What I'm seeing is that people who have the mistaken idea about what the cards are, what makes them work, or are scared of them thinking they have a spirit---or all the above---are the ones who have the weird experiences. They think it's the cards but it's not the cards. It's what they've come to believe because of bad movies and incorrect warnings from some of the more fanatical Christian people. Your subconscious is a very complex and mysterious thing. Let me give you an example or two.
In early sobriety, I sponsored women as a means of staying sober. I've learned lots of surprising things in the past years. One girl was on crutches. She said she'd been kicked out where she was living, etc. I had her under my wing and one day after a meeting we were going to have lunch in a restaurant. Well, we got sat down and this girl fell out on the floor in a grand mal seizure. The waitress, (this was in mini-skirt days) immediately bent down and tried to put something in the girl"s mouth (never, ever do that) and her jaw locked up on the woman's fingers. So here was this waitress bent over, her mini skirt not covering up whatever she had on under it, her legs straight with the pain and that lovely view was what a man in the booth ahead of us saw when he turned his head to see what the commotion was.
Okay, I'd had training what to do with seizure patients when I worked in a place where it was common. You don't touch the person because the electrical activity that's raging out of control in the patients brain is stimulated by that and they get worse or stay in the seizing condition. If a seizure continues beyond 3 minutes, that's called status epelepticus and is life threatening. I had called an ambulance because it had been three mintues and she didn't stop. The waitress disappeared, nursing her hand, the man who had gotten introduced to the waitress was staring. The paramedics got there, she stopped seizing, and they picked her up to carry her out the door. There were two sets of doors, the one outside, then a little foyer and another door into the restaurant. The medics were carrying her out, but she started to seize just as they got into the foyer and they rushed back into the restaurant. They just get in when she stops again. The medics take off to go load her into the ambulance, but once again, here they had to come back in. This happened three times. It was like keystone cops. So I follow the ambulance to the hospital ER, wait till the doctor comes out after examining her, and he says, "She wasn't having a seizure." Twilight Zone sets in---I said, "yes, she was seizing. I have training and I know." He said no she wasn't. That these were called hysterical seizures. With a real seizure, the person always loses control of their bladder during it and I thought "oh yeah, I did think that was odd." SO! Now there's a dilemma for me. I have four kids at home, I'm trying to go to school, work full time, and stay sober in the process. This girl is very seriously disturbed and he comes out from seeing her again and says "she says she lives with you and wants to go home now". I said, "uhhhh no, she doesn't live with me and I can't take her home with me. I told him sorry, but I didn't really even know her except from AA. So then I beat feet out of the hospital but I forgot there was a trench dug for some kind of thing across the yard of the hospital and it was pouring down rain. I was in such a hurry to get out of there so they wouldn't let her out before I could make my exit stage left, I slipped and fell down in that soppy, muddy trench, and by the time I crawl out, no dignity left and not a clean or dry inch of me, and with my hair piece (the curls were in style then) my hairpiece flopped down over my eyes, there's a bus full of people in the street gawking, probably thinking I'm some drunk that fell in the ditch. I always enter things with the best of intentions but something goes awry and I never feel very heroic in the end or looking it either.
Okay, now that's an illustration of what a person's mind can do to them. Her, I mean---not me, although I was wondering about that at the time while I was slithering out of the ditch. She was really seizing but it was a mental problem and she went on to end up in the state hospital, incontinent by then---and I do have compassion for her, but all this is just to say that sometimes your subconscious mind can sabotage you without you knowing it. Please don't take this as me being mean---give me the fact I wasn't sober a very long time---but when I heard she was in the state hospital unable to walk and incontinent, the thought flashed through my mind "why couldn't she have just pee'd and I'd not have had to wallow in a muddy ditch in the rain?" When an alcoholic is in the early years of sobriety they don't have a lot of self-esteem, so I went home that night much the worse for the wear.
