It began innocently enough. Driving back from dinner on Saturday night at M & B’s, I tried to focus on the music playing on the radio. No chance. By the time I’d emerged from the tunnel and brief bit of highway, I’d already developed a bad case of white knuckled anxiety. Pulling over to the side of the road, I stared straight ahead and calmed myself down towards a deep breath.
When I returned home, I watched a trailer online for a movie that M & B invited me to see with them the following day. I hit the stop button as soon as the first hints of violence appeared onscreen. Thinking that I’d release myself from that train of thought by watching other trailers, I happened upon one with a seemingly innocuous title. The opening scene unfolds at a pond, with a single swan gliding gracefully across the water. Two children, a boy and girl, are out at the end of a dock. When the boy dashes back onto dry land, the girl attempts to follow… but suddenly the ground gives way underneath her and she falls through the warped and weathered wood planks, flailing her arms, screaming for help.
Was there no getting away from (the possibility of) people or things falling everywhere, all the time? 
Is it any wonder that every night since then, my unconscious has brimmed with angst-producing scenarios and fear-inducing images?
The most memorable dream, by far, surfaced a couple of nights ago: Like something out of a George Lucas or James Cameron film, high on speed and special effects, I was driving a car along a road, when it (the road) morphed into a train-track, which then morphed into a roller-coaster track, whereupon I found myself suddenly careening off the rails, into space. Disney meets Star Trek meets Back to the Future.
So finally, yesterday, I bit the bullet and made the call. I booked an appointment with a therapist (MV). Long overdue, I know. More than anything, and even before meeting her, I would like to take a whirl in that SFX orbit myself; by figuring out how to shrink MV into a cellular-sized midget and, with the latest laser advancements, implant her into my brain. Please, M, take a tour of my disturbed cerebellum – and, while you’re in there, pleasepleaseplease, do something about all that stuff (and me), that just won’t stop falling.
Healing Pilgrim 