Womb twin survivors in science fiction - Philip K Dick

 Philip K. Dick - womb twin survivor and  science fiction writer



From the Phil K Dick web site

The Early Years

 He was born prematurely, along with his twin sister Jane, in Chicago on December 16, 1928. His father was Edgar Dick, his mother Dorothy Kindred - from her maiden name came Dick's middle initial. Jane died six weeks after her birth, a loss that Phil felt deeply throughout his life.

Is there a true "Womb Twin Survivor Syndrome?

In the beginning, in 2003, there was the hypothesis. I discovered that I am a womb twin survivor in 2002 and I assumed that there would be others like me, who were also womb twin survivors, who felt like me.  As the number of stories I heard increased, and as the questionnaire statements were gradually refined, it seemed that we did all think and feel the same way. I was therefore able to come up with my first Womb Twin Theory in 2004:

Womb twin survivors spend their lives constantly re-enacting their Dream of the Womb.  Nothing is more important than that - even life itself.  They will go to extraordinary lengths and choose to create all kinds of fantasies, simply to keep that Dream alive, for in the Dream is the twin they yearn for and search for, their whole life long. 

Then came a couple of rather heated exchanges with sceptics on the James Randi Sceptics Forum, to whom I put my hypothesis and the problem I had with finding a control group who were certainly NOT womb twin survivors. They told me in no uncertain terms that I had nothing more than an hypothesis, if that, and to talk about a "theory" would be to make out that I had certain knowledge, which I clearly did not have.

A womb twin survivor obsesses about death

Take a look here at someone who talks like a womb twin survivor BUT who it seems has absolutely no idea why she feels this way.

If you have ever felt this way, then take another look : is it possible that you are a womb twin survivor? Is it possible that there is a very good reason why you feel like you should never have been born?

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A womb twin survivors story

This was sent to me anonymously very recently:

If this is your story or you have a similar story, please make contact.   I can help.

I am dyslexic. I had insomnia from being a baby and always felt different, alone, mute and like I shouldn’t be here...years before I knew I was a twin. A nursery nurse when I was four described me as ‘a very solemn little girl’. I first attempted suicide when I was eight and failing, told my mum I had done it because : ‘I shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to be here.’  I did whatever I could to please everyone as a child and the thought i had done anything wrong, upset or hurt anyone made me suicidal with despair. 


If I saw poverty or famine or war on TV I felt helpless and pointless. I self harmed throughout childhood because I felt constantly guilty and didn’t know why. I thought I was innately bad and everyone else was innately good.  I wanted to be good, to fit in, to belong, but I constantly felt not human, like I was pretending to be human, wearing a mask, which made me a fraud. 


As I got older the insomnia got so bad I wouldn’t sleep for days on end. I stopped even going to bed. Then I stopped eating. Then I stopped going to school. By the age of twelve I had left school and was smoking, drinking and began using drugs. By eighteen I was alcohol dependant and a heroin addict. I used to attempt suicide by staging ‘accidents’. 


All my life I’ve felt in limbo, neither a part of this world and not apart of any other. Then, after getting clean off heroin, getting two jobs, getting a first class degree and getting all sorts of awards in a matter of six months I just went to a bridge and tried to jump off it.  I was diagnosed with manic depression and said to have had a psychotic episode. 


I work.  I succeed at the things i do.  I feel love for people.  I don’t whinge or blame or hate.  I don’t remember ever feeling hate for anyone or anything.  I think life can be beautiful and this world too...but I just haven’t ever felt like I should be here.  Half of me isn’t even here and I felt that before I knew I was a twin. 


I don’t know whether my chronic loneliness, mute-ness and feeling like I shouldn’t be here is anything to do with having been a ‘Womb Twin Survivor’.   I’d never heard of it before or thought that might be why I don’t remember a time I didn’t feel like half of me is missing. Just my story.


More about the support I can offer here

Schizophrenia and the lost twin

Opinion is divided about the aetiology of schizophrenia. Firstly there are those who are concerned solely with studying schizophrenia as one of many disorders of the physical operation of the brain experienced by those with a genetic susceptibility.   Secondly, there are those who view schizophrenia as a personality disorder and are concerned with personal and cognitive development and how that may have been compromised in various ways and at various stages in the life of the sufferer.  Thirdly, there are those who dare to suggest that schizophrenia is not a mental illness at all, but a catch-all term for a wide spectrum of impaired thinking, extreme emotions, and bizarre behaviours, Among this group is RD Laing, who suggested forty years ago that schizophrenics may be acting normally to some kind of social or inner craziness.           

There appears to be no way to heal this divide, but new research into the psychological effects on the survivor when a twin dies at birth or before may have provided an important missing piece in this puzzle. It is suggested that the symptoms that we call "schizophrenia"  may be a completely normal reaction to a situation that can occur in the womb before birth - ie. the loss of a twin.

Read complete article with references

Comments  welcomed.

A Hungarian Womb Twin poet

I have been introduced to Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti (1909-1944) whose twin - and his mother -  died at birth.  His poetry is wonderful but the theme of death is everywhere.   It does seem that death is never far from the mind of a womb twin survivor.  More.

Miklós Radnóti was born in Budapest into a Jewish family. Radnóti's mother, Ilona Grosz, died while giving birth to him and his twin brother, who was stillborn. When he was 12 Radnóti lost his father, Jakab Glatter, who had remarried – he died of brain thrombosis. Radnóti was not told about his mother's and twin brother's death until he was ten. Later in the autobiographical sketch, Ikek hava (1939) he described the shock of finding himself an orphan. Also the prose piece 'Gemini' (1939) was an examination of this traumatic expence. Death, guilt, and sacrifice would become a frequent subject of Radnóti's prose and poetry.

Cojoined identical twin survivor

A terrible wound on her chest and a profound sense of something missing... why Holly will always be scarred by the loss of her Siamese twin.  She has a sense of something missing; an imaginary friend; feels different ------ anything familiar here?

Read about it here

AA GILL: is this person a womb twin survivor?

Read about it in the Guardian. I think he is, do you?  here

Clues:

contradiction in his character and behaviour
always the outsider, looking on
problem with keeping to boundaries  (polite/rude)
addiction
androgynous ( female energy)
dyslexia
rage
feeling like a sham, living a kind of false existence

and there is more.... what do you think?

New social network for womb twin survivors in Australia

Sign in today HERE if you are a womb twin survivor and you live in Australia.

This could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship for all womb twin survivors in OZ!

Making this small step may be the beginning of better times for you.

A typical wombtwin survivor

This is a typical response to the questionnaire.

After reading your site, it just makes perfect sense. I always wanted to be a twin, right from a small child; I've always had a fascination with twins. Twins definitely run in my family.

When my mother was pregnant with me, there were problems with her blood and she was hospitalised. I was a month premature and very small. After my birth, I had several severe illnesses. All my life I've had problems with food as well - one other aspect that is mentioned here. I've always been a very picky eater, refusing to try new foods, and in my teens had eating disorders.

I've always been searching for something without knowing what. Throughout my teenage years I withdrew and was very depressed, self-harmed (cutting and burning myself), and developed severe anxiety. When things go wrong I struggle to keep level-headed. I often have difficult relationships with others; they are usually very intense. I much prefer to have close, intimate friendships with few people rather than many acquaintances, but I have always felt alone.

I'm not autistic (to my knowledge), but I have symptoms. I'm an extreme perfectionist, setting myself goals that I'm always surprised to reach. My intelligence has always been significantly above average. I've always been a dreamer, although I am very good at empathy and extremely perceptive.

Do you feel this way? If you do, what other reasons may there be for these feelings? All reasonable suggestions welcomed.

Michael Jackson: wombtwin survivor?

So, farewell, Michael. Some said you were weird, but many people loved you. I am sure that you were a wombtwin survivor, and I often wondered what may have happened if I had been able to tell you that you were not crazy or weird but simply a perfectly normal wombtwin survivor. Certainly you were a contradictory character - like so many wombtwin survivors, who live out two lives in one.

On the Alpha side there was the confident, glittering star dancer:- a King of Rock to rival Elvis Presley (also a wombtwin survivor, only his twin died at birth), Michael the star dancer was and still is loved by millions of fans and massed a vast fortune.

But on the Beta side there was the abused, gentle, hurting and extremely lonely man.

On the Alpha side there once was an extremely handsome dark-skinned youth.

But on the Beta side for many years there was a hideous, white-faced androgynous figure with long hair, a travesty of a female.

On the Alpha side there was male energy - professionalism, vigour, creativity, the BAD man in leather with a desire to father children.

On the Beta side there was female energy - quiet, sweet gentleness, the long-haired saviour, with a desire to comfort children, give them toys, make them a special play space and spend time with them.

The Alpha side of Michael Jackson has been gradually destroyed by his own choices and actions. His vast fortune has been squandered, the handsome youth is long gone, destroyed by self-destructive plastic surgery. His terror of death and decay, which revealed itself in his desire for immortality, has at last brought about the one thing that was most feared. He has now sadly died, and long before his time.

But this path of self-destruction is so often a wombtwin survivor's story. It sounds crazy, if not insane, to throw your life away, waste your talents, destroy what is good and healthy in you and replace it with a total commitment to a secret and subtle slow forms of suicide, such as overdosing on alcohol, tobacco, food, drugs, extreme sports, reckless driving and so on.

Wombtwin survivors tend to live a life of self-sabotage and some of them sabotage themselves to death. Now there is no sign that Michael Jackson died at his own hand, but the signs of the self-destructive wombtwin survivor would have been there to be seen, if we had only known how to look for them. Sadly, no one - not Michael himself, or his family, his friends, his children or his colleagues, knew what was wrong. Michael's brother is a wombtwin survivor, but that was all we knew. Sadly also, the Wombtwin Survivor project had not yet come to the notice of professionals, who may then have been able to help.

What a different life he would have had if he became aware that, long before he was born, there was once a little twin sister who died - being too sick to come to birth - leaving him as the loneliest man in the world, and prepared to sacrifice everything to keep this half-acknowledged little female figure somehow alive in his life. He ignored the scorn of the public as he gradually destroyed his own handsome male face; he tried so desperately to stay young, to never grow up, never grow old and start to decay, that he now has his greatest wish. He truly is now immortal and will never die. The world will never forget Michael Jackson. Like Elvis, he will be forever young.

He will always be the glittering star who has for so long been bleeding inside, with a grief he obviously never understood.

Wombtwin survivors spend their lives re-enacting the life and death of their wombtwin. Nothing, not even life itself, is more important than that.

Rest in peace, Michael.