Where is the line drawn between delusion and imagination? Where do we differ from reality and delusion? Why do we think that one reality is more real than another? Is it a matter of the collective mind rules the shaping of the universe and what we believe? The grass is green and not red because everyone believes it is so?
There was a quote by someone, a child, that I read a long time ago. "Are we real or just someone else's dreaming?" How do we know that we are not a dream made up by someone else?
Why should the reality I believe in be any less real than the reality you believe in? Why is my imagination any less concrete than your reality? Why can't my imagination be real? Maybe there really are monsters under the bed and we only pretend they aren't because our imagination scares us?
Why can people believe in psychics and past lives? Do they think that that's imaginary as well? With documented evidence?
My name is Blair Jacob Sandburg. I am a Professor at Rainer University, Cascade, Washington. I have been diagnosed with schizophrenia. My life consists of control, routine, and a strength of mind I would not have believed I possessed when I first came to Rainer at age 16.
The biggest regret I have is the fact that what I believed to be real, the life I thought I had lead, was in fact a delusional state of mind. My best friend, my biggest, best achievement never occured.
I've always depended on my mind. Learning was always easy for me, and my interests were wide. I enjoyed the history of archaeology, the discovery of the past, finding the clues and piecing them together to discover what it was, what had happened. I'd always been interested in ancient cultures like the Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans. I studied to the exclusion of everything else. A thirst for knowledge that I could never quench.
My mother moved around throughout my childhood. She was the only family I had ever known. No father, no siblings. Just her and I against the world. I thought it was enough. I thought I didn't need anything else. But when I went out on my own, I found that I did need something else. Someone else.
Of course, I didn't know I was thinking that way. I thought I was on top of everything. Studying, socializing, and then finding Jim. I had been fascinated with Richard Burton's work about Peru, and among everything else I was doing - the teaching, the studying for my graduate thesis, the expeditions, Jim entered my life.
He walked into my office one day, complaining about problems with his senses. I persuaded him to let me study him, test him, work with him. He became my friend, and I became his. He became the father figure/older brother that I had always wanted, and never had. Maybe I should have known something was wrong when we started discussing black panthers and grey wolves. More from my interest in native cultures, both ancient and current. I remember living with the Navajo for a while, learning their ideas along with the Peruvian cultures.
I learned the truth when I stood up in front of a room full of reporters and told them my story and was told there was no Detective Jim Ellison on the Cascade Police Force. That I had never worked for the Cascade Police Force. That no one in the Major Crimes division had ever heard of me. I learned the truth when I was taken from that room to the hospital and sedated. It took me a couple of years before I learned to believe what the doctors told me.
He still comes to my office now and again. Or into the classrooms where I teach. Yes, I teach. I've learned to distinguish reality from delusion, even if I see the delusions still. There are days when I really need him to be real, and want to reach out to him, to the life I am sure I had. But I stop myself. I can't live my life that way. As much as I need him in my life, need/want the delusions to be real, I can't live my life that way. I can only hope he understands.