Bio

In 1998, when Amy George was still male, she undertook a quest that led her to a weeklong state of communion with the universe. During the week, her dreams united with waking-life. Poems, paintings, music and dance blew around her like wind, all of them interconnected on an unbreakable web of being. Wild animals gathered round her. When Amy passed babies, they gazed at her adoringly. People fuming with darkness were also strewn along her way.  

The illusory aspects of Amy’s adult male self were asleep. She was like a seven-year-old boy—the seven-year-old boy she had forsaken to become a man. Amy felt the signature of God in everything. Metaphor was no longer figurative. It was actual. It was in the fibers of nature. For psychotics, the symbolic consumes the real. For Amy, the symbolic and the real embraced, making consciousness whole. (Drugs were not involved.)

In answer to the calling Amy received, she spent two years turning herself inside-out through self-observation, monastic living, attendance to her dreams (recording 10 to 15 a night), meditation, and contemplation. These practices precipitated, in 2000, the sudden, unanticipated identification of herself as a woman—this after being born a man, and growing up identifying as one. The ramifications were psychically cataclysmic. Many times Amy thought the world was ending, and it was, in the universe inside of her.

Amy had never before considered changing sex, and assumed that she was magically turning into a girl. Her psyche was pouring into consciousness. When this happens it is called “psychosis.” In the word “psychosis,” “psych-“ means “soul,” and “-osis” means “sickness.” Amy had soul sickness. She did not see it as a condition to medicate, but rather a process through which she could piece together her female self. Amy understood the end of soul sickness as soul wellness.

For two years Amy survived without a fixed-identity, lost in visions, managing psychodrama, and often bedridden in a trancelike state. In 2004, she began hormone replacement therapy. In 2005, Amy obtained an orchiectomy and then began living as “Amy.

Without her dreams, Amy would not have become a woman. Her female self literally emerged through the dreams of her male self. In becoming her new self, Amy essentially has become, in waking-life, the main character of her former self’s dreams.

Skills and talents

dream interpretation, existing, cleaning house, doing dishes, being, feeling

What I'm Reading

the library

What I'm Listening To

wind, birds, the heart, dreams

Education

High school

HB Woodlawn

College

VCU, English