A chilly bedroom. I'm using my down sleeping bag as a blanket, and it's still not enough. Disturbing--the bag's rated well below freezing, but it seems thinner than it should be. I fold it over so it's double-thick. Now it's narrow, so bits of me keep slipping out from under. Brr.

In the morning I wake feeling down. The room is grim: not just cold but gray and dark and viewless. But it's only my first night. Give the town a chance!

I'm in San Luis Obispo, on the south-central California coast, north of Santa Barbara. I wanted a small town out of range of my family's telepathic field. I suspected that my persistent phobias and my weird guilt feelings were telepathic spillover from my crazy, brilliant relatives. And it looks like I was right. They all lived near me in the Bay Area, and as I drove south, the feelings faded out. I'm out of broadcast range!

My therapists were wrong. You CAN run away from your problems--if they're external. All along, I wasn't walking around with my family's craziness inside me, after all. I was picking up broadcasts. Here, for the first time... radio silence. I can seek a job and a girlfriend without panic attacks or getting sick. The geographic cure! Famously ineffective for neurotics--"wherever you go, there you are"--but for telepaths, it works.

The room's miserable now, but this far south, winter's brief. In a few weeks it'll be warm, and if not, I'll find a better room. My present discomfort isn't a sign something's wrong. It's just the cost, and a very low cost, for escaping a lifetime of madness and misery. At last. At last. At last.

MORNING NOTES

• San Luis Obispo, the Central Coast: 1: Mariel Hemingway found love here in the film Personal Best. 2: Philip K. Dick lived and wrote here. 3: My dad grew up nearby, in Santa Barbara.
• Why my down bag seems thin: years ago I lived in a car with my brilliant, crazy, violent girlfriend Kay. She slashed it open in a rage; though re-sewn, it lacks a lot of its original insulation. So did I, after her battering.
• I have felt depressed lately, retreating into worn-out old defenses. But the dream reassures me it's short-term--I'm stressed because I've moved out from under my family's shadow at last. Temporary misery, but permanent change!
• The geographic cure the dream proposes: may well be literal. My parents and sisters and I have no boundaries--involuntarily broadcasting/sharing dreams, emotional shocks, physical traumas. ESP researchers mostly say distance doesn't matter, but my dreams disagree--moving far away really might help.

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