Jewish Atheist

“Wake the dreamer and you will see psychosis.”

Carl Jung

The following actually appeared as a listing at the freelance site guru.net (all spelling and grammar errors have been preserved).

Title: This is it. The true story about MJ
Project ID: ______

Sincerely
Sylvia S_________
Melbourne. FL

Dear Sylvia:

I am a writer, and I am responding to your guru.net project listing. Sylvia, I am also a secular humanist who tries to keep his thinking grounded in reality. Knowing certain basic laws of physics and biology – among them that once the dead are dead, they are incapable of communicating with the living – I suspect that something not real yet very vivid is indeed happening in your head, something that feels and sounds like you are incessantly channeling Michael Jackson.

Please be assured that this is ALL happening inside your head. If you were a rabid Jackson fan, thinking about him and listening to his music for many years, his death was a tragedy that somehow linked up with your need to be special – and before you know it, Michael, the King of Pop, had singled out you, an otherwise undistinguished German, for an intimate, posthumous one-on-one.

Just step back, take a deep breath and think about it for a moment. How likely is that? Did you know that our minds can present to us phenomena that seem utterly real (as when we are dreaming) – voices, aliens, hallucinations of all sorts that appear to be happening in the brain or even outside it?

You do need help, if this condition is disturbing to you. A competent mental health professional will help disabuse you of your delusions. As close as your phone book, there’s a psychiatrist who will prescribe pills that will probably make Michael shut up.

But, you say, Michael’s voice seems so real. And he’s talking to YOU. I know. Perhaps you don’t need to be cured of anything.

So go ahead and write your book – get some bottom-feeding guru.net serf in India who will write anything for pennies – and publish it. I’ll bet a major publisher would pick it up. The commercial prospects are very good.

If my assessment of American society is correct, you will sell millions of copies and find yourself on Oprah within a year. Michael is still hot, and a story like yours has legs. But I’m sure many others are equally strongly convinced that Michael is talking to them, so it’s important that YOU get out there first.

Go for it — and good luck.