THAT DAY

I'm taking antibiotics for what appears to be Lyme disease. They give me indigestion, but that's way better than fever and shakes and night sweats.

Spend much of my limited energy transcribing examples of possible extrasensory perception from Louisa Rhine's book Hidden Channels of the Mind for the World Dream Bank: Tin Fish, Nina's Ring, Chandelier, and Boy Scout. Diverse on the surface, but the underlying pattern suggests that ESP may work in mysterious ways, but it behaves just like our other senses--scans for danger and lost stuff, checks up on loved ones. More animal than mystical! Somehow that makes it more plausible to me...

THAT NIGHT

A film actor, a member of Zero Population Growth, is worried humanity is causing a Sixth Extinction, a time as bad as the end of the Dinosaur Age. He takes extinction personally because he witnessed the Holocaust. He grew up in Austria, and even met Hitler when they were both kids.

He tells me "I was one and a half, riding in a donkey cart, when I saw him with his governess, a squat little monster in a short black and tan dress. Ugly thing." Dunno if he means the woman or the dress. But now we know where Adolf got his color scheme! The Holocaust: bad potty training? Hm.

"Hitler was in a pram, being pushed along a dirt path through fields toward a little beach. I wanted to push him in, the bastard. He'd burned all Europe's early films he could get his hands on, you know, because some productions involved Jews..." Wait, the actor knew this before the war? At 18 months old?! Time in his story seems quite jumbled!

"...but I was too little and my donkey was too slow to catch up. And this dog guarded Hitler. Frisky, stupid mutt wouldn't let me near him. It meant well of course, but without that dog I'd have tried to drown Adolf, I think. Would that have been wrong? Killing a baby to stop the biggest war in history? I guess. Every kid deserves a chance. But look how many kids I'd have saved."

"Then..." I find myself saying, "...German history essentially ends. But the end of history is good. Divided, starving, guilty, occupied, leaderless, they quietly built peace, prosperity, democracy. East Germany lagged politically for 45 years under Russian occupation, but even the East had peace, stability, food, secure jobs, health care. And in the end the wall came down. I'd say the pundits proclaiming the end of history in 2000 just generalized it to the world. History IS ending--regionally. The Americas and Oceana beat Europe to it, but Hitler was the last gasp of history--for Western Europe."

NOTES

• Last gasp of history: well, I hope so. But are Osama bin Laden and the Arab Spring the Mideast's last gasp, or do we have to endure more regional history? And China better not gasp again; the world can't take it. Of course the Chinese look at our political deadlock and think "America better not gasp..."
• Babies and little kids: common in the Rhine accounts I edited (e.g. Chandelier, Boy Scout)
• Moral implications of precognition and ESP in general: in all the Rhine accounts.
• Baby Hitler: the last surviving spirochetes in my system still giving me trouble? Little monsters! The dream's hinting, I think, that my pacifism goes too far--unconsciously, I'm reluctant to kill even parasites! Fear and grief are known to suppress the immune system--why not guilt?
• ACTION: keep taking antibiotics. Don't go feeling sorry for the little hitlers! And don't you, dear readers, over the next generation, feel sorry for the little hitlers of this world as they finally fall.

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