I woke up in my bed and looked up to the ceiling, where the shadows of the trees were moving. They swung outside, silently rustling in the night’s wind back and forth. These patterns had cradled me several nights into sleep, but not this time, not this night.
I had never tried to find anything particular in this tangle of forms. But one night I saw for the first time the shadow of an animal scurry through this carpet of light- and-shadow cluster. There was a little forest surrounding our house but the lamps of the nearby street shone into it. Maybe it was a cat, a bird or a squirrel, who knows. Whatever it had been, it left me with some assumptions until I fell back into sleep. But today it was different. There appeared a big powerful shadow on the ceiling that covered almost half of the illuminated surface. It moved slowly with intense force in ominous slowness and disappeared again. Whatever it was, it could have been directly on our house. We were here in Wisconsin on the outer slopes of a mountain range. In its center high above the plane lands was the Devil’s Lake, a deep mysterious water hole with rock cliffs surrounding it. The Ho Chunk, the local Indians had called it Spirit Lake, because they had been able to hear spirits during their ceremonies up there. On its shores there were ancient animal gestalt arts made of earth, heaped and overgrown with grass, especially of bears and jaguars. The high quartzite rose rocks on the steep slopes of Devil’s Lake changed their color all the time, oscillating between white and red, two colors that were sacred to the Indians. I had some sacred moments in the Devil’s Lake area. One was during heavy snowfall. I went out and moved uphill into the park. The walk was arduous, because of the deep snow and nobody else dared to do it. To be alone inside the valley on the lake’s shore was an amazing experience. I could hear the snow falling and some of the big black birds crying, nothing else. In the distant I saw a strange black animal prowling down the edge of the steep slope covered with trees and rocks. Was it a bear, a cat or a wolf? I did not try to find out and went in the other direction. The other time seeing the park without people was in the summer. It was after a strong rain. The rain was so heavy that houses were washed away by the Wisconsin River, which was even shown in the world news. My car had no working windshield wipers, but I still tried to drive during this rain, seeing only a blurry light in the middle of the street. I made it home somehow. Because the wipers of my old car could not be repaired by my friend I had to drive fast during snowfall in the winter. In this way the front windows were cleared by the wind. In Wisconsin it was not necessary to let cars be checked technical by any official agency now and then and any car insurance was also not obligatory. That led to possible bad surprises when we drove each other’s cars. One time I found out shortly before the red traffic lights that the car I drove had almost no functioning brakes, but I still managed to stop in time. Some weeks after the heavy rain I went to the Devil’s Lake Park with a girl, but it was still closed. We did not care about it and walked down to the lake. The big black birds that were usually high above the water were flying now on a day without visitors very close. My friend and I were sitting on the rocky bank of the river enjoyed a day alone in this usually crowded area until a police officer caught us and gave us a fine for a hundred and ninety-five dollars for entering this closed area. A friend advised me to go to court to try to lower this and I did. The first thought was for me as a former East German that nobody asked me for my identity card when I entered. So I could have gone easily in place of someone else. The other astonishing thing was that the judge let always five people stand up at the same time, listened to their statements and made a decision. Before coming forward he read a charge like this: “The state of Wisconsin against—” Most of the other cases were young people who were caught drinking alcohol under the age of twenty-one. They had a choice between a fine of two hundred and eighty-five dollars and a registration as a criminal in the records or participation within a police monitored program against alcohol. This program was lasting a half a year and they all chose it. The judge was listening to my excuse also. I said I had overlooked the sign, but he waved me aside. “I hear these stories for weeks now, I give you five dollars less. That’s it.”
My memories returned and I still wondered what a big animal could have thrown such a massive shadow and felt a slight horror. Was it a bear or a jaguar, or even a crazy person? Was it the same animal I had seen in the snowstorm? Or was it the old chief? The old chief was the spirit of an ancient shaman who had his place of residence on the other side of my town Baraboo and showed up sometimes during spiritual rituals in the area. This place was a monument called the Man Mount. There was a big humanoid figure on the ground, with perceptible energetic marks for each level of the body. Only his legs were cut off by a nearby road. Here I was often with my friends from the vegetarian restaurant in Baraboo to take in that energy. This whole part of Wisconsin had many interesting places to go. There were hundreds of other earth-made monuments with strange energies in the area and sometimes my friends and I saw the natives sitting on top of them. The history of the Ho Chunk and other tribes were always part of that. The Ho Chunk were lucky enough to have a casino on Highway 12. They earned up to two hundred million dollars each year and could give every member of their tribe free income. They still had to fight alcoholism and other issues.
On the next day I drove the road to the center of the town. It was easy to speed up to fast. Suddenly I had the strange impression that something was going to happen. The time had changed its texture and pace. Maybe there was a waking call, I did not hear.
Peter Bernhards Therapie: 