All this begins to afford us a glimpse into what happened to the Allans, as well as to Jane O’Neill, the two ladies at Versailles and Ivan Sanderson and his wife in Haiti. The fact that the Allans were run down, overworked and depressed — and therefore in a passive rather than an active state of mind — may explain why their minds failed to ‘tune in’ to the everyday reality of 1954, and in some erratic way selected the reality of another time and place.
All this suggests that Wilbur Wright could be close to the truth with his view of the ‘Fixed Time Field’, in which human beings move forward like a man in a railway carriage, regarding the passing scenery as the ‘present reality’. Or perhaps a better image might be one of those artificial streams in an amusement park, in which passengers climb into a boat — held temporarily at rest by an attendant — and are then swept off by the flow of the water, through ghostly tunnels and strange landscapes, where skeletons descend from the sky and crocodiles rise at the side of the boat. Once in the boat, the passenger has no way of escaping the forward-flow; yet the attendants can walk along the banks in either direction. If this view contains some element of the truth, then time is not some kind of illusion, as most time-theorists suggest. The stream and the boat and the landscapes are perfectly real; but the passenger in the boat has been subjected to a kind of limitation that does not apply to the attendants — and which will not apply to himself when he gets out of the boat at the other end.
If we consider the total picture that seems to emerge from the evidence for ‘time-slips’ and precognitions, it certainly seems clear that there is some sense in which the past continues to exist with its own kind of solid reality. (Otherwise the Allans could not have sat on a non-existent seat, and the two English ladies at Versailles could not have crossed a non-existent bridge.) There also seems to be some sense in which the future already exists as some kind of reality — Air Marshal Goddard was quite convinced that he was flying over a real airfield. And there is certainly overwhelming evidence that human beings possess a faculty that can grasp these other realities. In that case, it could be argued that the past, present and future form a total ‘field’, which ought — under the right circumstances — to be accessible to all of us, just as a total view of London is accessible to anyone who flies over London in an aeroplane.
But the ‘Fixed Time Field’ view should also be treated with some caution. It implies that we live in a kind of four-dimensional (or perhaps six-dimensional) museum in which everything is fixed and static. But the very essence of human existence is our feeling that the past has happened and cannot be ‘unhappened’, and that the future has not yet happened, and therefore cannot be precisely known. Time is not ‘unreal’. The alternative view, suggested in this chapter, is that the past is accessible to a certain level of the human mind because we are living in an information universe in which everything is ‘on record’. The future is also accessible because we are living in a largely predetermined universe in which human beings can (but not necessarily do) introduce an element of freedom. But the future — like the quantum universe — is a world of possibilities. The very essence of this theory is the recognition that human beings possess the freedom to choose between these possibilities.
Then how can human beings exercise their freedom? The basic answer seems to be: in the extent to which they accept or reject their experience. When I catch a train, I know in advance where it will take me, and even what time it will arrive. But I decide whether to sit blankly gazing out of the window, or whether to try to force my mind into a state of wider perception. Our basic human problem lies in our failure to grasp our freedom. And this is the real irony of the human situation. The freedom is there. It is merely the dullness of our physical senses, and the dreary narrowness of our minds that prevents us from grasping it. And, more important, grasping what can be done with it.
*In I Saw a Ghost, edited by Ben Noakes (1986).
*The story is told at length in Mysteries, pp. 144-9.
*I am deeply indebted to Wilbur Wright for allowing me to quote from his so-far unpublished work Immortality and the I Ching.
*See Herbert B. Greenhouse, Premonitions: A Leap into the Future.
*I am indebted to the account of the case given by Andrew MacKenzie in The Seen and the Unseen (1987), chapter 30.
7
Minds Without Bodies?
The story of the Allans yields another important clue to the mystery of paranormal experience. When the three ‘ghosts’ appeared behind Mrs Allan she felt paralysed, unable to turn her head. This sensation of paralysis appears again and again in accounts of paranormal experience. The student S. H. Beard experienced the same sensation when he tried to ‘appear’ to his fiancée Miss Verity, as decribed in chapter 2: ‘I must have fallen into a mesmeric trance, for although I was conscious, I could not move my limbs.’ It is as if the mind and the body have drifted slightly out of alignment.
Another case is cited by Dame Edith Lyttelton — one-time president of the Society for Psychical Research — in her book Our Superconscious Mind. In June 1889 Mrs F. C. McAlpine went to meet her sister off the train in Castleblaney and, when she failed to arrive, decided to go for a walk by the lake.
Being at length tired, I sat down to rest upon a rock at the edge of the water. My attention was quite taken up with the extreme beauty of the scene before me. There was not a sound of movement, except the soft ripple of the water on the sand at my feet. Presently I felt a cold chill creep through me, and a curious stiffness in my limbs, as if I could not move, though wishing to do so. I felt frightened, yet chained to the spot, as if impelled to stare at the water straight in front of me. Gradually a black cloud seemed to rise, and in the midst of it I saw a tall man, in a suit of tweed, jump into the water and sink.
In a moment the darkness was gone, and I again became sensible of the heat and the sunshine, but I was awed and felt eerie … . On my sister’s arrival I told her of the occurrence: she was surprised but inclined to laugh at it. When we got home I told my brother: he treated the subject in much the same manner. However, about a week afterwards a Mr Espie, a bank clerk (unknown to me), committed suicide by drowning at that very spot. He left a letter for his wife, indicating that for some time he had contemplated his death … .
It seems clear that Mrs McAlpine’s state of total relaxation created the right circumstances for her experience. We can assume either that her ‘subjective mind’ received a precognition of the suicide — after all, probably the most arresting event in the immediate future of the lake — or that she simply entered into telepathic contact with the bank clerk who was brooding on his suicide at that spot. The problem was then for the ‘subjective mind’ to convey the information to everyday awareness. If Mrs McAlpine had been asleep or in a semi-doze, a dream or hypnagogic image would have served the purpose. But at least she was in a state of complete relaxation. A slight ‘nudge’ was enough to send her ‘down the rabbit hole’, where the information could be conveyed in the form of a visual impression. But the ‘rabbit hole’ state is close to trance, so it involves a feeling of paralysis.
The literature of the paranormal offers many more examples in which feelings of paralysis are associated with ‘clairvoyant’ states. The psychic Robert Cracknell has described an experience that he had in the RAF, when he was guard commander. He was supposed to stay awake all night but decided to take a nap in one of the cells:
I was lying on the bunk fully dressed, drifting into sleep, and it was as though I suddenly woke up. I could quite distinctly hear the voice of the orderly officer in the main guardroom asking where the guard commander was … . I tried to get up and found, to my horror, that I was completely paralysed.
I knew in a strange way that I was not asleep. This was not a dream. And yet I could not move a muscle, and for what seemed to be at least three minutes I tried to call for help. The words formed in my mind but I was incapable of making myself heard. At this point I was conscious of panic. I constantly struggled to get
up from the prone position, but could not do so, and from somewhere at the back of my mind came the impression that I should relax. The panic, however, was far too strong, and I went on wrestling with my state of paralysis. I heard someone walk down the corridor and a voice said, ‘Quick, Corp, wake up.’
I managed to master my paralysis and stood by the side of the bunk completely bemused, drenched in sweat and unable to grasp what was going on. Then I heard the voice of the orderly officer calling out, ‘Where’s the guard commander?’*
In fact the orderly officer had only just arrived at that moment, and Cracknell was there to receive him. The dream — or rather the hypnagogic experience, for he points out that it happened as he was drifting into sleep — had been a precognition. For Cracknell it was the first of many such experiences. It was only later that he learned — from a book called Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington — that such states of ‘paralysis’ often precede so-called ‘out-of-the-body experiences’.
Muldoon is probably the most famous of the ‘astral projectors’ — at least until recent years, when that position was challenged by another American, Robert Monroe. Muldoon had his first out-of-the-body experience (usually abbreviated to OBE) at the age of twelve, when he and his mother were visiting the Mississippi Valley Spiritualist Association at Clinton, Iowa. He woke up in the middle of the night in a state of bewilderment and when he tried to move, found that he was paralysed. He had a sense of floating up into the air, then looked down and, to his amazement, saw his own body lying on the bed. He seemed to be joined to his body by a kind of cable that extended between their heads — the kind of ‘cable’, we may recall, that seemed to join the psychometrist Maria de Zierold to Dr Pagenstecher (see p. 148). Assuming he was dead, he tried to awaken the other sleepers, without success. ‘I clutched at them, called to them, tried to shake them, but my hands passed through them as though they were but vapours. I started to cry … .’ Then, as he wandered around the place, he felt an increasing resistance on the ‘cable’. It pulled him back towards his physical body, and once again he felt paralysed, unable to move. As he re-entered his body all his muscles jerked and he experienced intense pain, ‘as if I had been split open from head to foot’. Then he was awake and conscious again.
Many thousands of examples of out-of-the-body experiences have been reported in the literature of the paranormal: one eminent researcher, Robert Crookall, devoted nine volumes to such cases. Another, the South African investigator J. C. Poynton, collected 122 cases as a result of a single questionnaire published in a newspaper. A similar appeal by the English researcher Celia Green brought 326 cases. One survey even produced the incredible statistic that one in ten persons have had an out-of-the-body experience.
A few investigators, notably Dr Susan Blackmore, have expressed doubts as to whether these experiences are any more than dreams. One of my correspondents, Mr D. R. Mitchell, has sent me a paper in which he argues that out-of-the-body experiences can be explained in terms of a mechanism in the brain called the Reticular Activation System, which acts as a valve between the senses and the brain and which closes the channel between the brain and the muscles (producing, obviously, a sense of paralysis). He also suggests that as soon as we begin to fall asleep, a mechanism called the Silt Removal System is activated to get rid of surplus calcium ions in the synapses of the nerves. The neurons ‘fire’, and this causes memories to appear in the nervous system. (This could also explain hypnagogic images, as well as dreams.) But if something jarred the sleeper partially awake he would find himself in a kind of sensory limbo, unable to move — because the Reticular Activation System’s ‘valve’ was still half closed — and aware of the input of memories being ‘dumped’ by the Silt Removal System. This, Mr Mitchell believes, explains the out-of-the-body experience, which is merely a waking dream.
It is a convincing explanation, but would be rejected by most people with any experience of ‘astral projection’. Obviously, the question of proof is all-important. Muldoon’s fellow author, Hereward Carrington, was an eminent member of the American Society for Psychical Research and made something of a speciality of exposing fraudulent mediums, but he was finally convinced by Muldoon’s ability to obtain correct information about distant events by ‘travelling’ there in his astral body. In fact Carrington himself once conducted a series of experiments in which he tried to ‘project’ himself into the room of a young lady when he was on the point of sleep. He had no idea of whether he had succeeded. But the young lady told him not only had he ‘appeared’ to her, but she had been seized by an impulse to practise ‘automatic writing’ and had written a poem. The ‘poem’ turned out to be the opening lines of a song called ‘When Sparrows Build’ which she did not know, but which was a favourite of Carrington’s.
In the 1960s the psychologist Charles Tart studied a borderline schizophrenic girl whom he called Miss Z., who told him that she had been leaving her body ever since childhood. To test whether these experiences were dreams Tart told her to try an experiment: she was to write the numbers one to ten on several slips of paper, scramble them up, then choose one at random when her light was out and place it on the bedside table. If she had an out-of-the-body experience in the night she had to try to read the number (she claimed to be able to see in the dark during her OBEs). She tried this several times and found she always got the number right. So Tart decided to test her himself. The girl was wired up to machines in his laboratory and asked to try and read a five-digit number which Tart had placed on a high shelf in the room next door. Miss Z. reported correctly that the number was 25132.
In 1972 a book called Journeys Out of the Body by the American businessman Robert Monroe aroused widespread interest. Monroe had begun to experience what he called ‘vibrations’ on the point of sleep when he was experimenting with data learning during sleep. When this happened he became powerless to move. Then one day when the ‘vibrations’ came he happened to be lying with his hand over the side of the bed. He tried scratching the rug and found that his fingers went through it, then through the floor to the ceiling of the room below. A few weeks later he found himself floating in the air looking down at his own body on the bed. From then on, he was able to leave his body more or less at will. He soon confirmed, to his own satisfaction, that this was not some kind of dream: he observed what friends were doing during his ‘trips’ and later confirmed that he had been correct. He even pinched a woman friend, who jumped and later showed him a bruise at the same spot. (People in OBE states seem to have some slight ability to influence the physical world.)
Charles Tart investigated Monroe in his laboratory and found that, like Miss Z., he could report accurately on things that were happening elsewhere. Other psychologists were understandably sceptical. Glen O. Gabbard and Stuart W. Tremlow produced a classic study of ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ based on 339 case studies. They noted that as a child, Monroe had had a fascination with flying, and speak of his ‘Daedalus fantasies’ (Daedalus being the Greek mythological character who invented wings, with which his son Icarus flew too close to the sun and crashed.) They say that ‘the fascination with out-of-body “travel” seen in Monroe is likely an adult derivative of this Daedalus fantasy.’ But when Tremlow studied Monroe in his own laboratory in 1977 he and a colleague were baffled to see a ‘heat-wave-like distortion beginning at Monroe’s waist, so that it was difficult to get a clearly focused picture of his upper body, although his lower body was in clear focus’. This was a few moments before Monroe began to move again at the end of his trance-like sleep. They also observed a slowing down in his brainwaves when he was in his trance-state. It looks, on the whole, as if Monroe had the last word in this argument.
The title of Gabbard and Tremlow’s book, With the Eyes of the Mind, is taken from Goethe’s autobiography Poetry and Truth, Part 3, Book Eleven, which describes a curious episode in which Goethe was confronted by his own double. He had just taken leave of Frederika, a girl he had been temp
ted to marry, and was in a state of gloom:
I now rode along the footpath towards Drusenheim, and here one of the most singular premonitions took possession of me. I saw, not with the eyes of the body, but with the eyes of the mind, my own figure coming towards me, on horseback and on the same road, attired in a dress which I had never worn: — it was the grey of a pike, with something of gold in it. As soon as I shook myself out of this dream, the figure disappeared. It is strange, however, that eight years later, I found myself on the very road, to pay one more visit to Frederika, in the dress of which I had dreamed, and which I was wearing not from choice but by accident … .
It looks as if Goethe’s ‘superconscious mind’ was attempting to relieve his depression by showing him a picture of himself returning to see Frederika in eight years’ time — and in fact it did have that effect: ‘the strange illusion calmed me in those moments of parting.’
The German for ‘double’ is doppelgänger, but the above case is obviously an example of premonition rather than of the ‘projection’ of a double. On another occasion, however, Goethe saw a genuine doppelgänger. It was of his friend Friedrich, who was apparently strolling along the street in front of Goethe after a heavy shower. The odd thing was that Friedrich was wearing Goethe’s dressing-gown. Goethe arrived home to find Friedrich — in the same dressing-gown — standing in front of the fire. He had been caught in the rain and had borrowed Goethe’s dressing-gown while his own coat dried out.