How the psychedelic shows of your youth affect your mind today
Have you ever tried to track down something you saw on TV as a kid, just to see if it was even real? Many of us are occasionally haunted by snippets of movies and shows we vaguely remember watching when we were children. We may wonder if these memories ever really happened, or if they were dreams. Especially when the memories seem incredibly bizarre! Having grown up in the 70s, I caught a lot of psychedelic stuff on TV as a kid that I’ve become obsessed with tracking down as an adult. Why? Discovering forgotten moments from our youth is the closest thing we have to time travel. We get to relive an experience we had and to see what actually happened. Sometimes, we may even be shocked to find that the story from way back then provides an answer to our lives now.
We all have our own palette of TV and movie memories that somehow straddle the threshold of our conscious minds. Over the years, I’ve managed to track down a whole host of weirdness that made an impression on me as a kid. Some of these were so strange, I wasn’t sure if they had really existed or if I’d just imagined or dreamed them. Discovering them is always a thrill because it gives me a chance to see how close my memory is to what I’d actually seen, or thought I’d seen.
For whatever reason, many of these same TV moments have affected others who grew up around the same time as I did. They too were haunted or moved by a particular scene that has stuck with them. While each of our lists are unique, I find that certain show memories are shared among those whose lives run along similar paths—with the show being a common link.
For example, the surrealistic animated French film, Fantastic Planet is one that seems to have given many people my age the creeps when they caught it on TV as kids. I can only imagine what a film about helpless humans treated like pests or pets by a race of intelligent giant aliens, does to a developing mind. Perhaps this movie stimulated some kind of empathetic pathway in our psyches, teaching us to be more understanding of those who are different than us—physically or philosophically.
My personal palette also includes, the 1976 Hungarian animated fantasy Hugo the Hippo, which the movie poster described as “PHANTASMAGORICAL” and features Marie Osmond singing that “if you accept a strange story as true than a certain enlightment comes to you” (a complex message for a kids’ film, but one that obviously stayed with me since it’s what I believe today concerning the wisdom found within mythology). The movie is about a group of poor farm kids who come to the rescue of an orphaned hippo in spite of the wishes of their parents and the townsfolk. Perhaps those who had this movie planted in their minds learned to question authority and to not go along with something just because society dictates it.
There’s also the 1975 Italian/West German animated fairytale Once Upon A Time (aka Maria d’Oro and Bello Blue) that’s sort of a cross between Cinderella and Alice In Wonderland, but with singing babies. The message of this film is similar to most fairytales in that those who are pure of heart prosper in the long run.
The live action Village of the Giants from 1965 was another that I wasn’t sure if I’d dreamed or not until I tracked it down many years ago. Revolving around some delinquent teens who ingest a substance that allows them to grow to 30 feet tall and overpower the grownups of the town, the movie’s message certainly foreshadowed the coming hippie movement. In this case though, the teens were bad, perhaps because their growth was all ego and based on the material world. And since the material world is imaginary, their growth would eventually collapse, just like everything based on ego and greed eventually does in our world.
Some of my memories came just from the opening credits to certain shows like the cheerful The New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a live-action/animated kids show from Hanna-Barbera that originally ran from 1968-69. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the nightmarish 6-fingered hand intro from Chiller Theater. Both of the links above will take you to the actual intros. While our creepy memories are obviously chilling, there’s something about the neutral or even cheerful old-time memories that put me in a sort of creepy nostalgic mood too.
In addition to the two above, I’ve included several more below that will help to give you that feeling, even if you have no memory of any of this. I’m including them in hopes of reaching your subconscious memory before delving deeper into this post. We need to unlock some aspects of your mind to connect to the message of this post. The sleeper must awaken. And those not ready to awaken, probably haven’t read this far.
Even though it only includes night scenes from NYC and the theme to Gone With The Wind, (a fact I didn’t realize until years later), for whatever reason, the opening to WOR’s Million Dollar Movie gives me the heebie-jeebies to this very day. Perhaps it’s because of the movie I associated with it, which I’ll get to in a bit. ABC’s 4:30 Movie intro also creeps me out a bit. Something about watching movies at home at 4:30PM on weekends—remembering the way the sun glares in the window at that time in the winter and fall—is creepy to me, like the end of the original Friday the 13th.
While most of these old TV memories give me the chills, not all of them give me the creeps. Some of them are chilling because I remember how happy they made me or how peaceful. It’s easy to see why I associated CBS’s SPECIAL Presentation bumper to a joyful feeling since it preceded so many of the holiday specials I loved as a kid. And Sesame Street’s fairytale Madrigal Alphabet brings me back to a feeling that must have originated from another lifetime, back when I was a wandering troubadour singing songs of gods, monsters, and mythology. When I tracked it down several years ago, it literally made me teary-eyed. It was likely a magical time, but probably not a happy one.
Hopefully, you were able to connect to at least one of those nostalgic media moments. I just want to get your brain into another place before you read this. If you haven’t connected to any of them yet, please do so now. Whichever calls to you. If none of them do, just click on the Madrigal Alphabet and allow it to work its wonders.
With varying degrees of difficulty, I managed to track down all of the mysterious media moments from my youth in order to step back in time and relive them. All of them that is, except for one—the one that has eluded me for at least thirty years and haunted me for even longer. It was an animated movie I remembered watching during a creepy afternoon alone at my grandmother’s (I think it was a Million Dollar Movie which may have conditioned me Clockwork Orange-style to getting creeped out by its intro.) Why I was watching a movie alone at my grandmother’s at six or seven-years old I have no idea and one reason why I thought this memory may have all just been a dream—that, and the odd nature of my movie memory. All I could recall was a creepy cartoon that had this giant machine, almost like a wind tunnel, that was being run by a witch and was sucking up kids and turning them into monsters. Later in the film, the witch somehow becomes a midget-goblin thing and is scampering around trying to destroy the kids. Surely, this had all been some kind of dream.
Not so. With the help of a movie-searching forum that I’d “accidentally” stumbled upon, “Grrr, What Was the Name of That Movie?”, one of the experts suggested that the film may have been a 1967 Japanese anime titled Jack and the Witch. THIS WAS IT! Not only was I amazed that this was the movie, but, after reading the comments about it, was completely stunned by the number of people who’d had such a similar experience as I did when watching it—freakishly so! It was almost as if we’d all shared one memory!
The poster who’d written about the film, described it this way:
Lodging deep within the brains of millions of prepubescent youths, JACK AND THE WITCH is one of those movies you see on some UHF station’s afternoon movie timeslot when you’re home from school with a fever or it’s a rainy summer day or you’re stuck at the relatives and are aimlessly turning the knobs on that giant woodgrained RCA monster – the knobs make that satisfying “klunk” as you switch from channel 2 to channel 3…
Had I written that? I actually saw it at my grandma’s place one afternoon, on her big, wood-grained TV with the clunky knobs. The article goes on to describe the feeling viewers have of rediscovering the movie as an adult:
…and you stand there shocked as you realize that no, you didn’t DREAM that movie or IMAGINE it or HALLUCINATE it after one too many shots of Dimetapp Children’s Cough Syrup – it actually exists, for once your memory isn’t cheating.
So bizarre! Yes, I was high on Dimetapp for most of my youth, as my parents gave it to me most every night. This was long before it was discovered that its original ingredients could cause brain damage. That fact, combined with psychedelic movies like this, explain a lot about the way my mind works today! Had all of the kids who’d watched this film been similarly affected by it? Were they subconsciously changed from the experience, to the point where it could help shape their minds and nudge them on their life path? In other words, were the kids who were meant to grow up to do some specific task seeded with the subliminal wisdom of the movie in order to eventually sprout some future action in their lives? It’s almost as though certain movies and shows we see as kids are coded with some kind of time-released message that call us back to them when it is time for that message to be realized.
Another blogger wrote this about the movie:
When I was a little kid, I saw an animated movie on TV which stuck in my mind for a long time…I recall a sense of surreality. Some time ago I managed to find out what this cartoon was. It was Jack and The Witch…I found a site that would sell me a DVR of it, and got it, and watched it… Wow. Memories came back. Not only of the movie, but of the circumstances in which I saw it. (My grandmother’s house on a summer long ago.)
What was with the relative/grandma connection? And the Dimetapp downing experience? How is it that so many kids who caught this crazy cartoon all had similar childhood recollections that eerily parallel my own? Were we all implanted with the same memories? Perhaps none of us had even ever seen the movie at all, but were just implanted with a partial memory so we would one day seek it out and get its coded information downloaded into our consciousness. Only after watching it to completion as adults would we receive the full upgrade to our minds.
Sound crazy? Ever see Blade Runner? In the film, “replicant” androids are given random, specific, sometimes meaningless fake memories of the youth they never had so that they would believe they were actually human.
If we all do live in a computer simulation—or something similar—as I’ve come to believe, what better way to manipulate populations and individuals than with the combination of movies and shows that they bombard our brains with? Our unique combination of media experiences could easily be used to influence our thoughts and actions. The stories alone could have an effect. In addition, these movies could have codes that connect with our brains, which can begin or complete a download we are meant to receive at a certain time.
Seems far-fetched, right? For those of you who are aware of YouTube’s copyright procedures however, this process may feel a bit familiar. If you’ve ever posted a copyrighted movie, TV show, or song on YouTube, you may have noticed an ad with a link to buy it was placed below the video soon after. And random advertising was placed directly on your video. The question is, how did YouTube track down the song or video so quickly and connect it to the correct copyright holder? The answer is that YouTube has received millions of songs, shows, and movies from their respective owners and broken each down to their binary code. When the code finds a match from a new upload, it contacts the copyright owner who decides whether the video needs to be pulled or if they want to place advertising on it so make some money. Usually they choose the latter as they did with my “Free Hugs” video. This isn’t sci-fi people. It’s already happening and has been happening for years. Imagine what ten more years might develop.
Just as our digital world is coded, our reality can be broken down to mathematics as well. So it’s likely very possible for us to receive uploads and downloads and upgrades from various sources directly to our minds. And it just makes sense to me that things we scan with our eyes or experience with our senses would be among them. In fact, much like a video game, you may not meet a certain character, get a certain task, or receive a certain clue until you’ve seen, heard, or done something that is coded to unlock this programming. Perhaps that’s why our life at times seems to go in circles—same jobs, same kind of dates, some old issues—because we haven’t done the task required to send in the new program.
For the record, I did not originate the belief of brain or visual scan uploads. It’s been the stuff of sci-fi for decades and a major concept of kabbalah for centuries. According to kabbalah, the combination of Hebrew letters acts like a code, that when scanned with our eyes release certain energies. And according to The Matrix, Minority Report, and many others, your senses can be triggering downloads all the time.
All these thoughts spun through my mind as I finally tracked down the movie that had haunted me since childhood. And the fact that it came to me exactly seven months before the Mayan calendar reset date of December 21, 2012, didn’t go unnoticed. (You can see that a poster named Piquant, aka lila_says, gave me the name of the film here, on May 21, 2012. I thanked her profusely in a later post under TheLayman name.)
When I was a kid, I had a dream that has basically summed up my entire life. I had just completed a puzzle and was proudly carrying it downstairs, presumably to show it off to my parents. It was dark and spooky in my house and before I knew what was happening I was falling down the stairs and the puzzle pieces were flying everywhere. When I reached the bottom, I was shaken up, but most bothered that all my hard work was now spread all over the place. I decided that I had to immediately put the puzzle back together. Suddenly there was a flash of light and a menacing blue witch draped in black appeared next to me. Any normal person would’ve simply run, but I didn’t know what to do. I was compelled to put the puzzle together but doing so would put my life in danger. DOES NOT COMPUTE. DOES NOT COMPUTE. I simply froze.
I’ve interpreted this dream in dozens of ways with everything from my OCD/workaholic personality to my destiny with the Layman book to the kabbalistic story of the broken shards that we on earth are meant to repair. Interesting, my Hebrew name is Mendel, which means “to mend or repair.” Famous Mendels have done everything from simplifying Judaism by creating the Reform Movement (Moses Mendelssohn) to simplifying genetics into a simple table (Gregor Mendel) to simplifying the elements into a Periodic Table (Dmitri Mendeleev) to simplifying the Bible for modern day understanding (Menachem Mendel Schneerson), and the list goes on and on. Notice something they all have in common? They’ve all taken a complicated subject and simplified it. So could it be my destiny to take the complicated rules of the world we live in and, in layman’s terms, provide the answers to everything?
Until recently, I always thought that the witch in the dream was inspired from an old GE Show and Tell record I had as a kid called, The Boy Who Played Santa Clause. But shortly before discovering Jack and The Witch, I somehow managed to find a presentation of that story online as someone had recently posted it (why I thought to even look for it, I have no idea). Shockingly, I discovered that the witch depicted in the story is not blue at all. So what witch WAS blue? The one from Jack and the Witch!
Was Jack and the Witch the missing piece to a puzzle I’ve been searching for? The key to understanding a dream that’s stuck with me for over thirty years? Did it have some message for me that I was now, having reached some karmic milestone, finally ready to hear? Would it at least give me a much-needed clue on my fate and how to fulfill my destiny? I scrambled to somehow find a copy of this movie, which had never been released on video or DVD in the US.
Unfortunately, it was recently taken down from YouTube (like I said, sometimes they do just remove it). I found another poster who was equally as excited about the movie and mentioned she’d bought it from CoolStuffVideos. I immediately contacted this company but was informed that they no longer had it in stock. Demon Dogs! Had I come this far only to fail when I could nearly touch the solution? Never!
Thankfully, my coworker Jimmy, tracked it down with his Sherpa superpowers (more on our various superpowers another time). The name of the company where he found it is “All Clues No Solutions.” I kid you not. What kind of a name is that for a company selling hard-to-find DVDs? I couldn’t help but wonder if the company was some kind of Illuminati front or simply a site created in my simulation world just for this part of the game. Despite the disheartening title, I was still determined to find the movie, and hope that it DID have some solutions for me. Not only did they have it, it was only $7.00! (There’s that seven again, like the number of months before 12/21/12 when I finally found the film and my likely age when I first saw it.) I immediately ordered the movie and waited by the mailbox like Charlie Brown for it to arrive.
When it finally did, I was pleasantly surprised. The movie was in excellent condition and thankfully dubbed in English (as I’d originally seen it, as opposed to subtitles). I popped it in the DVD player and began to watch it. What I saw blew my mind.
Wikipedia has this to say about Jack and the Witch:
It is well remembered by those who saw it on U.S. television in the 1970s and early 1980s (in particular, KTLA developed a tradition of airing it around Halloween each year) because of its surreal sequences.
Surreal indeed! No wonder this movie had given me nightmares! But even more intriguing is how similar the film’s storyline was to one of my most recent obsessions: Lost. Both feature a hero named Jack; a secret ice cave (where the donkey wheel was); an evil entity that could turn your friends evil (think Black Smoke Monster with Danielle Russo’s science team); a pretty girl turned into a manipulative ass-kicker by the evil entity (i.e. Claire); a bomb set by the evil entity to destroy the hero’s friends (in the sub); a crystal ball that allows one to see one’s friends until it’s broken (the lighthouse mirrors); an incident causing an energy surge that sucks people into a pit and then explodes (5th season finale); a discovery of the evil entity’s power source which can be shut off so the entity can be killed (the golden cave), etc.
So, was Damon Lindelof one of the thousands of seventies-era kids who downloaded this movie as a memory or was guided to watch it to help affect his mindset? Was he subconsciously influenced by this bizarre anime and either knowingly or unknowingly applied its mythology into Lost? Does everyone who has watched this movie share some common path? Was it required watching for future “candidates”?
I wasn’t sure. But something I definitely learned from this experience is how far apart the various puzzle pieces of our lives could be spread out and still somehow manage to all fit together. It’s like time doesn’t exist to whoever is planting all these clues. I’ve written (in “Deciphering Hollywood’s Hidden Messages”) about how watching certain movies back-to-back often brings out certain similarities and associations that we wouldn’t necessarily get from them individually. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the clues of our lives can fit together from various times of our lives, as was depicted in Slumdog Millionaire, which itself has been a clue for me.
For clues that are a major part of our entire life story, they seemingly can be spread out over our lifetime. For clues that provide messages for where we’re at in the present, the clues will likely be presented closer chronologically. For example, someone who was influenced by the Layman blogs (a young lightworker named Antonis) recently gave me a gift as a token of his appreciation. That gift was a DVD of the first season of Ancient Aliens. I’d seen the show before, but not all of the episodes. After watching them I then began watching the original Battlestar Galactica, which I only later realized had a very similar theme to Ancient Aliens, since it’s all about whether life here, really began out there (in space) and if these extra-terrestrial beings are what we considered as our gods/God from our mythology.
I’ve just begun watching the newer Battlestar Galactica series at the same time as J.J. Abrahms new series, Revolution. In my opinion, Revolution isn’t mythological magic, but in conjunction with the new Battlestar Galactica, a new message emerges regarding the folly of relying too heavily on modern technology. (In Revolution, mankind is rendered helpless without it, in BSG, technology grows to enslave humans and those equipped with the latest technology are rendered helpless since it can be easily taken over, as opposed to those with the older technology which couldn’t be.)
So, all of this has been about my personal messages, mythology, and destiny. How does it apply to you? Only you can answer that question but hopefully, I’ve given you the tools to do so. What interesting messages could be interpreted from the juxtaposition of various stories you’ve heard, read, or seen lately? Do they share any common elements? Does the combination of these elements tell a new story that might be meant solely for you? This is what we call synergy: where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In addition to more recent media connections, are there older themes that have seemed to follow you around or provide recent insights after having been MIA for years or even decades? How could these old themes apply to your life now?
If it’s kind of hard to get the gist of how old aspects of your life can drastically fit together to help you in your current situation, I suggest watching or re-watching Slumdog Millionaire which is the best recent example I can think of to demonstrate this.
There’s one other important message we can all glean from this too, and it has to do with this blog, which you manage to read despite its lengthy posts and your busy schedule. The question is: why do I write them? They are incredibly time consuming and I don’t really get much compensation from doing so, nor much feedback. But I don’t write these for either of those reasons. I write them because I feel compelled to. I guess it all goes back to the puzzle dream or my OCD or whatever, but much like that kid Jake in Fox’s Touch, if I don’t share what I’ve learned from following the clues, my brain goes nuts! It continually nags at me until I post the latest message.
I don’t know what would happen if I didn’t write these blogs, but I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be similar to the fate of schizophrenics—eventually, you just lose touch with reality. (Perhaps that’s why that show is really called, Touch.) I’m not sure how many people read this blog, and not really sure if it matters. What matters is that the right people are reading it. Perhaps we are among the enlightened 36 mentioned in kabbalah and referenced in Touch who are meant to “mend” the world. Perhaps you are a Mendel too, without realizing it…or a candidate to put it in Lost terms. Or, maybe you’re simply a lightworker meant to help humanity adjust to this new enlightened age we are quickly approaching. Whatever the case may be, thank you for following along with my journey and I hope it’s helped provide insight for your own.
May Your Inner Spark Grow To Light Your Way,
Marc
*We now return you to your regularly scheduled life, already in progress*
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