FT268

Part 1

Part 2

Graham awoke to find himself unable to move, his body frozen onto the bed and a faint buzzing sound tickling his senses. If it was a dream, why did he feel so awake? Suddenly, there was an explosion of light and then, without transition, he ‘came to’ inside a room filled with bright, soothing light. The bemused witness had no idea where he was, but it wasn’t his bedroom in Lancashire. A voice inside his mind urged him to “Go Back!” A circle of light hovered nearby, which he yearned to enter, because within it stood a figure he recognised – but Graham’s recently deceased father was telling him to return, and a powerful force was pushing him away. Then he was within a tube of light falling from a point above the rooftops to his house. In a blink, he was sitting up wide-awake in bed.

How do we interpret something like this? It has obvious elements of the OOBE (out-of-body experience), has clear links with the NDE (near-death experience), and overlaps with countless alien abduction stories. Indeed, had the figure not been perceived as Graham’s dead father, then the story would almost certainly be considered a ‘close encounter’. As we’ve seen, recent medical research into NDE cases has identified possible clues, such as changes in carbon dioxide levels in the brain. However, arguments rage over whether these trigger the perceptions of an OOBE or NDE or are parallel events associated with visionary experiences.

There are similar problems with alien contact cases. Witnesses who encounter ‘aliens’ also display patterns that suggest a propensity towards physiological triggers such as epilepsy or narcolepsy. And they can experience profound changes to their development, such as unexpected growth in abilities, or onset of ESP. They also often feel more spiritually attuned as a result of their ‘contact’ experiences. This is equally true of NDE patients. Regardless of how we explain the phenomenon in physio­logical terms, it often has a massive consequence on how the person looks at their existence, at death or the Cosmos. The links between these supposedly divergent phenomena is obvious, in my opinion, and suggests that an NDE and an alien contact might simply be two sides of the same coin, the context and the disposition of the witness or investi­gator determining how they are pigeonholed.


FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
Eileen Arnold had her life transformed by a remarkable incident in February 1942. She was a young mother and about six weeks away from giving birth amidst wartime austerity. As she walked back from a pre-natal check on a sunny afternoon, the high street in Cheltenham was still busy but changed in an instant: “I was in a particularly sensitive state, possibly due to my condition… and I seemed to share a moment of telepathic rapport with a passing stranger.” Then something made her look skyward “on impulse”, and she saw a large oval mass with light pouring from the sides, slowly sailing through the air ejecting ‘quills’ from its side. “I knew instinctively that it was not anything of this Earth,” she said. But she also noticed that the world around her had changed, so that there was what she called “an environment lapse”. Elaborating, she described to me how time stopped – indeed, the Universe stopped. There were no people or cars around and she was focused on the UFO as if looking through a tunnel, the rest of her surroundings gone. Odder still, she instantly forgot what happened. In a trice, she was back at her flat. Recall only filtered back slowly, and still with a ‘time lapse’.

Eileen chose not to tell anyone about these events for years, aware that it might not sit well with her successful educational career. It was also something she regarded as private, an experience “for my eyes alone”. Years later, she reported it to a famous UFO group, which logged it as a wonderful example of an alien ‘mother ship’ ejecting baby UFOs.

Yet the more I asked about Eileen’s background, the more it was obvious that this simplistic ‘alien’ interpretation misses what matters. Eileen began to have intuitive experiences or visions of other realms. She engaged in what she called ‘impressions dictation’ where she felt the urge to sit and doodle, and messages or artistic images poured out. As a result, she developed a very spiritual outlook and after retirement started teaching others how to unlock their unconscious. I asked Eileen how real were these ‘communications’ and she confirmed my suspicion that they seemed hallucinatory: “Of course, they are all symbolic – what else?”

This struck a chord, because I had heard similar responses from others. The late Michael Bentine, a celebrated comedian who had numerous psychic and UFO related experi­ences, said when I asked how he decided whether an event was real or imagin­ary: “I think they are all exactly the same… imagin­ation is the ability to create images or integrate images from memory or impress­ions that you have received.” So, yes, these experi­ences might technically be hallucinat­ions. They might be for your (inner) eyes only. They could be highly symbolic and occur while you are in an altered state of consciousness. But what matters is the source of the impress­ions that you ‘imagine’.

We miss a trick by our desire to prove something real or unreal. Sometimes, there is more power in dreams than reality, and if the experience triggers profound changes then how it manifests might not matter. American Psychologist Kenneth Ring sees this and divined such a pattern in his own data. His idea is of an ‘imaginal realm’ which fuses waking reality and imagination; perhaps the realm where Eileen Arnold went that February day. Ring and I corresponded over our work and found that we were reaching slightly differ­ent but nevertheless similar conclusions. I argued that these alien contacts might be ‘living daydreams’, technically a form of lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreams happen when a person becomes aware that they are dreaming and their conscious mind intrudes and controls the subconsciously created dreamscape. From my own experience, they are truly mag­ical – like living inside a 3D movie blockbuster. Everything is vividly real and you are the dir­ector, controlling what happens – until you wake up or drift into normal sleep or dreams.

My suspicion is that alien contacts happen similarly, but not during sleep. Instead, while awake, the subconscious mind takes control of the waking conscious landscape (what we call ‘the real world’), transforming it into images that are then reported as a close encounter. In both dreams and alien contacts, time loses its usual meaning, spatial distortions can happen, and once you return to normal consciousness the experience vanishes from memory but might return slowly later. And they are for the eyes of the witness only, because they occur within their perception.

Indeed, psychologists have come close to this deduction. As long ago as 1966, in his book Brain and Mind, Prof. H Price noted that “Dreaming goes on throughout our waking hours and just occasionally we may catch a glimpse of it.” And perhaps this alien contact/waking daydream is how it sometimes manifests.

Of course, those sure that alien contacts really do involve actual aliens might strongly disagree. So I will conclude this series by asking whether they might be right.

to be concluded...