Good thread. I'm gonna give it my best.
Like almost everybody I was born awake. At 4, during sleep, I was levitating 6 feets over my bed, was having aliens encounters (rationalized as dreams), OBEs. Then school started, the horror, and I forgot about these.
I was not reading anything from 5 to 19, yet...
At 10 I wrote a fiction novel about my being a space explorer, colonizing other solar systems. When asked by teachers and friends what I wanted to be later, it was "scientist for NASA".
At 15 I wrote a fiction novel about overpopulation and government sponsored commandos taking people away during the night. The story was about a great and challenging adventure from the point of view of being in those commandos. I had no interest in depicting this as horrifying for the victims. There was no drama at all in my story. At that time some teachers thought I was a weird kid for taking such a sensitive subject as depopulation with commandos and using it just as a casual background for a superficial story.
Yet I was still sleeping, but a weird person to say the least.
Even with good grades in high school, I never went to college. From day one at 5, I hated every single day I had to spend in school. The school experience has been a constant horrifying nightmare and I was so glad to have the choice finally. I became a night janitor in banks for the next 15 years.
At 19, I met a musician much older than me who turned out to be an alchemist, the student of a well known quebecer alchemist:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4h8q1_802
This new friend of mine triggered everything I had forgotten. He gave me a copy of Allan Kardec's The Spirits' Book and I was on a roll to read. Lobsang Rampa got my attention and I read all of his books many times. Spalding's "Life and Teaching of the Masters of the Far East" was great also. My friend also gave me some books that didn't interest me at this time:
Many Freud's books, Aleister Crowley's books, Eliphas Levy's books. One book awoke brutally my Kundalini for the first time: The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov. Click! I went psychotic, not being prepared at all. Then I went away a little from this stuff. This all happened in one year.
At 21, I went back to Lobsang Rampa and decided to meditate and try OBEs, as well as eating right. Working nights as a janitor, reading, breathing, relaxing, meditating and visualizing during the day. I decided that the best way to achieve something would be to read as much as possible from people who had OBEs. I bought a bunch of books on OBE at the library. One of them was Robert Monroe's Far Journey. Click! Read it in one day, had my first OBE the same day, interestingly at noon October 31st. Robert Monroe was definitely writing in a way I could relate to much more than occultism, magick, alchemy. That was the writings of an engineer creating his own vocabulary for his spiritual journey, ignoring completely what has been written before him. I liked that! For some reason, I had a couple more OBEs, got depressed and put a stop to this. No Kundalini this time, and this all happened in 4 months in 1994.
At 25 in 1998, out of the blue, I started writing and somehow "connected" on a train of thought that led me in a few days to something I described there:
http://projectavalon.net/forum/showt...998#post149862
Click again. Huge awesome click I must say.
Yet, I was able to forget again about it, learn web programming by myself, find a job in Montreal, and live a very materialistic life with no concern whatsoever about all these awakenings. Of course no medtation, no relaxation, and maybe a small concern for breathing correctly, but that's all. I was enjoying material pleasure.
What was missing all that time for me to not go back ever to sleep was what most starts with: the conspiracy part. It never occured once to me that something like a great conspiracy could exist. I was able to read all these books, having all these experiences and completely ignore the conspiracy. 911 didn't interest me at all and I had never met anybody questioning it. Not that I was trusting governments, but to me these institutions were like mosquitoes bitting me while I enjoy the woods. They are annoying but hey, I'm in the woods and it's great!
Then in 2006 a guy at work gave me a copy of the Loose Change movie without saying what it was. Eventually an evening that I had nothing to watch and was bored, I put it in the DVD and started watching. Click! That was a slap in the face. If these annoying institutions are corrupted to the point of blowing buildings like the one I was living in, then what's next? Endgame by Alex Jones was next! Boom! I factchecked it it for 4 months, and now I know what is next...
I can't go back to sleep now, but I have a hard time getting back to my previous positive stuff, and have everything balanced. Now that I know that the mosquitoe can torture me, it's hard not to focus on it, and I've lost the pleasure of enjoying the woods. I'm just worrying about the mosquitoes, even though I know it's stupid.
At least everything falls into place and it's just a question of digesting it, recuperating the positive stuff, and reaching balance. Now that I'm writing it, I realize that I am a very lazy person because it's not that hard if I would try honestly.