In this part of the story, I'm going for the idea that I want to bring across my total conviction that these memories had a basis in reality when I first experienced them. My literary role model for this part of the story is Mark Vonnegut and his book, The Eden Express. Someone described the experience of reading The Eden Express as similar to reading Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. In Fear and Loathing..., Thompson describes massive drugs binges of all kinds. The person describing Eden Express to me said that Vonnegut gives a similar visceral feeling of what it must be like to be psychotic to the reader of his ordeal, even if the reader has never been psychotic. I just changed a passage at the end of issue number 18 to indicate that I initially greeted the first wave of hallucinations with no ability to think critically about what I was going through. In effect, these "recovered memories" struck me as totally real, and I believed I was going through an evolution of consciousness rather than a psychosis.
People may find it hard to believe the hold these kinds of experiences can still have on me. I had another vision of the Legend of Richy Vegas in the Summer of 2016; this time while on medication and decidedly not psychotic, and its power still holds me to the point where I won't talk about it in detail or specifics on a forum such as this blog.
I've looked at Youtube videos that go into Dissociative Identity Disorder and whether that is real or not. The famous case of Sybil and her sixteen different personalities turned out to be a hoax perpetrated by an unscrupulous therapist and her willing patient. So yeah, maybe Dissociative Identity Disorder now. Y-y-yep.