Deconstructing "I think, therefore I am" (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781665771603)

I began writing "Deconstructing 'I think, therefore I am " as a comic memoir, but remembered a terrifying nightmare I'd had several times as a very young child. In the nightmare I found myself alone without a body in an entirely empty world forever. I awoke in instant panic. I was alone, not because there were no other people present but because there was no such thing as another person. I thought I was in Hell.

Fear that the nightmare was truth hidden behind a delusion, the world, became my waking obsession. Mindlessly I muttered continuous desperate prayers to stifle the poisonous thoughts and the hallucinations my loneliness generated. I alienated embarrassed friends and even my family until I was truly alone but for hallucinations. There was, however, in grade school, a little Mexican girl who wasn't afraid of me, probably because her English was bad. and she didn't understand my pious interruptions. I was enormously impressed by her apparent courage and overcome with gratitude. I fell in love with her. Several months later she returned to Mexico.

My hallucinations told me I would live utterly alone, perhaps forever, as in my dream, if I doubted their existence, leaving me in the insoluble dilemma of possibly living in delusions for the rest of my life or living absolutely alone perhaps forever. After my eighteenth birthday I permanently left the United States in search of my Mexican sweetheart. We found each other when we were accidentally jammed together on a bus and then in an overcrowded government waiting room in Jalisco. We recognized each other and excitedly conversed.

After further meetings I risked telling her of my fear of solipsism. She laughed and tersely explained that solipsism was unintelligible. Her reasoning was irrefutable. My immense gratitude and sublimated love returned powerfully magnified. My hallucinations dispersed and my fear fell away. We later married.