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A long while back I found that someone had decided to link an article on a semi-popular site to my dragon page. The article mainly dealt with the theory that dragons are so often depicted in so many cultures because of some genetic memory of dinosaurs. Well... It's a good way to increase traffic to Draconic, but lots of miscellaneous traffic isn't what I want. I want to connect people like myself. To help them if I can. The miscellaneous web surfer who visits my site may be intrigued, disgusted, amused, or dismissive. But what if you feel more? What if you feel something you can't explain - an attraction - a fascination - a love for something inhuman, yet more familiar to you then any human you've met?
Are you a dragon?
I am. That's why I've created this site. I'm in my 40s as I revise this page once more, and Draconic has been around for about 26 years. I started this community back when there weren't any others. Alt.fan.dragons newsgroup was for roleplaying, Herpetophile mailing list was for scaled erotica, and that was about all there was that I ever found (and this was after searching relentlessly to compile a list of dragon-related web sites that was as complete as I could make it). Most of Draconic's software was created from scratch, before ASP and PHP were even invented. Seven years later, these communities became much easier to make with pre-built software, and so they came and went. At 26 years, most dragons have migrated to Discord, Telegram, and more evil platforms from Meta.
I didn't have time to compete with newer platforms as a single coder needing to support myself and my family. As long as dragons connect, I don't much care where they do it. But I kept Draconic around, porting from ASP to PHP, MSSQL to mySQL, and moving to a new host for those who still value it, and to keep the history of decades of conversations around for future generations to read. These days, it's easy to find evidence all over the internet that we're not alone. I now know dragons in their 80s, and surely there are older ones than that. I think that dragon spirits have always been here, but it has only been since the age of the internet that we could easily find one-another.
Around 1994, I found that I wasn't alone, and I was overjoyed. It's not that I hadn't expected that somewhere in this world of billions of people there was at least one other person at least somewhat similar to me; but to actually find that person, many of them in fact, was a turning point in my life. I've seen it have the same effect on other dragons and on displaced spirits of all kinds. We are sometimes referred to as Otherkin - spirits of any inhuman creature trapped in a human body. From spirits of animals like wolves and foxes, to unicorns, fairies, and elves - they're all out there. In fact, as of 2005, over ten-thousand people have registered with Draconic. Of course, some are duplicates, and not all are Otherkin, but it's still a large number, and just one of the many places you now might find us on the net.
With all of this meeting and mingling, I think more people are coming into the Otherkin community as role players rather than truly displaced spirits. Ask yourself if you feel some "ulterior motive" to calling yourself a dragon, or anything else. Perhaps you long to fit in somewhere, to find a brotherhood of any sort, or maybe you simply like the idea of being a dragon, being powerful enough to squash your foes, being able to fly away from your problems, or whatever else you associate with being a dragon (everyone thinks of them differently). Whatever the ulterior motive, I'm sorry to say that this is not the place for you, at least not if you plan to try to pass yourself off as a dragon.
Personally, I did not choose to be a dragon, or want to experience all the pain that went with it. I did not want to be completely alone and feel out of place, or be in a funk longing to have wings for weeks on end. There was no advantage in it for me, or any group I could turn to for help. It simply happened, and I dealt with it on my own. At least I am pleased to say, for those of you who are feeling the same pain, that the feelings do diminish. I still cry about it now and then, or simply feel like crap for a time, but it's less intense and less frequent. We all deal with the loss of our wings in different ways.
At age 10 or so, I saw a dragon on a boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons (the role playing game). I got a hold of it and started playing the game and finding myself most interested in encounters with dragons. I didn't want to kill them, but capture one, despite that being one of the hardest things to do in the game. My interest in the game didn't last that long, but my interest in the pictures on the boxes did. I began to collect dragon pictures as a sort of hobby. But it wasn't just a hobby, I found the dragons to be beautiful. It was hard for me to accept, but I eventually had to admit I wanted to be one of those gorgeous creatures. Still, I mostly ignored those thoughts and kept collecting pictures. I went so far as to buy a book, Dragonsbane, just because it had a dragon picture on it. I never intended to read it.
But I did read it. It was on a long boring camping trip with my parents. The book happened to be about a female mage who was also attracted to dragons, who actually wanted to be one! This was amazing to me. Perhaps my desires weren't so strange after all. My life had changed. I found I could no longer deny what I wanted. I cried because I felt so hopelessly trapped in human form.
How on earth could I ever become a dragon? This question consumed me for a time as I tried to come up with ways it might be possible. Magic and prayer (the "quick fix" solutions) did not work. In the end I decided my best chance was through genetic engineering, but as a 10-year-old (or was I 12?) there wasn't much I could do to get started on such a project. I had to wait. And while I waited I asked the question: "Why do I want so much to be a dragon?" I had this burning desire, something so intense it could make me depressed for weeks on end, so there must be some reason behind it, right? Some scientific, logical, reasonable reason... In my junior year of high school I got so desperate to understand it and to make my friends understand it that I wrote a story - the story of what I wanted, and why I thought I wanted it. You can read it if you'd like. It's quite long and most people tell me they love it, although I think its intensity may upset those who also long to be dragons. I revised the story 12 times over the course of two years, trying to use it as a tool to analyze my feelings, so I could explain them to myself and to others. Writing it was very painful, so it has been a long time since I have wanted to take on another story.
The problem was, the story really didn't ring true to me. The main idea was that I wanted to be a dragon because a dragon was my idea of the perfect creature, but why would wanting to have a "perfect" body be such a passion? Why would not having a dragon form cause me such pain, as if it was something I needed to be happy and complete? Moreover, why would I think a dragon body was perfect? After all, bird wings generate more lift. Horns, long necks, and round tails aren't the ideal forms for aerodynamics or steering. And why should flight be so important, compared to swimming, space travel, or even ground travel? Why not be a shape-shifter, able to change to whatever form was best suited to the environment I cared to explore? I skirted around such questions in my story, but deep down I knew I couldn't answer them. Dragons may excel beyond humans in most physical aspects, but they certainly can't be called "perfect". In fact, most humans seem to find them terrifying or ugly, quite the opposite of how I see them. My feelings still didn't make sense, even after two years of contemplation and analysis.
So it was that I came to have Internet access in college. One of the first people who touched me was a velociraptor. I posted my dragon story to a small mailing list of dragon/reptile fans and her response was by far the longest and most interesting. She seemed to understand. I eagerly talked to her. She told me of how she felt she might have been a raptor in a past life. What? A past life? That's ridiculous. I was a man of science. And yet I'd been raised a Christian and had believed in god for a long time. Why did I turn to science? I had seen no evidence of god. I'd never seen a miracle. I knew about plenty of very bad things happening around the world. Even if there was a god, he didn't seem to be doing anything of tangible benefit to anyone, so I turned to science. Still, I wasn't a man of science as much as I was a creature with an open mind, forming my belief system based on whatever evidence I had encountered, and willing to change the system if new evidence came my way. This raptor told me of experiences I couldn't explain with science. She had written long detailed stories of another of her past lives as a member of a strange alien race, a race focused on war and planetary conquest. She remembered this life more clearly than all the others. She told me of her spirit guide, how she'd talked to him for years and one night seen him as a ball of light. Could this be proof of something unexplainable - beyond science? Or was she just delusional, or very imaginative? I couldn't say. Yet I saw no reason for her to make up her past-life memories. Most of them were painful and haunted her. They gave her all sorts of phobias in this life which made no sense based on her experiences in this life. I also met others who believed as she did. I met someone who I thought was role-playing a dragon. One night he told me he believed he was a dragon in body once, long ago. He was always depressed about it, wishing to return to that form and wishing to be reunited with his mate who'd been killed soon after their mating ceremony. Was this some strange psychological condition? Was it a need to find something to always be depressed about? Maybe he just randomly chose to be depressed about wanting to be a dragon again? None of the alternative explanations make nearly as much sense as simply accepting that yes, he was once a dragon. Could the reason behind my feelings be the same? Was I once a dragon?
It took a long time for me to believe. I had two separate people tell me that they felt I was a dragon, and their feelings on exactly who I was matched. I heard story after story I couldn't explain. I even had a few experiences of my own that went beyond my normal perception of reality. I felt I could finally answer my question, "Why do I want so much to be a dragon?" The answer is that I miss it. I miss flying. I miss my home world. I miss being beautiful. Understanding that somehow helped to ease my pain, and I have been getting better ever since.
Starting in high school, I read a series of books that laid out what might be defined as a "new age" belief system. A Joseph Campbell Companion, by Joseph Campbell, is something of an investigation of how all religions are saying the same thing. The Celestine Prophecy, by James Redfield, talks about nine insights into our condition here on planet Earth. The first few insights deal with meaningful coincidences, and the notion that things happen for a reason, even apparently bad things. Then I saw a movie called What the Bleep Do We Know!? that tries to provide evidence of these kinds of claims rather than just telling a story. In The Power of Intention, by Dr. Wayne W. Dyre, he goes extensively into this concept of what we think and feel having some real tangible effect on things around us. As he says, "When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change."
As I re-read this in 2024, I've become much more cynical. Wayne is just doing his thing for the money and "What the Bleep" doesn't provide any truly scientific evidence. Bad things have happened to me with no apparent lesson or reason attached. Yet good things have also happened that seem so unlikely that it's hard to believe there wasn't some force involved. I don't attribute any of this to a grand plan by some universal intelligence (aka god) and I realize that there could easily be no meaning in anything that happens.
However, I prefer to think that if I really am a reincarnated dragon, that means there are spirits around that might have some influence on the living, and individual spirits may be pushing things in a good or bad way in certain instances while everything else is random. I don't know anything for sure, but I do know that Wayne is right on his core concept of things changing when we intend for them to change. Whether or not you get spiritual help, if you have a goal and you don't give up on it, you'll find ways to make it happen and notice things that may help you. If people see you working towards it, they may also help.
My biggest advice as a greymuzzle is to always look for the truth in any situation. You can only change yourself, and no amount of time or effort will change other people more than a little. Make the hard choice to move on and try something or someone new if a situation is unfixable. More than anything, be kind, generous, understanding, and helpful to others. Not because you expect a reward in some afterlife, but because it makes this world a better place and because it's the right thing to do.
Here are some other resources you might be interested in:
- Baxil
Another dragon with a long and interesting life story.
- Otherkin.net
A large and venerable resource for displaced spirits of all types, dragon or otherwise.
- Draconity.org
Forums, a wiki, and links to more dragon communities.
- Finding your Answers Within, by Dick Sutphen.
Outlines techniques for self-hypnosis, past life regression, astral travel, etc. If you want to remember your life as a dragon, this is one possible method. Personally, my attempts at regression left me depressed and unsure what vague memory impressions were real, so I gave up.
If you're an average web surfer who's happened to find this page, perhaps my thoughts are one of the strangest things you've ever read. My hope is that they help you to understand that there are many ways of looking at life, many spirits, many things we all like to keep secret in the interest of blending in and appearing "normal". However, the concept of "normal" is arbitrary. Cultures all evolve over time, and at each period in their history they will have radically different ideas of what "normal" is. Broaden your perspective. Whether your spirit is dragon, human, or something else, it always behooves you to look beyond the arbitrary rules and expectations of your culture. Find your own truth, and fly free.
Last update: 2024
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