"I ... Knew This Time I Had Them Beat"

The four (or five) pages that Kesey wrote in stream of consciousness might be the best written but the least understood section of the book.

It is commonly believed that what appears in our subconscious dreams, nightmares, and hallucinations represent the real fears, desires, hang-ups, and baggage that we're carrying around.

So a dream (or the like) about a moment from our childhood might take us back to some anxious moment and some repressed feeling that we can better deal with in our dreamworld than in the real world.

So, too, a dream might include some real sound or sensation that our body is actually experiencing. The music from your alarm clock radio appears in your dream--you're on the dance floor "dancing like there's nobody watching."

You're running up a steep slope in your dream, when actually your blood pressure accelerates while you sleep because you took a Pseudofed allergy pill before you dozed off.

Chief hears, "AIR RAID," which takes him back to his days hiding for cover in WWII, but also suggests that he's "under attack" by the voltage of electricity coursing through his body during EST.

Before Chief is shocked, one of the technicians working in EST says about him:" Watch that other moose. I know him. Hold him!"

After he is shocked, Chief dreams, "Hit at a lope, running already down a slope. Can't go back, can't go ahead, look down the barrel an' you dead dead dead." Now he's the moose, hit as he lopes down the slope, feeling helpless going back, going ahead, or looking down the barrel of the gun, maybe someones two eyes, if the Chief has his own eyes open, or seeing the light emitting through his two eyelids, if his eyes are closed. Either way, Chief feels "dead dead dead."

man, Man, MAN, MAN ... I love this book.