Sergey Vassiliev - The realm of tormenting dreams

It was absolutely obvious now that in the nearest future I would get fabulously rich, driven by such energy, also possessing this power raging within me, to acquire the ability to heal people, through which, perhaps, I’ll be able to become known to the whole world. But how else one can think of the path of a person with such an inner world, when he is organized, purposeful, and is about to change under the onslaught of force, which did not allow him sitting still, into a superman invented by Nietzsche, for example? Certainly, this seemed inevitable and, at least, for me personally. Once, when I was a child, my mother wanted her son to become just such kind of person or almost such, I fully justified her desire, began to transform myself into a god, again entering that former channel of unrestrained striving for a new life. The main thing for me was now the advancement to the development of abilities that were already to appear inside me. And so, planning their growth, I began to follow the path, which seemed to me the acquisition of divine skills and traits of character.

Now I ranked healing first as a method of rapid enrichment and glory. I though: “Okay, I’ll learn jurisprudence on a person basis. For individual lectures, I was going to greatly assist the academic community, for example, healing them or their children, adjusting their fates with my superhuman intervention, and in general – it would be a honor for them to have such a student, so I will, as a result of such private learning, develop in divers directions, so the desire to continue learning would also come.” And now, after such a trick performed by the professor in family law, I just wanted no attitude to myself except for the above, so I immediately stopped to pass thee exams. As time passed, my energy did not leave me for long periods, and I decided to go to the village in which the events of my first attack developed.

In the village I again began to tell everyone that I was a god, but less often, more cautiously than last time, but the people around were already ready for this, nevertheless it was possible to fool them in the same manner, namely close acquaintances and friends. Knowing for a long time my behavior, many still began to see in me an erratic, impudent dreamer, and were only angry in response to my dogmas with the emerging clarity on the matter in their inquiring minds. I also suspected some kind of dirty trick, the community kept puzzling me with its protest against my superpowers. And the other side of my self-esteem began to appear, I felt that I was in trouble.

Then I decided to stop all this maniacal whirlwind in myself, and I started a fight, having suffered a lot, but even the fact of my broken tooth did not calmed me down. Still wandering around the village in a misunderstanding of myself and having found a girl who considered me a cool guy, which was the best in my situation, she almost immediately fell in love with me, and that with the permission of my mother; I began to feel that even though she liked me, but I was still in trouble again.

With the new girlfriend, I hurried to the dentist who restored my tooth, and I was pleased to introduce Zemfira, as I called by the nickname that I gave her due her similarity with the famous singer, to my parents, and then realizing that I could not cope with the new girlfriend, I handed her over into the custody of my close friend, already expecting the sad outcome of my psycho attack.

I asked my mother to settle me in somewhere to tranquil my soul already tortured by drunkenness, and most importantly, by the impulses of maniacal ideas. So she did: I was admitted to the central hospital, where I had once been treated from pneumonia. Here I was put on a drip in the ward for patients in an alcoholic delirium. I like a pretty nurse, and staying there seemed to result in calming the nervous system. I gave the girl as a gift the amulet that my mother brought me. My mother reacted enviously, and finally I lost the trust of that pretty girl, which was impossible to return. Another adult woman who nursed me, turned out to be the mother of my classmate’s husband and happily began to restore my strength, saying that many were able to regain here their former condition. Everything that happened to me during the second attack was like a muddy and heavy dream, and my story is therefore as little interconnected as those visions, and nevertheless let me continue…

I paced the wards and actively communicated with those who were treated from pneumonia, inspiring respect, stating that in the nearest future I will find out where our governor spends the municipal money.

But the calm, of course, did not come, and I tortured the nurse a lot, who, I think, had many questions in mind relating to me anyhow, the main of which was the question of my legal capacity, since all my assuring statements about my possible help to her son, the husband of my classmate, who in a jail at that time, more and more resembled nonsense. And then I was dismissed, yet not having calmed down enough. As time passed, I was still excessively energetic and strolled again in the village.

It was necessary to somehow solve this problem, and I independently took, as I now think, a completely wrong decision to come to psychiatrists, and they finally did what decisively broke my whole being, i.e. they were imprisoned me back in the hospital. I regret that I addressed to them, because I was already on the verge of my maniacal rise and could absolutely do without them.

But here in the hospital being, I think, a prison nightmares overtake a man, against which he can no longer stand.

What a man shall undergo in a hospital? Still much filled with the rise of my super-energetic mood; I did not at all succumb to the onslaught of medications and even arranged a crazy concert with dances for all the forced patients in my ward. Forced patients are those who, being threatened by a criminal sentence, but not jailed due to a mental disease. And so I danced enthusiastically, amusing all this rabble, which were totally different from those in our village. And I must admit, I made many friends with many of them, because, again, not everyone considered me as a madman, despite my queer performance at Zemfira’s songs background. But those who realized that I was delirious, and most of them thought so, decided to introduce me to the President, as they called the local maniac Kolya, who considered himself a most real president of the world, who was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital in order to prevent him from his powerful influence on the world, of which he was completely convinced. That is to say that for me his influence turned out to be really strong. Whether Kolya’s erudition, or his secret knowledge and secrets, whether the ability to play chess, learned from Fisher, or the whole combination of those at once, made me sincerely trust this person which was mostly charming. When my parents came to see their son and learn if he was healthy, they heard the cheerful news that President Kolya was now among my close friends. I must say that Kolya was doomed and never left the maniacal state, and all the horror of the constantly raised mood had never left him for a long time since some critical point. “I am recognized by people to be a God,” I told him, and he asserted that the greats of this world were convinced of his genius and worshiped him as a God, and we became very friendly.

Forced patients managed to get stiff drinks, they always drank builder’s tea, constructing homemade boilers, they made from bread a kind of beads they skillfully played with, and taught me to do so. I absolutely did not see the need to tell anyone that I’m a God, so this secret was only confessed to Kolya. For another month and a half, I did not leave the maniacal spin. My imagination started to mess playfully: I turned into a dragon looking for its tail, studying the order of this universe, which consisted here in the change of having meals and cigarettes in a smoking room. Here, nothing was more valuable than a cigarette. It was the only joy for anyone who got used to the tragic rhythm of life in this institution. People here became passionate smokers, and the cigarette could be smoked at once by a large group of comrades, especially those who were completely suppressed and weak, having no such dope because they were insolvent or robbed. But, having gathered their last strengths, came to the smoking room and asked for mercy to finish the cigarette stub, those poor people even did vile tricks, eating feces, as a performance for which they were given a cigarette.