Laura Lockwood

The Man in Laura Lockwood

Volume I and II

By Rev. Magdalena Light, RN,C, Ph.D.

Written in 1994

First Edition by Light Press Publishing, 2004

Note: Editors are sought in preparation for publication.

This fiction/fact work is a tantalizing display of life’s preposterous fancy that dwarves the scope of human imagination. The story borrows heavily from my childhood experiences in communist Hungary and from my work as a psychiatric nurse in the U.S.

This psychological thriller is an intoxicating existential farce of in vivo characters and dynamics interspersed with philosophical meanderings of the European kind. Blending trendy quadroons of science, psychology, spirituality, multiple personality and gender identity, this exotic, never before told tale is sure to trigger the reader’s existential voyeurism.

The story is an intricate and ever elusive interplay of the normal, the abnormal and the paranormal. It challenges conventional notions of normality and keeps the reader guessing till the end, and beyond.

Are the protagonists psychic or psychotic? Are we dealing with the paranormal or the abnormal? Telepathy or hallucinations? Cosmic intermediaries, multiple personalities or multiple personality disorders? Divine wisdom or grandiose delusions? Jungian synchronicities or human ego orchestrations?

Are mental patients, so called, innately different from their caregivers? Or do they simply have permission to display pervasive human pathology while caregivers are expected to keep theirs in check? And, in spite of all professional expectations, can they, really? The story provides more grounds for questioning than for answering.

This unconventional tale also catches a non-stereotyped glimpse of the mentally ill and their caregivers. Shows patients as both the victims and perpetrators of their stigmas. Dispels the myth of the all good and all bad mental health professional. Exposes nurses and psychiatrists as all human, and as such, not much different from their patients. They too are conflicted, conflicting, ego driven individuals, with blurred boundaries and murky emotions, living in the swampland of the soul, struggling to maintain the façade of normalcy.

Of course, this story of the ever churning and ever lurking Freudian psyche would never be complete without a hefty dose of forbidden sexual innuendoes.

Besides being all of the above, “The Man in Laura Lockwood” is also a lavish sampling of philosophies on universal love, higher consciousness, self-fulfillment and on freeing the shackled down human spirit. Alludes to the possibility of cosmic beings intervening in human lives to mediate their intractable existential conflicts.