Worse than a heroin addiction, once “hooked” on these products, the mother cannot return to breast feeding because her own milk dries up, and as the baby grows, the cost of the “fix” increases.

When I’ve awakened from my most important dreams, I’m usually in one of two states: 1) alert, almost pop-eyed, feeling a unity with the dream, and remembering details readily; 2) slow to awaken, feeling a kinship with the dream, but rarely remembering images; my mind is unusually empty after waking.

He hasn’t seen or heard me, and continues about his business of piling up my little TV, radio, stereo. I softly — very softly — close the door, tiptoe down the stairs, and call the 911 police emergency number.

The shortcomings of our health care system are becoming more obvious: rising costs, the professional “territoriality” of physicians, the narrow perspective of Western medicine, the enforced passivity of the “patient.”

“To write profound things about the human soul, your feelings about it have to be very deep, very difficult . . . I could have been . . . another one of the good ones. But when you’re making serious comment on people and their behavior, you have to put part of your soul in the work. I thought, if you’re merely good and not great, what’s the use of putting all that agony into it?”

Anecdotal accounts suggest that the use of psychic powers is often accompanied by unpleasant and sometimes fatal side effects for the practitioners. In this series of exploratory experiments, subjects were found to suffer varying degrees of physical pathology as a result of psi experimentation. This has some important implications for parapsychological research.