My Way Back Story, Part One

🔑Here I’m starting to present you with semi-not-randomly complied paragraphs of facts from my current lifetime biography since birth (February 4th 1982) and up to February 2015. I can support the text of points listed below some later on a go of updating this page (you will notice by a date-time added to it), providing you with a documented evidence (personal photos, online notes with time-stamps, and probably eyewitness accounts etc). If at the beginning of reading some references from the past may seem puzzling to you in terms of the reasons why they were included in this text, then in the end everything that has been told finds its meaning.

• I survived that fetus of my physical body had been rejected because of my blood type as my parents having blood rhesus conflict. I was prematurely extracted from the womb and put into an incubator after complete blood transfusion. I have a scar related to it on my right arm since. I don’t know who was a blood donor. My blood type at birth and till later 2003 was O(I)+. It was the same in the year 2000 (18 y.o.) when testing by medical procedures for army enlisting (later not served). Then it switched to A(II)- because of hepatitis type “A” infection and following treatment (20 days spent in a hospital, many tests performed and blood samples were taken then). It changed next time to B(III)+ when I registered in local hospital at Garni village, Armenia, in late June 2020 (I have it documented).
• First encounter and realization of death and physical mortality occurred when I was about 5 y.o. – witnessed a funeral procession in my household (Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, 26/1) on a day of spending my time in kindergarten nearby. I learned about a death and dying basics from my mother later that day asked her about.
• My first personal experience of facing death of a relative is for my maternal grandmother, who was honored defender of Moscow during the Great Patriotic War during Nazis' bombing of the city (1941), and with whom I was mostly close around from my birth and until April 1989 for the time of the grandmother's death (7 y.o.); she was living with my mother and me in same apartment by the address mentioned above.
• Since kindergarten years (4-7 y.o. period) I already become fascinated about death and afterlife. I was trying to understand how it is ‘to be dead at all’ and I couldn’t find any solid answer inside myself. So, I began to contemplate about “What it is that “there-after” of existence or non-existence?”. As a natural way of my thinking process consequences, sometime later a question came to me as “Where I was before my birth?” and it was a totally ‘mind-cracking’ type of a question! I tried to recall anything there, but got nothing, and it was like a blocking black wall arising behind me obscuring my view. Other questions of that kind, which worried me heavily, were “What if it was not me to be born to my mother, so where I’ll be then and who I would be being myself then and there - the same or being anyone else? And how it feels to be 'anyone else than myself?"
• With my fascination with a death phenomenon and with a “mysterious beyond” even stronger, I began finding my attention focused on media and fiction, which was somehow dealing with the issue, from everything I could occasionally discover and think about, depending on my childish level of understanding of such matters.
• One of the first revealing media to me was animated short film “Кентервильское привидение / The Canterville Ghost (1970), based upon the Oscar Wylde’s short story. It stricken me, and I felt for The Ghost depicted as a bearded old man desperately trying to get rid of his dwelling’s occupants. It opened me to a knowledge that there are some people living ‘beyond’ somehow.
• I was baptized in Russian Orthodox Christian Church in infancy by my mother’s intentions. Though my godmother (best friend of mom’s) were atheist at the time, and godfather was a younger and true believer (more spiritual and philosophical because of his life work devotion – related to USSR Academy of Science World Religions studies in modern society associated with my mother in this work and research area);
• My mother Vera was archeological and ethnographic scholar (with field work) in the area of folklore and mystical knowledge of indigenous peoples of the north and Siberia, but also specializing in Iranian religious history (Zoroastrianism and the Cult of Fire), Middle Asian (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan), – she was totally pro-life in her attitude, traveling a lot in her younger years on her field research expeditions work assignments throughout whole ex-USSR - from Kamchatka up to Baltic region and down to south of Caucasus mountains.
• My mother kept various artifacts brought from her archeological excavations work studies – some of ancient Greek origins from Crimea and Krasnodar region near Black Sea coast (Chersonesus and Taman). I discovered early that she brought human bones with her as well – a coccyx was hanging on a wall at our home kitchen – she liked to decorate every piece of the apartment’s environment with any tiny bits of artwork, artifacts, pictures, collective ethnic small figures and stuff like that. There was also an ancient human skull smashed to pieces and being kept in a bag, which I dreamed to re-assemble one day, like I did then with airplanes model kits, when become older (in fact I buried it probably in early 2000's after learned from somewhere in a book about a ‘spiritual complications’ of keeping such stuff at home, along with that coccyx, and that jaw bone one time I brought at home, which was found on a river bank of the Naberezhnaya Tarasa Shevchenko st. behind my house building during vast excavations performed there in late 90's for changing water tubes throughout the old Jewish Dorogomilovo cemetery there (lots of skeletons were lying on a ground here in there, while local children were playing with bones like a puzzles, and there came also older folks, who were trying to find some treasures buried around).
• Being an academic scholar and of her generation of intelligentsia in USSR my mother Vera (born 1946) was keeping bookshelves and bookcases full of various literature – from specific publications related to her work, to religious studies, mysticism, poetry, classics, fiction of foreign and local authors. I liked many books very much and most of all a big old one like from late 19th – early 20th century encyclopedic illustrated of anthropology and world nations history. I loved then everything about nature – like biology, zoology and paleontology being presented in encyclopedic format of publications. Of wild nature I was instantly fascinated mostly by spiders, butterflies, scorpions and snakes. Later I discovered books about sea life, and this became of my favorites too – from nice dolphins to creepy obscure fishes of ocean deeps, especially, but I liked crabs and shrimps as well.
• I went to a primary school (generally in USSR and Russia it called just “school”, meaning ten years classes from 7 (in some cased 6) to 17 years old being spend there. My school is at the next building corpus (Kutuzovskiy Prospekt, 24-A) and there was also an old tombstone from that same Dorogomilovo cemetery at the school yard, lying there for years then and even after I graduated the school in summer of 1999.
• Before going to school and mostly at first years of it, I started to put my attention to any sources related to a ‘spiritual life’ meaning a ‘life of spirits after death’, learning from books and papers about ghosts, and as I mentioned previously, being myself triggered and probably primary activated for such fascination by that animated film.
• There was other Soviet animation dealing with similar ghostly characters (like, for example, the famous and favorite Karlson from The Rooftop guy, who was scaring thieves and others being dressed himself in white clothes pretending to be a ‘spooky ghost’ flying and howling around, and of Fröken Bock housekeeper calling on a television program asking to do a report about encountering that ‘ghost’ for the ‘whole wide world”).
• Another one among favorites of mine was animated series about so called “Домовёнок Кузя” (Domovionok Kuzya) – a home-keeper spirit performing some kind of a poltergeist activity visible only to his little girl friend.
• I’d could recall and provide you with more examples of animation (like the “Дядюшка Ау» (“The Uncle Ow”, 1979) and movies (like the “Viy” based upon the Ukrainian horror story by Nikolai Gogol with same name) which were mostly fascinating to me, if you’d asked, but here I’ve emphasized the very theme and topics which become one of my major predominant obsession throughout childhood-teenage years and till now on.
• In early 1990s I discovered local public libraries. There I found some books I was interesting hugely in then – about ufology and paranormal. Then also was my delving into all horror-thriller fiction started to unfold in large.
• I had at home a first publication (1991) of Raymond’s Moody book ‘Life after Life’ in USSR since it become available. My mother told me that it dealing with ‘near death experiences' reports proving a reality of afterlife, but it was years before I read it myself, because I was 9 y.o. at the time and being interested more in illustrated books of any kind, but I remember a cover art of that book, and I recall it was of my awareness of that book existence since, just because of it being in front of my eyes every time I was looking through out bookshelves daily of my mother’s pretty vast home library
• The same period of time I was told by mom that ‘Johnathan Livingstone Seagull’ by author and pilot Richard Bach is something very special for me to read one day, but more it was about another book written by, and also a pilot, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “Le Petit Prince”, which I was examined regularly, trying to recreate in my own drawings the famous illustrations of it, even before I started to read myself (at the age of 6, as a matter of fact).
•  My mother studied French in school, her English skills were below basics.
• I started studying English from first grade at school in 1989 till graduated. I was easily good at it though not paying much attention for memorizing words or rules. At higher grades I had three years of French language as an open classroom group as well. I was good enough at it, but I was in my puberty, so I was mostly staring at this pretty young hot teacher asking us to sing Joe Dassin’s hits to her as a training exercise as she proposed to us, or - at my classmate-girls then obviously becoming the girls around me. I've been very amorous since I was five or six. Early puberty of my body.
• From the moment when, in early childhood, my mother Vera mentioned the German city of Dresden in connection with its famous gallery, this city name became of something special for me. In the early 90's and in the following years, I tried several times to start studying German language on my own, because it felt pleasant and sounded like being familiar to me, and I easily found how some German words to match with English and Russian.
• From books of local libraries, I learned deeper about paranormal phenomena and activities of this kind (there were lots of such literature appeared in early post-Soviet ’90-s with Perestroika – like a flood of the genre by local authors mostly and later came more foreign translated issues).
• Then (early 90’s) I discovered parapsychology in general as the area for studying, and very practical applications of it for its' scientific studies were the subject I even wanted devote myself in the future full-time. I was fascinated by these three major facts about it: 1). Such paranormal abilities should exist, because lots of people were reporting them; 2). Such abilities could be scientifically studied by experiments and analytics, as described in some of those books I read then; and 3). There are some ways of mastering such abilities although there were also told that probably not everyone is capable of doing that.
• The same thing for me was about ufology. I witnessed myself and UFO/UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomenon) in summer 1990 at Krasnodar Black Sea beach (the Taman' region) with my mother Vera, because while relaxing on a sand, I was playing of detecting every of approaching planes by their sounds to detect and recognize them in clear skies. But that time of the incident I heard slightly but distinctively different and reminding me of a big jet plane lower humming sound, and when I turned my head up right in far sky above me, mom and others around there was visible clearly that white object, which looked like four rectangular clouds close to each other, radiating this very sound like directly at us (every common airplanes are having their sound volume to become louder and quieter as moving across the skies) in increasing volume. But then I noticed the object’s rectangles began to dissolve from inside, until only edges of them become visible and then disappeared as their strange loud sound as well.
• Later in the 90’s I found in local library a book by one Russian some-famous ufology author Aleksei Priyma, where I read about another different accounts of UFOs being witnessed in the Krasnodar region and also mentioning the same summer of the year 1990’s people testimonies. So I became hugely excited, because of finding that records confirming that not only me, my mother and some other people I didn't knew at the time, were indeed witnessing something paranormal, even when Vera witnessed that UAP, she was like “Ah, OK”-level of her attitude and interest to it in seeing something like that.
• So, I wrote a letter to the author A. Priyma describing my account in details. He replied me pretty soon with his thanks, and telling me, that he is now in great financial struggles, so he proposed me to buy his new book for a “crazy price” (his words) – well, I never replied to that, probably because I was discouraged of him not giving any comments about the account I shared so passionately with him, and also because he was asking me about money I haven’t had at a time.
• There were also a couple books on classical magic and occult by Papus in my mother’s library although I was skeptical about “how this really works? On what basis and principles?” Though I become fascinated about those books some years later – and this is for another story to tell you about, or from a possibility of translating my memoir book already online (in Russian) since 2015. So then most of all I was fascinated by all those images of pentacles, sigils and numeric codes, accompanied with strange incantations words and other special spirits names and prerequisites for a magic to work. I decided then to let it rest for a time, until I’ll figure out what is the main principle is behind it to make it seemingly working somehow through ages and nations across the globe.
• So, then I switched my intellectual attention to study a practical parapsychology – clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, astral projection, - all stuff like that, and from a practical perspective, most of all.
• As I mentioned about that cartoon about the ‘Kuzya” the home-spirit, I also was deeply interested in poltergeist activity and hauntings. There were many reports like that since late years of Soviet era and much more in Russia of ‘90’s. To become a ‘Ghostbuster’ following also my inspiration I got from the movie of the same name, was a big dream of mine though I couldn’t realize who to do that in practice.
• My own first personal experience of spontaneous telepathy, clairvoyance, and remote viewing started in a middle – second half of ‘90’s.
• Since my early childhood I was fascinated with playing cards. I started to be interested in it since I found some old decks probably even from 1950’s-1960’s. There were beautifully drawn depictions of Dames and Kings in different styles. I liked to imagine dialog stories of them being characters in my fairy-tales like dolls.
• Later, in my first school years, I discovered rules of how to play cards with my friends, and it was also very gambling tournaments in our house yards and everywhere around.
• But more than playing as the big interest for me was a discovery of such cards being also an instrument for performing illusion tricks which were possible to do even by myself! There were some simple tricks explained in Soviet popular-science journals for youth like “Юный Техник” (Young Technician), and in some other newspapers for entertainment purposes. I was studying how to do and performing some tricks from it, and I liked to train my fingers for these practices, or just to spend time to make ‘tables’ out of cards layouts. My mother Vera also told me, that there are other games too but for adults only - like solitaire and preference. I was intrigued by the knowledge, though there were no one to show me their rules and help in a practice.
• In second half of ’90-s I was parapsychically-shocked for the first time of my life that strong by experimenting myself as a game with quick guessing a card right before taking them a one after another out from a deck. When it became of series of my correct guessing, I become thrilled excited to my core nature, meaning this very experience changed me profoundly since, because I repeated it many times after using different decks, and being in different places, but for the time doing that only alone by myself.
• Next major 'psychic shock' to me was at a hangout with some classmates of mine, spending time there around my home house building playing cards. At one moment my fellow A.V. of a sudden, turning to me from his sit, he asked for the sake of the surprise effect – “Guess a card!” – and I instantly replied him with a correct guess. Now he was the one surprised there, but laughingly he asked me again to guess another card, and… I just fired it right away like having instant knowledge+image of it – and in a bullseye again correctly! After his third attempt, and when I guessed it right again, we both, but mostly A.V. become confused of what we just witnessed, and I quickly changed a topic. But this very experience also made a profound transformation of my mind's attitude toward 'what is possible'.
• I liked to do various things about playing cards (creating my own decks out of a cardboard, for example) till probably the end of the past millennium, and the last time I deeply become fascinated with cards was a poker game, when I learned the rules in some boarding house spending my summer time vacations with Vera in a countryside. I brought my knowledge of the game to Moscow and we played with friends for a while but not long because we already had other things of interests and games to play before the time to go to get higher education arrived. Strangely enough to feel that somehow remarkable to mention here, that during next couple decades since accidentally I was meeting professional players of poker (mostly those who play it online), and when I worked on video edition of a poker sport tournament show for TV in 2009. I still like and collect from time to time various types of artistic card decks like tarot or metaphoric ones.
• I had a remote vision experience, when I told myself to spell like a spontaneously improvised sentence in my mind while being pretty far from my home, and memorizing the phrase at the moment, and when coming home later I just took a first one newspaper I found at my home apartment, opened it and read... this very phrase right before my eyes!
• I had experiences of telepathic reading of test tasks while studying at the academy. Later I began to call all standard tests like that being ‘tests on telepathy’ (because sometimes I really just didn’t know or can't remember correct answers at the time, so here you see how parapsychology saved me for some times at the academy exams).
• My favorite playset toy of childhood was Made in USSR “Юный Фокусник” (Young Magician). It was very special thing to me, and I liked to play with it by myself, but also showing some tricks from it to my mom and friends of mine on occasion. I was keeping it partly survived all these years up to 2015, when I moved from my old apartment, as a very precious thing to me.
• I really loved our home desk with all these drawers, and I was just happy when my mother gave it to me for full use. In general, I loved all such desks and bookcases with doors, as I still love them today. I used and liked to hide some of my precious things in the drawers of such a table, as well as look for secret places in it to attach particularly important items.
• Since early childhood, I had an amazing ability to intuitively find everything hidden around the apartment we lived with mom, so I had no surprises from her for the new year eve presents (well, almost never).
• Also, from my childhood Vera was highly amazed at how I regularly on occasion found some precious objects or jewelry on the street.
• I was kind of a theatrical from an early age, I liked to change into anything to show myself in this form and what make me laugh. Clowns and guys performing in some animals costumes on stage were always fascinating to watch for me.
• Already in my 8-9 years of age, I had a chance to perform in the Pillar Hall of the House of Unions (the Main Concert Hall of the former USSR) as a soloist of the ensemble. I still keeping a newspaper with my portrait photo in an article written about those performances.
• From the moment when my mother told me about existence of Indian yogis and Siberian shamans, and also when Vera took me to a scientific conference of ethnographers, where they showed a documentary film dedicated to such topics about human beings' special capacities like piercing themselves through torso with metal rods, swallowing swords, walking on burning coals and broken glass, burying themselves underground without access to air, water and food, then I decided, that I had to know at least the fundamental truth behind these phenomena.
• According to her own then a scientific journalistic work, as well as personal interests, my mother in the early 90's went to the presentation of then famous and popularly popular psychics and 'modern sorcerers', and her stories fueled my personal interest in the study of parapsychology much more.
• From the moment I first saw the cartoon on the old black-and-white TV "Record", which appeared in our house in the late 80's, I was shocked by this kind of art and show presented to me. Later I tried to draw like frame-by-frame on sheets of paper and in notebooks "cartoons" of mine, and I also dreamed of becoming a cartoonist.
• In my early childhood, I adored watching filmstrips on a special unpretentious projector, especially pulling a sheet as a screen and turning off the light in the room, the curtain, excited me.
• The first film I remember the most because its plot and character shocked me when I was still a child is the film "The Gold Rush" (1925) by Charlie Chaplin, especially the episode where a Little Tramp is eating his leather shoes for the sake of survival in harsh conditions. Charlie Chaplin himself immediately felt somehow special and inspiring figure to me, and as a child, I, regularly, and for a long time contemplated about him, and I wanted to be fortunate enough to watch more of his films.
• The first Western TV show that most captured and delighted me was "The Magic of David Copperfield" show, which was broadcasted in Russia since early 90's. Most of all I was surprised by his trick with flying, and felt something special about him passing through the wall trick.
• I've been puzzled for a very long time then about how Copperfield pulls off his tricks on such a big scale like it was shown on TV of his famous vanishing the Statue of Liberty trick. Why are the special fishing lines on which he was hung invisible? How did he manage to get around that long big wall so fast that he actually seemed to walk through it? For me, from the first scenes of that Copperfield's show, it was not perceived as a "magic" or a "miracle", but as some kind of technical trick or a very smart television fraud.
• From early childhood, and for sure - after being 7 years of age, - I had lucid dreams and controlled flights in my dreams, which gave a lot of insights but also provided me with even more puzzling questions to my mind. Later, by the end of the 90's, I began trying the practice of lucid dreaming on my own, inspired by the book of Carlos Castaneda one friend gave me as a birthday present.
• As a child, I was very interested in Australia, I felt very special feelings for it as mixed with a dreaming about me being there. I was especially interested in its' rare and dangerous wild fauna and amazed by views of vast savanna landscapes. The "Crocodile Dundee" of Paul Hogan's character became like a super-hero role model to me for a while, after me and Vera went to watch it in a cinema at the first screening of that movie.
• At first, in the 90's, when I began glue-assembling various aviation models - later mainly of helicopters, the first aircraft type models, that I adored, were biplanes. My big dream then was to make a real flying model of a biplane with a motor, for which I was engaged in an aviation design circle for young people in my district nearby of a house building I lived my first two years of life.
• I was interested in handcuffs' mechanics and thrilled by it in general at a first sight. Then I hardly wanted to get real ones. In the 90's, only cheap half-toy handcuffs began to be sold to majority of citizens, and with which I and my friends loved to play "cops and robbers” sometimes.
• One day, I guess in the late 90's, I was flexing my fingers and exercising them in terms of flexibility, when suddenly my left thumb bent inside out. It being that way since.
• I've always liked old gramophones, movie projectors, photo cams. In the mid-90s, I became interested in photography as art, and studied it in a circle placed at the same building, where I studied aircraft modeling as I mentioned above, and learn how to prepare and develop a film and create pictures with chemicals and red lamps. Later doing these processes also at my childhood best friend's home. It was even a kind of "sacred occupation" for me then in dark bathrooms dealing with like miraculously appearing realistic images of memories on a paper because of light and chemistry.
• At school in my class for all years I was the best in writing at literature lessons. The teacher marked me as being somewhat special to her in this area, and she kept my long (a record of it was up to 20 pages written from scratch at some class exams) essays to herself until my graduation from school in 1999.
• So in those school years, I dreamed of becoming a writer, then largely inspired by the works and author's notes of Stephen King, introduced to me by a older brother of a best childhood friend of mine; and particularly his novel “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” is quite amazing piece of work may be familiar to you because of the famous 1994 movie based upon it, but for you interest, this story is obviously being based on the movie "Escape From Alcatraz" (1979), which is also an adaptation of a book with the same name, based on true story of events happened in 1962.
• Among Stephen King's works, I liked most of all his realistic stories about people with paranormal abilities - telekinesis, pyrokinesis, contact clairvoyance (Carrie, The Dead Zone, Firestarter, The Green Mile), and experiences at haunted places (The Shining, Bag of Bones).
• I have always been particularly fond of and continue to appreciate really old, or any preserved, typewriters. One of these, already electric at the time, I used at home to write my school and institute essays. Also, on it I wrote my author's script for a comedy slasher genre of a movie, that we were going to shoot with friends on VHS camera just for fun, but with a completely serious approach to its production as we imagined it, again mostly being inspired by the published script of Stephen King's "Storm of the Century" TV series as the novel. I also used this typewriter to type my own lyrics of songs for our local rock band "Mind Mutilation" in 2000-2002.
• I liked to compose improvised, via just catching inspiration, poems during school hours in the classroom. Sometimes I played with my desk-mate in alternately writing funny poems. Sometimes I wrote silly poems in the style of Russian poets for the sake of a joke.
• I have regularly won competitions and quizzes on erudition in my life, when they came spontaneously to my attention.
• In fact, I am very good at advertising and promotion, including from the point of view of creative ingenuity (back in the school times age I won the main prize (a big clay-made teapot) from the Pickwick Tea brand as the sponsor by coming up with a promotional advertising slogan for the children's magazine “Весёлые Медвежата” ("Funny Bears"). However, first of all, it works that easy for me to creatively advertise other people and their services and products, whereas when it comes to myself, I experience some unconscious anxiety, or nervousness, having a feeling like of "I am under the gun", a phobia with a built-in program hidden in it, - "if I stick myself out deliberately, it will definitely end later it's extremely bad for me."
• One of my main and long-lasting earlier phobias, was that of inflammation of the appendix, getting into surgery and losing my conscious state because of a general anesthesia. At the same time, I was afraid to accidentally swallow something that I couldn't digest as a cause for such inflammation. Since I was told that if your appendix would ever become inflamed, then they (doctors) will take you to a surgery to cut it off as soon as possible, otherwise you'll die. I already experienced a pretty brutal adenoids surgery at the age of 4, I guess, when I was lied that 'everything gonna be OK, and no pain at all' bullshit, after what doctors strapped my arms and legs to the chair and got into my violated little mouth with a sharp metal special instrument looked similar to a can opener, which I remember to this day. The knowledge about appendicitis made me-kid become phobic of two things at ones: to eat accidentally something dangerous to be cause of that (especially I was scared and always worried about swallowing accidentally any tiny bit of husk from sunflower seeds), and the other is to be 'picked up away by doctors', thinking then that only if there is any way to just wait in hope my appendix will heal itself somehow, just to avoid a whole hospital and surgery things. This, but also because my mother wasn't a cook almost at all in her skills there, I developed a habit to study closely and sort out all the pieces of food on the plates to the smallest detail, for which I also received condemning comments from her like "What are you picking at there? Go and eat it now!" I still have this, not a full-time anxiety, but a distinct alertness while me eating sunflower or pumpkin seeds, though it's not such neurotic as it had become in me then before. I remember me as a kid thinking repeatedly to myself to never get to a general belly surgery in my life (and I survived without it to these days, thanks Fortune!). And even today, if I was put before such a choice, I'd prefer to ingest any poisonous berries or wild mushrooms of unknown effects (which, by the way, I've been doing from time to time, to test and see what would happen then, and basically to strengthen the immune system), but no way I'll ingest a husk or some indigestible solid pieces of anything. Watching or hearing some people are swallowing a small solid stuff like diamonds to hide it from customs, for example, makes me think that they are crazies, because I'd never want to risk like that! Even seeing dogs’ feces around full of undigested plastic bags, bones pieces and other indigestible stuff like that, makes me feel like here I'm looking right on a miracle! Wow! They DID IT!
• Another early childhood phobia of mine was the fear of drowning and the fear of suffocation in general. It was exposed like full scale in me first time when being triggered by experiences at Black Sea with mother Vera in 1984, when she tried to take me far more than before into waters, playing with me on her arms (and she a was a top swimmer in her younger years, by the way). I become so frightened after a first experience of being fully emerged underwater in that vast amount of dark shaky liquid around me and to horizon and back, so when I finally cried enough high to mom to get me to the beach, angrily and totally infuriated I was trembling and screaming in spite and : "Море плохое! Я его сломаю!!" ("The sea is bad! I'm gonna break it!!") Later years to overcome the fear of drowning, I became a skilled swimmer in kindergarten, but only after a stern female coach threatened our group that she would drown us all there if we did not start swimming ourselves as adults. And I became a fan of free diving as well.
• That phobia of suffocating was combined with the fear of being imprisoned in enclosed spaces. At the same time, for some reason, being a little kid, I felt quite comfortable if I get myself into boxes or cabinets, but only when I did it myself, and not when I was locked up there and held against my will.
• When I already learned about human mortality and funerals in general, I became obsessed with coffins: I drew them, and tried to make them out of paper. When on funerals of my grandmother Pelagia I saw how a coffin lid was closed before a funeral, and being nailed, it was when I deeply realized, looking at it all, that "I WANT to GET OUT OF THERE!" - in a physical and, somehow, I would say, in a psychological sense in general, meaning to escape from the very possibility of dying, then being boarded up and buried under the thickness of the earth. And staying there for ever, while everyone thinks you're dead. But what if I’m not?
• When I read at literature lessons at school about Nikolai Gogol and his biggest fear of being buried alive (which seems like eventually happened indeed, as it became known after the exhumation of his body years later, if it wasn't a just rumors), this thought began to eat my brains like a sick obsession.
• I started constantly thinking about ways of how I could avoid such a fate for myself in a case. How can I warn my loved ones so that they are convinced that I am still alive there (it was still difficult for me to imagine myself "really dead")? I began to come up with my inventions of ways to get out of the coffin, or what to choose as a tool, that I would ask my loved ones to put in my coffin just in case. But what if I’d just suffocate before I get out? That's why I was regularly training myself to catch a breath as long as possible then!
• Since childhood, I had recurring dreams about me finding myself in a small room, where walls begin to gradually shift inward until I am crushed, freaking out in panic, because I just cannot find any even tiny hole to try to get out of there.
• A likely another huge trigger for the activation of this phobia was one of the episodes of the Soviet TV series about Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson (one of my favorite literary heroes of the beloved writer Conan Doyle, who also influenced my passion for cryptozoology). There is a scene I was exposed to as a kid watching it on TV, in which, as I remember, one of characters falls into a trap made like a press-thing, which is about to crush that person, and for a while it seems that it will not be possible to him to escape it.
• I've always had a strong phobia of burning alive for as long as I can remember myself (but if in being then in a sleeping state, than not so much). However, I was very captured by the story from the movie "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984) about how a brutal cunning maniac was burned alive out of revenge by parents of children murdered by him. Mysteriously, that maniac, Freddy Krueger, continued to live after, but in dreams of those children. It was one of the first Hollywood films that I also watched on the big screen in the very early 90's.
• At the beginning of 2001 (19 years old), very sad news came to me that one of my mother's close longtime friends, the poet Inna Clement, died after burning down in her apartment from a lit cigarette when she fell asleep drunk. On the one hand at the moment, I became afraid of the same fate, because of my mother's bad issues with alcohol, and on the other hand, I felt that she was lucky enough, since, apparently, the woman being asleep first suffocated to dead (which also hit my other phobia, but not that much) with smoke, and only then burned. So, with that terrible accident I became reinforced with my believe, that being burned alive was probably the most terrible way of dying.

🔑Continue with the Part Two...