Celeste had heavenly blue eyes and an unearthly beauty, but she was messed up, more than a little unstable. But Maurice loved Celeste and got married to her despite her craziness and her threats of killing herself after one of their many arguments. To help her become stable, Maurice had an idea about how he could fix her. He had mastered astral travel and thought that maybe he could travel into her body and tweak her mind enough to normalize her behavior as she slept.
After a dozen nighttime tries, he succeeded and began tweaking her consciousness, but that gave her nightmarish dreams of being possessed by an unseen entity. Upon waking she worried that a demon was trying to possess her in her nightmares. She’d wake up shaking and distressed, but he thought it was just a temporary adjustment to his nightly astral healing attempts.
Eventually as his treatments progressed, she woke up shaking and distressed less often, and he, to his surprise, felt like he’d become an integral part of her when inside her, as if their minds and souls had merged. The feeling grew stronger as he felt more connected to her after his astral healing sessions. But everything went awry one dawn when returning to his body, he had become possessed with her craziness and she with his normal behavior. He felt extremely depressed, became quarrelsome and suffered troubling thoughts of killing himself.
She, exasperated, and at a loss to understand his erratic behavior, had no idea she had taken on his normal state of mind. She felt like she had always been the way she had become. Maurice knew he essentially had become the worst of her and had no way to fix himself. He had lost his ability to astral travel no matter how hard he tried to retrieve it. He fell into deeper states of depression. A month later, feeling there was no hope for him, Maurice downed an entire bottle of aspirins and fell dead on their bathroom floor. Though sad that Maurice died, Celeste felt a sense of relief. She went on to have a wonderful, normal life with a new and sane husband.
Bob Boyd