Who Am I?

Why Am I Making This Publicly Accessible?

On to the story.

    To say that I believe in magic, or that I believe in dragons, is an
understatement.  It's certainly true, but barely brushes the edge of my
paradigm.  My life has not been touched by magic and draconity -- it has
locked itself into a full-body embrace with them.  Every day I see and
talk to beings who don't physically exist on this earth.  Very few of them
are humans.  Neither am I.  Underneath my human skin lurks a soul with
wings and scales, and for me, that soul is what counts.  I am a mage.  I
am a dragon. 
    Depending on their prior experience with the metaphysical, the average
person finds this aspect of me either disturbingly insane or immensely
fascinating.  I have very little trouble admitting my beliefs, as I
learned long ago to live for myself instead of others, but I find a great
deal of difficulty in trying to explain them. 
    After all, in a world like ours, you'd be hard-pressed to find more
fringy topics than the existence of magic and dragons.  (Not fantasy-novel
fireball-throwing and firebreathing monsters; real magic is the changing
of reality with applied willpower, and real dragons are highly
misunderstood creatures.  Those misconceptions are, unfortunately, some of
the kinder ones.)
    Both of the dominant paradigms today, religion and science, turn up
their noses at magic, either because it's "satanic" or "unbelievable". 
Even within the metaphysical community, there's great disagreement as to
just what is and isn't really out there.  Not to mention that nobody has
yet publicly provided convincing proof of even the bare existence of
magic. 
    How, then, does the son of a scientist, born and raised a Christian,
turn to embrace it?  What is out there -- or, perhaps, inside us -- that
causes one to choose the path of willworking? 
    In my case, the answer is inextricably linked with not only who I am,
but who I consider myself to be.  I most likely would never have studied
magic if I did not believe I was a dragon, and if I hadn't learned as much
as I did about magic, draconity might have been little more than a vague
lifelong aspiration.  This almost begs the question:  What made me think
of myself as a dragon? 
    I hope to illuminate these themes through a variety of personal
experiences.  Surprisingly, there are a great number of people out there
who also consider themselves dragons; many of them are quite public about
it.  I hope, as they often do, to deliver some insight into the broader
dragon paradigm (as well as that of the mage). 
    Many dragons -- and mages -- have always lived with their beliefs.  My
case is different.  I started out in a Christian household, got baptized,
and went to Sunday school.  I cherished science (and science fiction) from
an early age.  The influences on me during my formative years were all
very normal adults.  The person I am today would not exist if something
hadn't steered me away from that path.  So what was it?  The question bugs
me to this day, but I'd like to share some insights. 

    One of the things I've continually noticed since grade school is that
I was always very different from most kids.  Partially in that I was very
bookish ... but mostly in ways that were very subtle, in ways that still
elude easy description. 
    In a way it's like when you're shopping with friends, and the cashier
gives you an extra nickel in your change, and you hold up the line for 15
seconds while you explain that she gave you too much money back.  And then
all your friends ask you why you didn't just take the extra nickel ... and
you're helpless to explain because it's not something logical, it was just
the right thing. 
    I couldn't fit in with humanity.  I couldn't justify it.  But I knew
in my heart it was right.  There was just some twist in my mirror to the
outside world.  From my classwork, it became obvious to me I didn't think
the same way as other children my age.  (Indeed, at the age of nine, I
wrote a letter to an adult crossword-puzzle magazine pointing out an error
in one of their clues.) As I grew up, though, I found I couldn't fully
relate with adults, either.  In many ways, I felt abandoned; I grew up
believing that not even my closest friends understood me. 
    I also wasn't very skilled with emotions.  As most bright youngsters
do, I endured a great deal of teasing; unfortunately, I tended to bottle
myself up, and the tears and the rage would come out all at once in
periodic breakdowns. 
    I've thought long and hard many times about my childhood.  Was I
reaching for an identity?  Did my desperate quest to find a peer group,
understanding and a non-destructive environment lead me to retreat into
the realms of draconity? 
    Honestly, I don't think so.  I've always had a rich and treasured
fantasy life, but only around junior high school did dragons even start
showing up.  Even then, it was in a much larger framework. 

    And why dragons?  That's a question that, for me, has no good answer.
    What I'd like to say is that I was drawn to dragons because I am one,
and I was subconsciously reclaiming my heritage.  That's the simple
answer, the one that fits, but it also hinges entirely on my
self-assessment being objectively true.  I believe entirely in my
draconity, but realistically, there's a chance I've got a faulty
self-image, and thinking about alternative theories certainly can't hurt. 
    I've had two draconic friends tell me that their respective guardian
spirits, who they'd been talking to since early childhood, were dragons. 
I do know that I grew up similarly, with a dragon spirit guarding me, but
I have no conscious memories of even recognizing his presence. 
    I'm certain that a number of dragons out there got started with
recurring draconic dreams.  A friend of mine who goes by Sev online
explains his experiences: 

        I suppose that one of the things that really started the ball
    rolling were my dreams.  I mean, I was either a human in my dreams, or
    a dragon.  That's it.  And I have had some potent dreams, with
    dragons ... there was one that seemed so _real_ that when I woke up, it
    took me several minutes to realize that it was a dream.

    This wasn't my case, though; I have horrible luck remembering dreams
at all.  And I have only had dragons show up in my dreams at all five
times in my life. 
    I did, however, feel completely at home with the form.  "When I was in
the form of a dragon, in a dream, it just seemed _natural_.  And even
waking, sometimes, I could feel ... well, limbs that were not there," Sev
added, echoing my thoughts on the times my imagination has carried me
where I can't fly in my dreams. 
    It's possible that I picked up the dragon idea from the video games I
played or the books I read.  I was a voracious reader, and the
sci-fi/fantasy genre I preferred has a way of throwing new ideas at you. 
But I only started seriously investigating draconity after my reading had
tapered off due to a high-school courseload.  I do remember reading
Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman's _Dragonlance_ saga as a younger child,
but I also remember the novels not impressing me too much, and the books'
concept of dragons certainly didn't match the noble attributes I
associated with them.  I remember one comic book I read, _Southern
Knights_, which had a dragon as one of the four members of its superhero
team.  To the best of my knowledge, though, I picked it up originally
because I was already fascinated with dragons at the time.  _Southern
Knights_' dragon character matched almost perfectly with my ideals, but my
investigations into draconity predated my first literary exposure to them. 
    I don't think I picked up my fascination with dragons from the games I
played, either.  Games such as _Dungeons and Dragons_ usually portrayed
dragons as evil beasts guarding hordes of fantastic treasure -- as
something to be overcome.  Despite this, I did a lot of role-playing. 

    One of the pastimes that I engaged in from an early age was
role-playing.  It came very naturally to me; putting myself behind a mask
was a skill I'd picked up to deal with Real Life, and to do it in a
setting where my character could laugh in the face of adversity and fight
for what he believed, was a pleasure.  Around the time I was going to
junior high, a friend and I embarked on an ambitious project to create a
game world for our role-playing adventures.  I did nearly all the work. 
It came out onto paper frightfully fast. 
    Even though the game's setup made the world's religion essentially
irrelevant, I fleshed out the world's dominant pantheon to a startling
degree.  Most people worshipped Thideras, the Dragon God.  The draconic
ideal of honor was the ultimate goal to be reached.  Having long since
rejected both the social organization and the contradiction-riddled belief
system of Christianity, I started -- mostly in jest or in rebellion --
calling myself a Thiderean and dedicating myself to developing the virtues
I had laid out for the game. 
    There was no good reason for me to associate dragons with honor.  I
don't recall having read anything by that time that would have caused me
to view them sympathetically.  Perhaps I felt a bond of kinship with them,
since they were different and hence persecuted, as I felt myself to often
be.  I think, though, that the kinship I felt was more deeply-rooted.  Up
until about sixth grade, I was fascinated by medieval knights and their
heroic deeds -- at some point I just flip-flopped entirely and moved to
their traditional enemies.  I doubt I would have had such a drastic shift
had nothing drawn me to dragons beyond their otherness. 
    Still and yet, dragons were ignored through my childhood and a
sideline for most of my adolescence.  There was one specific event that
completely blew my life out of the water and made me reconsider everything
I'd thought I'd worked out. 

    My mind habitually wanders.  I'm always coming up with new ideas.  It
wasn't surprising, then, that I considered the thought that perhaps this
Thideras I paid homage to was real.  (Which brings to mind an interesting
but silly side point:  Did I create Thideras ... or did he just make
himself known to me when the time was right?) Perhaps, too, dragons did
exist out there somewhere.  I spent a lot of time stargazing, squinting at
those little points of light and wondering whether the planet I'd
envisioned was orbiting one of them.  Although I often imagined the
possibilities, these were things I accepted early on as unresolvable
epistemological questions. 
    Thidereanism was (and still is) important to me as a value system. 
The philosophical aspects of it far outweighed the religious ones.  I was
entirely happy accepting it whether or not my god actually existed. 
Therefore, the question of his existence became unimportant -- it didn't
matter whether I was following a real god or not, because I wasn't in it
for salvation.  I was a Thiderean because it enriched my life by giving me
a set of standards to aim for.  And, hey, maybe if there really were
dragons out there, and this god-from-the-role-playing-game were real, I'd
be doing good enough to earn my wings. 
    For perhaps three years after I'd developed my moral system, life was
uneventful.  I recited my little bedtime prayer every night: 

        Thideras, let me look inside myself and find honor, courage,
    strength, dedication, wisdom and tolerance.  Let me transmit these
    virtues to others in thought and deed.  Give me a chance to make the
    world a better place for my presence.
        I'm still aspiring to be a dragon.
        Thank you.

    I meant every word (although it's important to note that I was using
"for" in the sense of "because of").  And I think this says a lot about
who I was and am -- and what standards I held myself to in the name of
draconity. 

    My childhood existence often seemed a war. I never surrendered my
individuality (I still haven't once worn blue jeans!) ... but I took a lot
of flak for defending it.  So, I learned to have very few expectations for
the outside world.  I certainly wasn't expecting the events of January 22,
1994. 
    The day before that was perhaps the worst of my life so far.  It was
one of those days where everything you touch gets twisted into something
which turns and bites.  A thoroughly miserable day was capped off by my
fanny pack being stolen -- including my wallet, keys, and nearly
everything else of value to me save my quotebook.  The 22nd wasn't much of
an improvement.  I somehow survived school, and aimlessly wandered
downtown, ending up in a phone booth outside a drugstore. 
    I called a friend, talked aimlessly for about thirty seconds, and
tears started dripping down my face.  I uncharacteristically hung up
mid-sentence and sat there and cried.  Everything from not just the
previous two days but the last few months of teasing and held-back
frustration burst all at once.  Within seconds, things spiraled, and I had
gone full-out into a nervous breakdown, consumed by an overwhelming
self-pity.  I'd tried my best, but the world had just connected one too
many times.  I was friendless, and I just couldn't go on on my own. 
    It was then that I heard the voice.
    Someone called my name.  Someone was speaking to me.  I raised my
head, but nobody was around, certainly nobody I knew.  The voice echoed
through my head, just like I was hearing it ... but nobody was speaking. 
I was hearing someone mentally. 
    I've since tried to duplicate what I experienced.  And I can state
unequivocally that the voice was NOT mine.  I think in an odd jumble of
images and words which flashes from one concept to the next.  What I heard
was clear, organized, and proper English.  Even when I'm in complete
self-control, when I force myself to think out loud in complete sentences,
it's still thoughts, it's not a voice.  (And I was in
hysterics at the time!) The voice in my head was calm, reassuring, and
completely lucid.  Which I was not.  The voice was loud ... I
heard it at roughly the level of someone standing a few feet away and
speaking firmly to me. 
    "Tad," it said, and repeated my name a few times firmly, making sure
it had my complete attention.  "It's alright.  Everything's going to be
okay." 
    There was only one possibility.  "Thideras?"  I asked in amazement.
    I swear I felt him smile.  "You're going to be okay," he repeated,
reassuringly, and faded out.  I was so amazed by this that I completely
forgot I was supposed to be having a nervous breakdown.  Less than thirty
seconds later I walked out of that shopping center, shoulders straight and
high, jaw still hanging loose in awe. 

    To say that the encounter did a lot to convince me that there were
things out there is an understatement.  From that point on I had no doubt
that there was something behind all my earlier speculations.  The question
became a matter of degree.  Most of the remaining uncertainty hinged on
what exactly it was that I heard. 
    For months only my most trusted friends knew.  I was deathly afraid
that my encounter would be written off as a split personality rather than
schizophrenia.  I wasn't ready to handle trying to explain something I
_knew_ to people who might not believe.  Only recently have I realized
that even if it was nothing more than my subconscious, the experience
still provides a basis for my beliefs -- after all, if I'm powerful enough
to stop a full nervous breakdown cold, I'm certainly a powerful enough
mage to trust my observations in the spirit arena! 
    Was it really Thideras?  There are any number of alternate 
explanations available, even just in the realm of the spirit.  (The
dragon-spirit who was my full-time guardian while I was growing up has
disavowed any responsibility.  I believe him.) The existence of Thideras,
though, is epistemologically irrelevant to both my draconity and my
magery.  By the time I decisively and permanently acknowledged my
draconity (very nearly a year ago), it was on the weight of a great deal
of outside knowledge.  Magic stood on its own evidence, and everything I'd
seen indicated I was indeed a dragon spiritually; finding the
alt.fan.dragons community on the Internet and realizing that there were
others who felt as I do was the clincher. 
    Though I have little evidence for it, I do believe it was Thideras who
spoke to me that day.  I have spoken to a great many spirits in the years
since, and not once have the thoughts been that delineated, loud or clear. 
(Most spirits, as I do, tend to think and communicate in images and
concepts, which are great for getting across large, tangled thoughts
quickly, but don't translate well at all into sharp English.) Also, he
knew my name.  Anyone who both knew my name and cared enough to intervene
must have been protecting me for some time.  My guardian-spirit claimed to
have nothing to do with it; nobody else but the one who heard my prayers
for years would have had the motivation and the knowledge. 

    I previously hadn't dared to consider myself a dragon.  I associated
with them such incredible ideals that it would have been hubris to my
young mind to assume I'd reached that plateau.  They were certainly, by
1994, a dream as much as an ideal, but I never thought I'd earned enough
to transcend humanity.  And dragons were, for me, a transcendence; their
minds were well-honed knives sharpened by dedication and tempered by
wisdom, their honor and their compassion were developed as only a
millennium can provide, and their wings represented the physical as well
as the intellectual freedom they reveled in. 
    After the aborted breakdown, though, I had to reconsider -- maybe I
_was_ worthy.  I was obviously doing _something_ right in order to get
that sort of attention.  Perhaps the blade was still a bit dull, but the
weapon was usable.  I was still aspiring to be a dragon ... but was the
aspiration transcendence ... or maintenance? 
    At the time, I was going through public high school.  I will
unapologetically state that anyone with an academic bent should under no
account be allowed to languish there.  It was a very easy environment in
which to gather evidence of my fundamental differences from humankind, and
that's about the most it contributed to my development.  Many of my
friends knew of my quest for draconity; the majority of them found it an
interesting oddity. 
    Strangely enough, the choice for me was always a dichotomy; either I
was a dragon, or I was merely getting there.  The thought that perhaps I
was something else in spirit never crossed my mind.  Nothing ever had the
fundamental appeal for me that draconity had.  Even now, nothing else
does. 
    
    In a way, magic was a very natural offshoot of my draconity.  If I
believe something as irrational as me being a dragon ... why not magic? 
It seemed so sensible as to be tame in comparison.  On the other hand,
magic was on a different level entirely.  I could identify myself as a
dragon with abandon, and never have to interface that belief with everyday
reality; since it was largely an outgrowth of how I already thought and
acted, it really was only a footnote to my teenage life.  Magic meant
taking that belief, that desire, and integrating it with reality.  For two
years I stumbled around blindly, occasionally building up energy but never
able to do anything with it except wish. 
    I really only got started with magic when I came to college.  I was
lucky enough to meet and befriend a teacher within a week of arriving in
the fall of my freshman year.  (It's things like that which have caused me
to throw out the word "coincidence" from my vocabulary entirely.) One of
the first things that I learned was what magic was. 
    A friend of mine who is a physics major as well as a mage explains it
better than I ever could.  "Magic is when you cause things to happen by
sheer force of will," he says.  "Whether you're learning, or playing an
instrument, or causing the sun to go supernova for some strange reason." 
    Most of the trouble in learning magic comes from learning to focus
that willpower effectively and see the result.  It wasn't a problem for
me.  I had a goal to work towards.  I wanted to be a dragon physically. 
    I didn't (and don't) see genetic engineering as currently viable, even
given recent successes in cloning, and I didn't want to wait for a better
method of changing bodies to be slowly developed over my lifetime.  I
turned from science not because it conflicted with my beliefs, but because
it just didn't suit my ends. 
    There's really no fundamental conflict between science and magic, in
fact; they're flip sides of the same coin.  "Most of reality is defined by
the collective will of the people," my physics-major friend occasionally
reminds me.  And it's quite possible to mix the two, according to him. 
"By explaining my paradigm in terms of their beliefs, I can force it to
happen." 
    "The scientific method is really an excellent thing," Sev noted.  In
fact, it's one of my main tools in approaching magical phenomena, and
still the best way I've got in distinguishing between magical events and
natural ones.  Magic really has no problem fitting within a logical
framework.  Why is magic given so little credence in the real world, then? 
    The problem is not in the paradigm of the science, it's in the
paradigm of the scientists.  "Physics is the art of trying to explain what
has happened within a rational basis, and trying to figure what happens in
other cases on that same rational basis,"  the physics major explained. 
Ideally, physics wouldn't be a cut-and-dried set of rules.  "In case of a
conflict [between the rules and the event] ... the benefit of the doubt
has to go to the event."  It's only when those rules become rigid that
things become "impossible" and magic becomes frowned upon. 
    Sev summed it all up nicely:  "I think that science is a great thing
if you don't let science get in the way." 

    And how does being a dragon and a mage affect my life?  It's
irreversibly broadened me.  There are worlds beyond our own, inhabited by
all sorts of strange and (generally) wonderful beings.  Even on our own
planet, there's such an incredible diversity of beings that it's very hard
to not make deep friends.  The Internet, especially, allows people to find
their niche in the world within weeks.  I've become close friends with
dozens of dragons out there. 
    Draconity and magic have also given me a focus for my research.  The
physics major told me, at one point, how he reconciled his lifelong
dedication to magic with his chosen discipline:  "I know my paradigm.  I
want to know theirs.  It lets me know what I have to work with." 
    Perhaps someday the magic paradigm will return to the Earth, and
people won't think it strange to see fireballs zooming down the street. 
Until then, there's a lot out there which works, and a lot out there which
doesn't.  There are a lot of people who believe strongly in the topics
they've chosen to study, be they fringe or mainstream.  There are a lot of
people to both learn from and teach.  And, mage or schizophrenic, draconic
or delusional, I'm going to keep trying to learn about the world,
adjusting my beliefs as necessary.  And whatever the truth of this
existence may be, I'm going to be able to look back and say that it was a
fun search.

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TOMORROWLANDS.ORG Home * Contact * Copyright Notice * About Us Please report errors or broken links to the webmaster via the Contact form.   Essay last updated Apr 12, 1998. Page © 2001 Tad "Baxil" Ramspott.