A young guy I know organized a big bike/footrace, the Human Race. It's partly to get Silicon Valleyites out of their cars, if only for a day. A huge crowd sets out on the complex course through San Jose... I bike after them on impulse, but get distracted by an weird electric cranking mechanism--an experimental bike part? When I look up, the racers are gone.

How to rejoin the Human Race?

My intuition says northwest, through a brown wooden maze of roofless booths. No aisles, just windows and doors into the next... and they're nearly all occupied--the users won't let me through.

Inspiration! I ditch my bike, and climb up onto the walls. Without corridors, they all meet! A grid of paths for me to follow. Nice view, too.

Looking down, I find the cubicles are therapists' offices. Every flavor of shrink, each walled off with a lone client in their personal pit or pen... no wonder they didn't want me barging through...

I feel a certain glee--the walls meant to block my progress are my path past their cages!

I reach the center plaza; not far now to my goal and the prize. Except for the mob of angry shrinks yelling "Privacy violator! We called the cops!" But who cares? By the time they get here, I'll be at the goal. I'll have beaten the Human Race.

THE NEXT DAY

I couldn't resist telling this dream to my friends Jewel and Carly, who are doing their hours as journeyman shrinks at the local VA. I was teasing a bit... curious if Carly feels skeptical about psychiatry as an institution.

To my surprise she just says earnestly "So you were using parts of you that were blocked..." Parts of me, eh? The dream's great irony, that the therapists' walls (assumptions?) are the barriers caging their clients--it went right over her head! So to speak. Like a kid atop the wall. Where I think I'll stay--and not just for the view. When I stick to the barriers, I'm a contender!

Hmmm..... the dream's screams of "privacy violation" suggest the walls mean confidentiality, privacy, psychiatry's model of us as sealed-off individuals. So climbing the walls and peering in might mean intuition or ESP--spying others' secrets. I have been having a lot of apparently psychic dreams lately. It fits--therapists are trained to treat claims of psychic dreams as a red flag that the client is delusive. But look what happens when I stick to my walls, to my craziness! Instead of playing catch-up to you normal humans, suddenly I'm zooming ahead!

I think I'll do it my way.

To me, it's the rest of you who are... well... off the wall.

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