I would notice.
Yeah? Vampire bats have razor-sharp teeth and bite between the toes and you never wake up while they are sucking your blood.
There are no vampire bats here. Can’t we go to sleep?
No. It’s not safe here.
My dialogue continued like this. Each night it took about half an hour to calm myself down so I could go to sleep. And it never got any easier on subsequent nights. The final night of the conference, I woke up at midnight and heard the coyotes eating the garbage at the house next door. Crunching bones. Crunch, crunch.
You’re next.
Come on, can’t we just sleep? Remember the elephant in Kenya? Remember how foolish you felt?
That was then. This is now.
Crunch, crunch.
Think how comfortable you’d be back in the house.…
I am not going back in the house.
A nice comfortable bed …
I am not going back in the house.
The only reason you won’t go back is you told everybody that you’re not afraid of animals. Actually, you are completely full of it. You have no idea who you really are. Face it: you’re terrified out here.
I am not going back in the house.
Okay. Have it your way. The coyotes will still be hungry when they finish that garbage.…
I am not going back in the house.
And I didn’t. But the struggle never ceased. The voices inside my head kept up the dialogue. And I thought, Haven’t I fought this battle already? Can’t I just go to sleep? The answer was, no.
And finally, in the middle of the night, I shouted out loud, “All right, damn it, I admit it, I’m afraid of animals!”
And you don’t really know who you are.…
“And I don’t really know who I am!”
With that, I fell sound asleep.
When I got home, I looked at people to see if I could still see auras. I could. It’s fun to do. When the dinner parties get boring, you just look at people’s auras.
But that didn’t seem to be the most important thing I had gotten from being at the conference. The most important thing seemed to be that, although I knew a lot more about myself than I ever had at any earlier time in my life, I still had to admit, the way I shouted in the desert, that I didn’t know who I was.
An Entity
In the spring of 1986 I was still working with Gary, the man who had taught me to channel. I continued to explore altered states with him.
I tried not to judge what was happening, but simply to accept everything as an experience. Past lives, guided meditation, astral travel: I just went along with it as an interesting time.
And I was in this general frame of mind—an interesting time, lots of doubts, and no idea what it all meant—when, at the end of one session, Gary said, “I experienced an entity around you during our work today.”
“A what?”
“An entity. A dark force.”
“An entity,” I repeated. I was very slow about all this. I didn’t get what he was saying.
“I believe it is interfering with our work,” Gary said.
“What is?”
“The entity. He’s attached to you. Do you have any sense of it?”
“No,” I said. I was starting to feel annoyed. I felt he was telling me there was something wrong with me. And it sounded bad, serious, an entity attached to me. “What is an entity, anyway?”
“Well, it could be a discarnate soul, a tramp soul.”
“A tramp soul.”
“Something you picked up earlier in your life, maybe at a time when you were sick, or if you drank or took a lot of drugs at some time in your life. When you’re weak, these things can latch on to your field and go for a ride. And they can stay with you for years. Or it may be a thought form that you have created, I really don’t know. But it’s there.”
I understood clearly now.
“You’re saying I’m possessed.”
“Well. Only in a manner of speaking.”
That did it. I went crazy.
“What manner of speaking?” I was very upset. “You’re saying I have a demon or something inside me! You’re saying I need an exorcist!”
“Is that so bad?” Gary said calmly.
“Yes!” I shouted. “Yes! It’s terrible! What am I supposed to do about it?”
“I’m not sure,” Gary said. “I’ll have to ask some people.”
“Ask them what?”
“I know some people who have experience in these things.”
“People who have been to an exorcism?”
“One, yes. Let’s talk more tomorrow.”
“What are you telling me? Gary, listen, I have a job, I have to write, I have to be calm, you can’t just go around telling people they have entities attached to them and let’s talk tomorrow!” I was shouting now, really shouting.
“Look,” he said firmly. “I don’t like this, either. We’ll talk tomorrow. But I’m pretty sure you have an entity around you. Just don’t worry about it. It’s not the end of the world.”
It’s not the end of the world.
I was very angry. I was distracted. Who wouldn’t be, to hear he had an entity bothering him? The next day I was still distracted. I couldn’t write. I was angry and upset. I called Gary.
“How do you feel?” he said.
“How do you think I feel?” I said. “Terrible.”
“Okay,” he said. “Come over at five o’clock, and we’ll have a session.”
“All right,” I said.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve asked somebody else to be there. A psychologist, if that’s all right.”
“Okay.”
“You’re sure it’s all right? She won’t come unless it’s all right with you.”
“It’s fine,” I said.
At five I went to Gary’s apartment. It was completely transformed. The drapes were drawn. There were lighted candles everywhere. On the couch was a row of pictures of holy people, from Jesus Christ to Muktananda. There were crystals scattered around on all the tables. In the center of the room, the massage table was covered in a white cloth.
Uh-oh, I thought. He’s really going to do it. He’s going to do an exorcism.
I was introduced to a small, pretty woman with short hair named Beth. She was very calm, but there was still an underlying tension in the room. Gary seemed tense.
I was tense, too. I complained about how Gary had left me hanging with this idea of an entity, and how ridiculous I thought it all was, an entity. I mean, really, an entity.
They listened, and then Beth said in her calm way, “Well, what if it’s true?”
It threw me: she was agreeing with him.
“Do you think I have an entity?”
“I sense something around you,” she said.
“Okay,” I said. That did it.
“When you’re ready, why don’t you lie down on the table,” Gary said. I lay down on the table. Now I was pretty nervous. I kept getting these melodramatic images of Max von Sydow and Linda Blair.
But, on the other hand, a part of me was excited. An exorcism: well, let’s see what happens.
What happened was that Gary said, “I’m going to spend some time with Beth first, you just relax.”
I lay there on the table with my eyes closed and relaxed. I heard Gary helping Beth to lie on a couch across the room, and heard him inducing her into an altered state. He did that by talking to her, and by playing tapes of oscillating tones. It took a while; he was really getting her deep.
Finally I heard his voice very near my ear. “Ready?”
“Ready,” I said. By now I was really nervous. Some part of me was saying, This is crazy, an exorcism, you don’t know what will happen, you’re saying you’re possessed, a demon, this is crazy. But I was determined to go on.
“Okay,” Gary said, and he induced me pretty much the way he had induced Beth. Visualizing light, relaxing, visualizing moving my ego away from my center. Usually this
induction took only a few minutes, but this time it seemed to go on a long while: he was getting me to go deep.
Finally Gary said, “Okay, now, Michael, I want you to visualize your body as entirely surrounded by light, so much light that anything dark will stand out against all the light.”
I visualized that.
“Okay, now, Michael, do you see anything dark around your body?” I tried to see. To my surprise, I saw a cartoon demon, a sort of Walt Disney evil spirit with wings that looked like the devil from Fantasia. I saw this devil right in front of me. I also saw a sort of large bug, like an ant, down near my feet. And I saw a little man about two feet high, with a hat, behind my left shoulder.
“Do you see anything?” Gary asked.
I felt ridiculous. The principal image was a cartoon devil, and I wasn’t going to open my mouth and report that I saw a Walt Disney devil.
“No,” I said.
Gary moved across the room. “Beth, do you have any information now?”
And I heard Beth’s voice, drowsy and trance-like, reply, “There are three entities around him. There is a large creature, an insect, and a little man.”
Oh my God, I thought.
Because I hadn’t said anything. I was lying on a table with my eyes closed. Beth was lying on a couch across the room with her eyes closed. I had never met her before. There wasn’t any way for us to communicate now, yet she was seeing what I was seeing. How was that possible?
Gary came back to my ear. “Did you hear what Beth said?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any reaction?”
“Yes,” I said. I admitted she was right. I described the three dark entities. By now my left neck and shoulder were starting to cramp painfully. I remembered the first time I had felt that: it was in the summer of 1968, driving home from Florida to Massachusetts. I was in medical school, I had gone to Florida for a couple of weeks with my wife, to dive and to revise a book I planned to call The Andromeda Strain, if it ever got finished. The work had gone well, but, driving home in my blue Volvo, my left neck and shoulder had become excruciatingly painful. The pain had lasted about five months, and gradually faded. I’d considered it tension from typing, or from driving.
“Let’s talk to the little man,” Gary said.
I attempted to talk to the little man. He wouldn’t speak, but I sensed that he was an old and angry man beneath the sunhat, and I saw he had a fishing pole. I couldn’t really see him well because he was standing behind me, behind my shoulder.
Gary asked him some questions directly, but we didn’t really get very far with the little man. He was uncommunicative.
Gary asked Beth for suggestions.
“Talk to the creature in front,” she said.
“But the creature is a Walt Disney devil,” I said. “A cartoon devil.”
“That is how he is presenting himself to you,” she said. “That’s what he wants you to think he is.”
Gary said, “Can you talk to the creature?”
I tried. I saw him as bat-like, with glaring empty eyes. But I could talk to him, yes.
“Ask him how long he has been with you.”
A long time. Years.
“Ask him where he came from.”
I made him.
“When did you make him?”
When I was four years old.
“Why?”
To protect me.
“Protect you from what?”
My father.
“What about your father?”
My father wants to kill me.
I am standing outdoors, looking at a curved gravel driveway, my tricycle. My vision is low, near the gravel, at the height of the tricycle handlebars. The house behind me is narrow, two stories high. It is spring, and sunny, lots of green trees. Beyond the driveway is the road. Across the road is a high cliff, maybe a hundred feet high, of yellowish rock.
My father is recently back from the navy. He and I are going to climb the cliff. We say goodbye to my mother and cross the road and begin climbing. I am climbing first, and my father is following, so he can catch me if I fall.
We start up and I’m not scared, but pretty soon we are high, and the cliff is steep, and there is no easy path up. I don’t know where to put my hands and feet next. I get scared. I look down at my father, behind me. I realize that he is scared, too, that this is more than he has bargained for. I am not safe with him. If I fall, he can’t catch me.
He has lied to me. I am very frightened. The rock of the cliff is sharp, and cuts my fingers. It is brittle; it comes away in chunks in my hands.
We manage to go on. Somehow we get to the top. We have brought handkerchiefs to wave to my mother, down at the house far below. We wave to her, and then we walk down another way, a gentle way, through pine trees. My father is beside me. My heart is pounding with fear as I walk beside him.
Mount Ivy, New York, 1946.
Gary said, “You made the creature to protect you from your father?” My father had been in the navy. He had come home, but my mother preferred me to him, and he resented me. He wanted me gone. He wanted me to fall off the cliff and die.
He hated me.
“And did the creature protect you?”
Yes.
Gary said, “Is that why you kept the creature all these years?”
I am thirteen. I have just grown taller than my father, but I am painfully thin. We are playing basketball in the backyard. He is pushing and shoving me as we play. He often knocks me to the ground. Sometimes I want to cry.
Roslyn, New York, 1955.
“And did the creature protect you in other ways?”
Yes.
I am in high school. I am thirteen years old and six feet seven inches tall and I weigh 125 pounds. I look like a skeleton. I have grown a foot in the last year. I am the tallest person in the school, taller even than the teachers. Everybody laughs at me. The older boys sometimes chase me home from school and knock me down and sit on me and laugh at me.
But whenever that happens, whenever I am humiliated, whenever people laugh at me, I block it off. It is as if an invisible wall comes down, the rest of the world becomes dim, I can hardly hear the laughing voices. I hear a whisper in my ear. The whisper says they are jerks. I am smart and I am going to show them all. They are jerks. Anybody who laughs at me is a jerk.
“Then this creature you invented protected you from pain?”
Yes.
“The pain of growing up the way you did.”
Yes.
“And later?”
In college. Yes. I could cut people dead, I could just stare at people and think, You are really an asshole, and I could reduce them to silence, make them go away.
“And later?”
Medical school. Less. Less and less with time.
“And now? Does the creature do anything for you now?”
No.
I am surprised to realize this. The images I see now are episodes in which I feel barriers, obstructions, difficulty getting past my own defenses. My own harshness.
“So are you ready to give up the creature?”
“Yes.”
“Beth, how do you feel about what he is saying?”
“I don’t think Michael is ready to give it up.”
“Neither do I,” Gary says.
I hear them with a strange detachment. I am feeling very passive, floating, just going along with the flow of images and feelings.
Gary again: “You feel the creature doesn’t help you now. Let’s just be sure. Does the creature do anything in your writing?”
No.
I am clear about that. The creature is defensive and protective and paranoid in a way I am struggling to be free of.
“Beth?”
“I agree.”
“Does the creature do anything in your other work, movies or TV?” I have to consider that. Sometimes collaborative work gets abrasive; people can be harsh. Sometimes my feelings get hurt, and the voice whispers soothingly.
“Yes, but I can do without it.”
“Beth?”
“Yes. He can.”
“Does the creature do anything in your relationship with Anne-Marie?”
I realize it does: “It lets me rest.”
Sometimes when we have disagreements, when I feel falsely accused, when I feel trampled upon, I throw up an angry wall, and withdraw behind it. I can go off and sulk, or I can sit in the living room and be silently furious. But in either case I am safe, I am protected. I can rest from the struggle. Secure in my knowledge: Women, what can you do. They’re all the same. They’re all living out whatever Daddy did to them, and you just happen to be the latest recipient. They don’t care about you, they’ve never even met you. They just use you.
And so on. Secure in righteous indignation and nice warm anger.
“Are you willing to give that up?”
“I don’t know.”
It is a place of my own, this angry retreat. If I gave it up, I would be much more out there. That might not be so comfortable.
I think of other times. The times I have wanted to give compliments, but have been afraid of also giving up a psychological advantage; the times I have wanted to say I was hurt, instead of getting mad; the times I have wanted to release anger, instead of hanging on to it for days like a security blanket; the times I have wanted to express a wish instead of a complaint.
I can see how it might be better to give it up. And, anyway, I realize I am tired of it.
“I am tired of living that way. Yes: I’ll give it up.”
“Beth?”
“I still don’t feel he is ready.”
“Neither do I,” Gary says.
I still feel neutral. I am even, I am balanced, I am floating. I will take their word for it.
Gary says, “This creature has been very important in your life for a long time.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to thank the creature for all that it has done for you.”
“Okay.”
I start to do it inwardly.
“Out loud.”
“Okay.”
I hesitate. I feel a little stupid to be talking to a Walt Disney cartoon devil when other people can listen. I imagine that I will get formal, and say thank you to this creature. A stiff, correct statement of thanks is what I have in mind.