from me, and I found I had thoughts and said things simply to jam out other thoughts, often not particularly what I would have wanted to think or do but I was quite resigned at that time to being in for a long struggle with whatever had been unleashed against me by the Danes and others.

I led a pretty austere life except for once a week having a cooked meal in a restaurant and once a week going to the cinema. I had stopped smoking pot, gone vegetarian, stopped smoking cigarettes, stopped drinking alcohol, (something I have done on and off a number of times since)  and stopped masturbating. I could do little else due to lack of money and an inability to believe I could communicate anything to others, except for my needs, like ordering food in a shop etc. nothing made sense.

After about nine or ten months of this draining and casting into illusions and with some people still insisting on appearing in front of me by surprise to indicate to me presumably that I could not hide from them, I bought copies of the New and Old Testament, The Mormon tablets (Book of Moroni) and the Koran. By this time the draining had been such that I could not have orgasms, news seemed boring and I was generally feeling rather less than healthy. Odd bits of those books, that I had not taken notice of before, seemed to fit with my situation too:-

• that Elijah Mohammed had preached with a cat under his arm seemed to fit neatly with the first illusion above where I was held in an armlock. The uncle that had reacted to me strangely when I indicated the future of his “present opening” had a book for cat lovers such as himself called “How to live with a calculating cat” So perhaps Elijah had figured I am a bit of a calculating cat.
• the revelation of St John the Divine talks about “the only ones who could trade are those who bore his mark” So perhaps hippie Prince of this earth Charlie had decided that he could prevent me from doing anything but working for others, (even as a slave perhaps), by taking that black mark

This is perhaps why I have wondered if there is some arrangement between Danish wizards and their church and God via perhaps Mohammed, to repress human reason and Buddhism until a new long term cultural zeitgeist has been established which rejects everything except monotheism.

I can only give a little taste here of all the things which happen after the world of the mind is opened but I hope somewhere in the future it will help someone not to panic etc.

Just over a year after the draining started and after buying the books, I began to suffer what I expect is common with people newly interested in religious things, a desire to claim I had an insight, ( the expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” comes to mind). I even thought I could start talking to people again about non-trivia. I went to a pub and met what I thought was an old English hippie acquaintance (again called Charlie and again a huge egotist where criticising others is concerned, like the Danish Charlie and also with long dark hair and glasses - they could be brothers or miror images from a parallel universe). It was to transpire that he appeared to be mixed up with some women who though of him probably much as Charles Manson’s coven thought of him and by the New Year of 1980 they had persuaded a young black man to attack me with a tankard in that Whalley Range pub. I suppose I could have died in the attack but at least one of Charlie’s coven, if that is what it was, called Vivienne said to me a few days after the attack “Oh the Blacks!” in a dismissive fashion with her fingers as though a magistrate dismissing a criminals appeal for clemency.

This surprised me since it seemed to indicate that, just like the Danes at the Rebecca ø Fest, she knew my thoughts, or at least what they had been focussed on by some force or other, perhaps the extracting of the black mark from behind my head illusion, for the past year or so since the Pizza restaurant. Further, that her and her friends had taken my rather amateurish intent, to try to liberate in an intellectual sense, black people as an intent to get at them or perhaps encourage racism. Perhaps though they just like, as so many seem to, to have victims so that their own lack of achievement seems to be better. One cannot help wondering whether they attacked me in the light of knowledge or ignorance. Did they know my intent and did not like the idea that eventually quite a few blacks would work in society and be respected equals, whereas they preferred drug fueled black culture. Did they, alternatively, believe erroneously, that I was some kind of magician trying to stir trouble in their community. Perhaps lastly they could have been duped by or colluded with, chronologically the US Hell’s Angels, Danish hippies or my uncle and his friends whose successive efforts had led me to that state.

Later, in March 1980, I went to live with my auntie in Newcastle to have a go at taking my A level exams again as a precursor to going to university.