Metempsychosis

  Extraordinary Coincidences

  Metempsychosis, sure—but where’s the server? Where is the soul-world where spirits wait to inhabit a new body? Assuming there is life after death, of all the options proposed, reincarnation has always seemed to me the most plausible… and yet still impossible.

  When you’ve spent your life being skeptical about the supernatural, arguing with people who believe in horoscopes, healing crystals, telepathy, ghosts, and reincarnation—calling them “unscientific theories”—what do you do when you’re faced with experiences science can’t explain? Or rather, when you feel things that science can’t explain, but which you’ve experienced? When the Emotional part of your brain sends you information that the Rational part finds absurd?

  What I’m about to share is not easy to put into words. No one has invented a thought recorder yet, and if they did, I’d gladly offer my memories. Some parts are blurry, so what you'll get is a summary. I’ll also leave some things out for safety reasons.

  But let’s start from the beginning.

  I was born in 1992 in a small town between mountains and sea. I was named Chiara, and I love my name—it means “light.” It’s my favorite female name.

  Basically, I’m a Pikachu. Chiara is also the strongest gym leader in Pokémon Silver. She has a Miltank with Rollout that still haunts a generation of trainers with nightmares. She’s the one who cries after losing—a very “me” thing to do. I used to cry from shame when I got a bad grade in school. Even a 6 (out of 10) felt like a failure to me.

  I’m obsessed with the meaning of names. I even bought two massive UTET encyclopedias on Italian names (which also include foreign names of Italy’s new citizens) on eBay.

  My favorite books are The NeverEnding Story, White Fang, and The Gods Themselves.

  White Fang is the book I’ve read most in my life—whenever I had nothing else to read, I’d read it again. It’s a survival manual for Life: if the world is tough, you have to be tougher and fiercer—but by doing that, you end up hardening; only Love can save you in the end.

  My life has been like many others, with tiny and massive traumas that all lives carry, messy family relationships (double divorce, with adults dragging children into their mess), and early losses. I’d rather not talk much about the family stuff though.

  Education: in middle school I chose a science-focused high school intending to become a marine biologist and save the Mediterranean monk seal (which I recently saw in a documentary is making a comeback!). Then I studied Biological Sciences aiming to be an ethologist, and then Plant Biotechnology because I believed in environmental remediation and saw myself as a kind of Poison Ivy. I learned that when plants die, you replace them with more resistant varieties. (100-105-110L).

  Friendships: I’ve always been a bit unlucky. Few friends, some lost partly because of me, social exclusion in middle school and even at university—it hurt a lot. But the friends who stayed are the right ones.

  I found Great Love; I waited a long time, and in the end, he came. His name is Alessio, which means “the defender”—my favorite male name.

  Political views: I was a communist from age 12 to about 23, and I even joined the Young Communists. I left after an argument about the Gulags—because you can’t just kill millions of people to impose even a good idea and call it necessary for the Greater Good. Just no. A community is made of individuals.

  Religion: baptized like everyone else by default into the Catholic Church, I became an atheist with an Epicurean path in my early high school years. I used to lie in bed thinking about Death, wondering what the experience would be like, what it would feel like. I told myself it was something that wouldn’t concern me: the moment I died, I would disappear, so there would be no experience.

  After that, I always thought there was nothing after death; I saw life as a complicated set of chemical reactions producing my thinking Self. If my conscious self “died” every night during sleep, I couldn’t see how it would survive the decay of the body. I accepted the end of life quite serenely. I maintained this proud atheism until I was 30, then things changed.

  Now I teach Natural Sciences in the same high school I attended. I believe Salvation is in the minds of the young—but then society ruins them, offering degrading entertainment, crushing their aspirations, and constantly showing them examples of low morals, cruelty, and pettiness.

  I saw my first Shadow during my second year of university. I was in bed, about to fall asleep, when I felt a touch—like a knock—on my right shoulder. I turned that way and saw, perched on the edge of my bed, a girl with greenish skin, yellow teeth, and black hair, grinning at me with wide eyes.

  I screamed in terror like never before in my life—and she just stayed there. The light switch was behind her. I reached out anyway, turned on the light, and she disappeared.

  For two days, I struggled to fall asleep. I managed by thinking about Alessio and letting myself be filled with his golden light that protected me.

  In 2015, I had Hodgkin’s lymphoma—a minor issue, considering there’s a 90% full remission rate. But after the second negative PET scan, I felt a relief like never before and only then realized how scared I had been.

  Really, if you’re in a room with 10 people and someone says “One of you will die,” it’s hard to stay calm.

  Of the whole lymphoma experience, what traumatized me most was being denied the chance to freeze my eggs. They said it would take too long and that I had to start chemo right away.

  Motherhood means a lot to me, and seeing it threatened made me break down—I cried desperately in the hospital hallway.

  Then at home, I looked up scientific articles on the matter and read that women who had Hodgkin’s aren’t statistically more infertile than others. So I used my Rationality to keep my emotions in check and went through with the treatment.

  During chemo sessions, I brought The NeverEnding Story with me to find comfort.

  After the trauma of lymphoma, my anxiety skyrocketed. I’d always been a little anxious, but not in a constant, overwhelming way like that.

  I started my master’s degree in Turin while also working at a radio station. I came home about every other weekend. Being away from Alessio weighed heavily on me—I got a knot in my stomach and a lump in my throat every time I had to take the train back.

  On top of that, I began to seriously worry about finding a job after graduation. Once, on the train, I burst into tears reading an article about “blank resignations” they make women sign—so if they get pregnant, they can be fired without even severance pay.

  Toward the end of my master’s degree, I started considering a teaching career, also on the advice of my thesis advisor. I had wanted to go into research to discover things that would help progress, but she told me I didn’t have the right personality for it (I had cried from anxiety during her exam when I couldn’t focus the microscope slide and panicked). She was right—I didn’t have the temperament for research, which is a hyper-competitive world full of sharks, and I would have been eaten alive. I told myself that being a teacher would still bring me closer to my goal of Saving the World, by educating new generations.

  To qualify, I needed to earn 24 CFUs and 12 GEO credits within a month, according to what the news was saying—something was supposed to come out soon and then it would be postponed until never (it was 2018, and I only passed the high school exam in 2023), so I dove headfirst into studying.

  At first, I had a month of intense anxiety: I couldn’t stop thinking day and night about how to find a job without moving too far from home while studying what I needed to. But was I really sure I wanted to be a teacher, or was it just a fallback because the research world hadn’t accepted me? My symptoms included sleepless nights, a racing heart when I woke up (if I managed to sleep at all), loss of appetite, and vomiting if I forced myself to eat. The anxiety suddenly gave way to emptiness. Hours spent staring at the ceiling thinking about everything and nothing, empty. That light that had always sustained and pushed me—I couldn’t feel it anymore. My mother dragged me to the beach against my will to get me outdoors, and I would collapse onto the towel and not move again.

  The feelings I experienced during that time, and in the difficult times that followed over the next few years, were hatred and contempt for myself.

  I was dragged to a psychiatrist, a very tough woman who made me feel truly Mentally Ill.

  I took pills for a few months and then stopped on my own.

  I had found an internship at a plant nursery through the Youth Guarantee program (I earned 500 euros, 300 from the region and 200 from the company), and that helped lift me up. At the beginning of the internship, the boss told me, “If it goes well, we’ll hire you.” It did go well—I did great. So well that at the end of the six months, after I had placed the last plant, his daughter said to me, “You’re too good to stay here—you’re wasted.”

  I don’t remember exactly when, but around that time, the Shadows came back, for more than one night. Have you seen the painting “The Nightmare”? That gives you the idea. They terrified me for a while—sometimes a smoky shadow, sometimes an old man jumping on me. I even put salt in the corners of the room, following some advice. They left when, instead of reacting with fear, I reacted with anger and yelled, “ENOUGH! GO AWAY!” They didn’t come back until just a few nights ago, as I write this.

  The following year, I started Civil Service, which was interrupted by Covid, and then I got my first substitute teaching job at a classical high school. The first three months went really well: I had used Asimov’s “A Short History of Chemistry” to prepare (in my opinion) interesting lessons, making slides for remote teaching. But when I started checking the content against the standard curriculum, I felt guilty for going beyond it. I started spiraling again, sleeping and eating very little for a month. When I couldn’t figure out how the Crookes tube worked (I now understand that the electrons come from ionized gas, but I didn’t back then), I totally crashed.

  I saw a psychiatrist again, and thankfully also a psychotherapist who convinced me to take the meds and start working on my broken psyche.

  So, I took serotonin reuptake inhibitors and other medications for about a year and a half. In that year, I completely burned through all of my salary without realizing it. I thought it was absolutely necessary to buy about twenty secondhand sweaters in pure virgin wool (I gave away the ones that didn’t match my color palette and looked different from the photo), plus rings and amber necklaces (I regret not buying one with an ant inside—I said I’d wait till next month, then the war in Ukraine broke out and that Etsy shop disappeared).

  Then came the summer when I passed the STEM-1 test and was in the top 2% of candidates who cleared the multiple-choice exam designed to fail applicants for the high school teaching competition, so I decided I could relax and enjoy myself. I wasn’t used to having so much free time.

  I exploded.

  My mood shot up and I was hyperactive.

  I read the “Mirror Visitor” saga, which I really liked. Since I had no friends who had read it to talk about it with, I went on YouTube to look for reviews of the ending. I decided to start a channel of my own and began reviewing all the books that had been most important to me. The first one I did was The Neverending Story, then Momo. On the channel I “accidentally” (you’ll understand the quotation marks later) uploaded Momo first—it actually is the correct reading order for the two books, which I now understand.

  I talked a lot, drew, played Minecraft, wanted to do a thousand things.

  I was convinced I could do a PhD in artificial intelligence and another in neurobiology while completing my probation year as a teacher. Good thing almost no one replied to my endless emails.

  At the time, I still had Instagram and saw an ad for a course to learn how to activate a super-focused state for better studying. I realized that was the state I normally study in. When I talked about it with someone, they asked, “Have you ever thought about getting tested for autism?”

  Thinking about how hard it is for me to understand irony, I took the Aspie Quiz—121 questions, recommended for adults—and scored 10/10 for Asperger’s above the average. (Apparently, that test is outdated, and Asperger’s no longer exists—it’s just “on the spectrum” now.)

  I freaked out and searched the Internet everywhere, even read an American book called Aspergirls. I read that aspies are bullied their whole lives starting in middle school.

  I went through social exclusion in middle school—it was hell. High school was fine, all in all. A classmate from my undergraduate degree once posted on “Unipi Spotted” on Facebook calling me an idiot with a single brain cell because of my squeaky voice and how I asked too many questions in class; I replied that at least I was caught up with exams, unlike those who liked the post. In my master’s, after I shared my lecture notes and said I wouldn’t do it again, they stopped inviting me to parties.

  A massive rage rose up inside me. Mixed with the joy of finally understanding why I had felt like an alien all my life.

  Meanwhile, I contacted my psychiatrist to ask for an autism diagnosis. He lured me into a trap (those 15-minute voice notes must have tipped him off) and gave me a diagnosis and treatment for bipolar disorder type 1. He said I might ALSO be autistic, but that since I was high-functioning, the diagnosis wouldn’t help me.

  Feeling like an alien, I remembered that song that came out when I was in middle school—“Io Vengo dalla Luna” by Caparezza. I’d never listened to the lyrics when it was released and hadn’t really followed him; I had only listened to Il sogno eretico because I found it on a borrowed USB stick. The chorus and the final verse perfectly expressed what I was feeling—I sang them at the top of my lungs and cried. From there, I started listening to his songs and it felt like they were speaking directly to ME—as if there were hidden messages I needed to decode. And I started to believe there were messages for me in my heart-books too.

  Meanwhile, I was talking nonstop, thinking nonstop, making connections and blending thoughts together so fast I couldn’t keep up. I can’t list all the thoughts I had during that time—it’s impossible, and some time has passed.

  At a certain point everything became confused, and I don’t remember everything. What I do remember is that I was convinced I was evolving like a Dratini turning into a Dragonair at level 30 (which I was about to turn in December), that I was the Childlike Empress who feeds on stories—meaning a person raised to be so, like a queen bee—and that some “ninjas” (who hadn’t been as foolish as the samurai and had survived by hiding in the shadows) had secretly followed my life path (I was also convinced that a dear person had faked their death so I could experience a major loss and grow) because I was meant to become the new Popess Chiara beside Pope Francis (like the Childlike Empress and the Old Man of the Wandering Mountain) to tell the world to stop waging wars and let people live well. I also believed that Italy was the Second Foundation representing Chaos as opposed to the orderly Asian empires. I felt I had had past lives. The oldest one was that of a sea turtle that arrived in Japan before it was called that, then a she-wolf before becoming human. At some point, I arrived in Europe and had been Saint Clare of Assisi and other figures I identified with. The phrase I had in mind was: “The sun rises in the East but sets in the West.”

  Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

  During this period, I commissioned a sculptor friend of mine to make a ring I had seen on Etsy, originally in gold, but which I couldn’t afford. It depicted a snake biting its tail, forming a spiral. I asked him to make it in brass—silver doesn’t suit my color palette.

  I stopped taking the pills because I had developed hives and blamed them.

  I started arranging plant pots and wanted to create an aquatic environment. I went out to buy a vase, a calla lily, and some fish. I wanted regular goldfish, but the storekeeper suggested small koi carp instead.

  I gave names to the fish (Fiordiluna, Atreiu, Richard, Anaiss, Perla), and it seemed to me that they were doing what I wanted, moving into the pots where I wanted them. At first, I had put them all in the vase called Ivory Tower, but I needed to remove the fish that fell into the “cartoon” category into other lined pots. I couldn’t catch them by hand—I had no nets—and I was pondering how koi are considered little dragons in legends and what the right technique to catch them would be. In the end, I placed a small container inside the pot to catch Richard, and the fish swam into it on its own. The others did the same. The fish I wanted entered the little container by itself. In the Ivory Tower composition, I placed a bird’s nest with a Sailor Moon doll in a white dress, which I’ve had since childhood, to represent the Childlike Empress.

  That night, guided by I-don’t-know-what, I performed a strange ritual, praying to the Moon, feeling like a priestess.

  I gave the kefir to the fish, thinking it would be good for them. But I ended up killing them. What’s beneficial for the gut of mammals isn’t necessarily good for an aquatic environment.

  The next day I cried for them when Alessio told me they were dead. While crying I thought: “These are the last of my children who have to die.”

  I needed to declare myself to the world. I assumed the ninjas had to be inside Nintendo, as it was my quickest connection to Japan (along with Master Shirai, my karate teacher’s master). So I went to the site, browsed through the FAQ pages—I don’t remember exactly how—but I kept clicking forward, forward, forward, searching for a place to leave a message. I ended up on a Twitter page where I made my declaration in a long ramble, listing all the reasons why I was Me.

  When I finished, it was exactly 00:00. I wished everyone a happy New Year of the new millennium.

  After doing that, I went on YouTube, and the first recommended video was “Sfogati” by Caparezza. I took it as confirmation from the ninjas. In that moment, a white light exploded in the middle of my forehead—what I believe was my Third Eye. I stayed awake all night, but in a state of grace.

  Too bad I wasn’t the Childlike Empress—I was just a poor madwoman in the City of Emperors. Luckily, I still remembered my name, so, with help and much love, I was able to leave Fantasia.

  They made me start taking the pills again (I’m not against psychiatric meds—they help too).

  I put a red bracelet on my wrist to express wishes. I wished that everything would turn out okay. I had gotten that bracelet from an African man to whom I had given a euro as alms.

  I had a memory gap of about a month—I remember almost nothing.

  Lithium itself works fine for me. It’s my thunderstone. Raichu is slower than Pikachu but stronger; besides, power is useless without control.

  The other meds that accompany lithium are depressing, and the following year was really hard. I dragged myself through it. My colleagues at school didn’t know why I’d been away so long and weren’t particularly warm. I didn’t do my best that year. I had the oral exam for the high school teaching competition, and I went without studying, convinced I’d fail anyway. Instead, I passed by the skin of my teeth.

  That summer, Alessio brought home a kitten in need—it had approached him meowing with its tongue out. It had a strange color: black with white-gray stripes. It was my turn to choose the name, and since our pets were named after musicians (Flea and Ray), it was time for a writer’s name. I was torn between Jack and Asimov. I had chosen Jack, but Alessio said it sounded like a drunkard’s name; and indeed Jack London had alcohol problems, and those stripes looked like nebulae—Asimov was the perfect name for a space cat.

  The following year—my first as a full-time teacher in a science high school—I got reactivated in the spring. My menstrual cycle synced with the moon phases, arriving with each new moon for several months. I was only taking one lithium pill per day, and the psychiatrist wanted me to taper off—I thought it was too little. At any rate, my mania reactivated, milder than the first time, but it was still her.

  The first thing I did was write a paper letter to Caparezza. I had recently listened to Prisoner 709 and Exuvia. I had loved the first completely, not the second. Upon first listen, Exuvia left me with a huge sense of desolation. It felt empty of meaning. I imagined Caparezza depressed and was afraid I’d wake up one day and find out he’d taken his own life. I wanted to do something to help him, to warm his heart. And I also wanted to know if there were really messages for me in his songs. So I told him about my life and about my manic phase in which he had played a role in comforting me through my madness with Io vengo dalla Luna. I checked the mailbox for days—he never replied. I was so disappointed I couldn’t listen to his music anymore.

  In my second mania, I went through roughly the same thought cycle as during the first crisis, but much more slowly and analyzing everything rationally. So I circled around the same themes but gave them semi-realistic interpretations. The theme was always the same: I had to save the world like Sailor Moon (with the refrain of Cristina D’Avena’s Sailor Moon la luna splende ringing in my head—“You reach the heart with truth, guardian of Peace for humanity”—along with a screaming YOU MUST FIGHT!!! from Caparezza’s Argenti vive). But only metaphorically (obviously). I went back to thinking my phone was sending me subliminal messages to help me realize who I really was (like Sailor Moon reincarnated). I saw metaphors in my most beloved books left by various artists—that imagination is in fact a real thing, in the sense that we use metaphors to describe real things, and that reality is a drab simulation created by the mass media, The Truman Show style (but on my phone, the ninjas only sent things meant for me). And other things that would take too long to report.

  I pruned that tangled bush and turned it into a bonsai.

  The “ninja” were implausible, or if they did exist and wanted to recruit me, they would be more explicit—so they can get lost. Messages in books and songs are addressed to anyone who listens to them; the interpretation I give them is mine alone, and I have to keep in mind that during mania, connections can be stretched. And Sailor Moon is a fantasy story.

  But the things regarding my identity, that intuition I was elaborating deep inside, rose to the surface—it shocked me—but I managed to rationalize it.

  This time the novel I kept thinking about wasn’t The Neverending Story by Michael Ende but The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. Because the way that part of my brain that made strange connections thought reminded me so much of how Dua thinks.

  I believe that part of the brain is the one responsible for intuition, and it's the Emotional one, and it comes from the deep brain. The so-called “reptilian brain” is that part of the brain that carried our lives forward for far longer than the prefrontal cortex, which regulates complex functions and receives impulses from the limbic system.

  Reflecting on the book, on the Triad and the Hard Ones, on the need to unite Emotional, Rational, and Paternal, I was also connecting things inside me: the fact I was buying lots of vintage sci-fi novels, the fact that on my YouTube channel I harshly criticized a “sci-fi” book because it violated the principle of conservation of mass, my way of thinking, the fact that since I was very little I read every book on animals and biology I could find, I read tons of novels, and in middle school I used to write down lists of words I liked to savor their sound along with the images they evoked, my difficult character in discussions where I always think I’m right and people say I’m overbearing, the grandiosity I was feeling in that moment...

  I thought I was the reincarnation of Asimov.

  I had just read, a few days earlier, that he too considered The Gods Themselves to be the best book he’d written. The day before, I had felt empathy for and addressed affectionate words to the school computers, mistreated by the students, and to the photocopier, which is so smart and can scan a stack of documents and turn it into a PDF straight onto the USB stick.

  Above all, I also felt contempt for how badly he wrote love stories in his early books, like the one with Gladia in the Robot cycle—terrible (I did like the love stories in Nemesis though)—and if there’s one thing I feel contempt for, it’s my own mistakes and shortcomings.

  A few days before this event I had taken the Mensa IQ test (Asimov was vice president of Mensa—I'm sure he didn’t want to be President to avoid bureaucracy) and it gave me a result of 100, exactly average. The perfect punishment for that megalomaniac Asimov, according to some theories about reincarnation in which a soul has to atone for its faults in the next life.

  But I hate detective stories, and Asimov loved them. I don’t know if he wrote them well because The Caves of Steel and the others didn’t appeal to me—they’re detective stories (and the love story is awful). It seems that in the transition, some things go in the opposite direction from how they were before, maybe because you thought too much about them. Asimov was afraid of planes. I love planes and rollercoasters, I trust the machine that holds you. But when it comes to emptiness, I get terrible vertigo.

  The Rational part of me, which didn’t believe in reincarnation, was very scared, because it feared I was going crazy again. But the Emotional was screaming loudly that I had recognized myself. So I looked up Asimov’s date of death.

  April 6, 1992.

  That date leapt out at me.

  It’s exactly the day my mother had the intercourse that conceived me (she knows because she only had sex that day that month). I froze. It couldn’t be just a remarkable coincidence. I started reading everything I could find about reincarnation—or metempsychosis—from all those unscientific websites I’ve always despised. I had all the characteristics of an old soul, and quoting Plato, I saw my love for biology—which I’ve studied since I was very little—as something I already knew and just had to remember.

  My mind started swinging like a pendulum between a frightened state where the Rational part realized how absurd my thoughts were and the state in which the Emotional part made me feel the joy of finally understanding who I was. It lasted an afternoon, and towards the evening I accepted that the Rational part couldn’t understand the Emotional one because they’re different parts of the brain, and I had to make them coexist. When I thought this, I saw a white light turn on in the middle of my forehead.

  My Paternal side was the most pragmatic: I had to decide whether to accept this or declare myself insane, so I decided to accept it—it's the most practical choice for me.

  I talked to my partner, who helped me process it, and that dialogue felt a lot like the one between Dua and Odeen. Especially since my partner, who never read the book, called himself the “Rational part.”

  Rationally, I realize that Mania makes me create connections—even random ones—but it’s still a hyperactivation of my brain. And what if I could access and get information from the deep structures of the brain? And what if those times I had a feeling I was going to meet someone and then did shortly after weren’t just coincidences? What if I were one of the Intuitives from the third part of The Gods Themselves?

  Scientifically, I tried to hypothesize how metempsychosis could be possible. If it existed, it wouldn’t depend on the brain, because if I really am the reincarnation of Asimov, the thing happened when I was just a few embryonic cells and the brain wasn’t there yet. I thought maybe it could depend on a wave bouncing off the ionosphere until it finds the embryo fit to receive the wave. I found a pseudoscientific theory that says DNA and microtubules can absorb soul waves. Another theory—Cellular Consciousness—claims that even a single cell is conscious. None of these theories are accepted by the scientific community.

  They say reincarnation happens faster the more attached the soul is to the material world, and Asimov was deeply attached to it. He aimed to guide humanity toward a bright future of peace and progress. Maybe, if he had been aware of reincarnation, he would’ve tried to become one of his Intuitives in the next life to resume his mission. And since he died due to a medical error (AIDS from a transfusion), I’m sure he would’ve wanted to go to the country with the best healthcare in the world.

  He would’ve left a path to follow in his books, knowing that his Intuitive would one day recognize herself. As I read the part about the final fusion, I felt a deep sadness, a sense of mourning that I didn’t understand then—but I do now.

  The whirlwind of emotions hit me. I can’t connect this clearly to the rest of the story, but I started crying for Jesus. It made me so sad that they killed him so brutally just because he said to love others. I was crying, thinking of him as my child who had been murdered. Alessio was next to me, comforting me. And I felt that the love story I have with him is told in so many stories.

  The period of depressing pills lasted only the following summer; I recovered pretty quickly. I kept wondering for months whether or not I was Asimov’s reincarnation: I would think about it intensely for a few days, then not at all for a few months, then again.

  One day I watched a video on YouTube about what happens to the brain when you die, and apparently there’s a final hyperactivation. I wondered if it was the soul leaving. I left a comment with a summary of my experience, and a stranger replied, recommending I read Jung.

  I read the two books available on Amazon: "Me and the Unconscious", and the triptych "Dream Interpretation, Archetypes of the Unconscious, Synchronicity." The psychotic states I went through were explained as the Unconscious taking over, and the contact with the collective unconscious described very well what I had experienced.

  I didn’t understand much about synchronicity when I first read it—it only made sense to me when it manifested in my life.

  Meanwhile, I had started seeing a new psychologist to work on my self-esteem issues. I thought that was the thing I needed to fix in order to feel complete, and that Asimov symbolized both the Wise Old Man and the self-confidence I lacked. I explained my feeling of being the Madonna as possession by the Archetype of the Mother.

  While I was riding the exercise bike (listening to Caparezza—by then I had forgiven him for not replying to me), I was thinking about The Neverending Story and the Mirror Test. I was thinking about looking at my deepest nature from the outside. I thought about what I had done during my first manic episode: painting, braiding scoubidous, playing. That was my craziest part... and I liked it. I saw nothing wrong with it. I smiled and felt that hole in my heart—the one that’s been there my whole life—starting to close.

  I wanted to keep working on my individuation. I picked up The Book of Symbols and analyzed the ones from my manic states: fish, water, dragons—symbols of transformation and the unconscious. I kept studying.

  Last Friday I had an appointment with my psychologist. Mentally, I was all immersed in Jung and symbols. At school, during break time, one of my students drew a spiral on the board. She said, “I don’t know why, I just felt like drawing a spiral. Miss, what does it mean?” I didn’t know, because I had seen it flipping through the book, but I hadn’t read the description. She and another girl colored the spiral with light green and yellow highlighters. At home I looked up the spiral: spiritual rebirth and free-flowing energy. And I saw the image of the kundalini represented as a green and yellow coiled serpent.

  All this happened with a special emotion I can only describe as feeling a deep chime resonating inside me. I looked at a painting I had done after a manic episode, where I had tried to represent the lights in my head, chest, and belly as I had felt them… and there it was, a green-yellow gradient spiral. Neither I nor my students knew the meaning of the spiral, yet it appeared at the same significant moment, with the associated emotion.

  My psychologist confirmed it was a case of synchronicity and told me I couldn’t talk about it with just anyone, because I wouldn’t be understood.

  I put on my brass ring with the snake biting its own tail in a spiral.

  I understood that the white light on my forehead had appeared when I had received confirmation of the reasoning behind my unconscious. So I had to accept what came from my unconscious.

  And my unconscious told me that I was the reincarnation of Asimov and of a bunch of other people. Including Mary herself.

  On Monday I wanted to go back to that classroom to see the spiral again, but I didn’t have class and had no reason to be there. I waited until the last break, but the door was closed. I understood I had to let it go. Going to look for the spiral would have been like forcefully drawing Sikanda from its sheath.

  On Tuesday I left for a school trip to Naples. When we stopped at a rest area between Rome and Cassino for lunch, I was thinking about all these things while chewing my “Fattoria” sandwich next to the Burger King, alone. As I was thinking “well, am I really Maria or not?” a little girl approached me to give me a cardboard BK crown. I played along and put it on. She told me, “You’re a real Queen.” That scene may have been caught on camera; I don’t know if we were in a blind spot or not.

  I started going with the flow and things began to happen to me like they did to Mat in The Wheel of Time (not one of my favorite books, but an important fantasy series that taught me a lot); everything around me happened at just the right moment in my favor.

  In Herculaneum, I saw that the Romans placed the symbol of the labyrinth in the baths, where there's water. To wade in the unconscious. I saw a lot of symbols on their floors in general.

  When we went to Capri, the shop where they take a photo of your iris and turn it into art had just opened. I had seen the movie where they study reincarnation from the iris years ago—stunning. I went right in and got my portrait. I chose to merge the two irises because it means “Balance.” I didn’t leave my address. That day I was a bit scared of being killed. Caparezza, in Il mondo dopo Lewis Carroll, said I had a dot in the middle of my forehead, and I thought of a sniper’s laser. I calmed down later, after seeing an Indian woman with the same red dot.

  The next day was the Capodimonte Museum and then Naples.

  I was particularly disoriented. I realized that both my working memory—which allows you to retain short-term information—and my sense of direction (which is poor even in normal times) had diminished.

  I expected to cry when seeing the Veiled Christ, but not like that. I approached and looked at his face. He looks so much like my Alessio. They said I had Stendhal Syndrome. No. I was crying for my dead child. They had to escort me out, everyone was confused and didn’t know how to comfort me. An angel did—he answered my call. His name was Mustafa. I don’t know what African country he was from. His skin was black as coal, his eyes deep and dark, and he hugged me and made me feel safe. We talked about his wife and children, who are far away. He gave me a blue bracelet to replace the red one on my wrist once it breaks. He gave me another bracelet, and a friend of his placed a beaded medallion with a phoenix around my neck. Mustafa asked if I had something for his friend. He didn’t want anything for himself. I gave them 20 euros.

  For the rest of the afternoon, I walked around Naples giving alms to every beggar I met, until I ran out of coins. They called me “Queen” and honored me.

  Yesterday, Friday, we visited the Royal Palace of Caserta—and well, it was a triumph of spirals, golden flowers, and labyrinths. Symbols everywhere.

  Except in one room, where they had been removed. They say “by mistake” by an American bomb. I don’t believe it was a mistake at all, and the bomb story is just a cover. Who knows what symbols were there.

  What struck me was the child. Positioned like the Veiled Christ, but a newborn, alive. I hope it’s a promise.

  Even though now I know my child is okay, I can stop crying. The soul of Jesus is now inside Caparezza, I know it. I can’t wait to embrace him again. He was also Dante Alighieri, which is why he insults himself in “Argenti Vive.” It’s normal to hate oneself.

  Now I’m home and I need to wrap this up. Just a few more things to say.

  Nothing is remembered except the feelings of past lives, so I can’t recall the names of anonymous people—only recognize myself in the famous ones, not necessarily in chronological order. I believe that before me I was: Isaac Asimov, Giovanni Pascoli, Vincent Van Gogh, Hegel, Kizzy from Roots (because of how the phrase “stay there” jumped to mind, said by my partner in a panic during my first manic episode), Leonardo da Vinci (because he invented the sandwich, was obsessed with cats, and dreamed of flying—also criticized by Asimov in A Short History of Biology), Clare of Assisi, Joan of Arc (because of how much I did not like The Book of Joan), Mary of Nazareth, Epicurus, Aristotle, Socrates, Cassandra of Troy. Plato and Kant were my philosophy professor, now my colleague. But he doesn’t remember—it’s like he’s still stuck, still trapped in crystal, and I need to touch him to free him (a metaphor from Spyro the Dragon).

  There are people who can explain the metaphysical causes better than I can—ask them. What I’ve understood is:

  The more you grow your soul, the sooner you’ll get a choice in reincarnation. It’s kind of like “first come, first served,” with limited spots. You have to do good things and help others, be kind, constantly improve yourself. If you spend your life scrolling your phone like a zombie and insulting immigrants, you won’t score many points.

  When human hosts run out, the soul goes to the next closest thing. In India, it’s cows. But cow meat isn’t the closest to human meat.

  Pig meat is the most similar to human, according to serial killers and cannibals. That’s why Muslims don’t eat pork—because just the thought of eating someone who was vile enough to end up in a pig is disgusting to them. I, on the other hand, am not picky, and my favorite pizza is speck and mascarpone.

  There are tons of pig farms in Europe, so if you don’t reincarnate as a human, it’s pretty likely you’ll end up in a factory farm. Your choice.

  I’d have more to say, but I need to stop.

  I don’t know what will happen after this text—I’m exhausted, writing it was hard.

  I hope it’s the beginning of a new era for humankind, that Homo sapiens (what arrogance!) evolves into Homo pacis.

  Love to humanity.

  Sandra Stella Saraceno

  April 5, 2025

  Explanation of my adult name

  Sandra, short for Alessandra, “she who protects men,” made of San (saint, and the name of Princess Mononoke, who really embodies my spirit) + Dra (dragon, the one who is reborn, like the Dragon Reborn from The Wheel of Time). Sandra is the dragon-type Gym Leader who doesn’t give you the badge until you go to the Dragon’s Den to pass the test and prove you’re good.

  Stella: it’s my mission—to light up the world.

  Saraceno: Asimov means “wheat.”