"That isn't an image of what really happened?"
"No. I have no reason to believe that. Maybe something much more subtle is going on here. Maybe that image was created to see how I react to something that would be ultimately terrifying to me. Or maybe they were just trying to find out what kind of person I am."
The session then ended with a decision to continue later in the week. The next night (Sunday. March 2) I called my mother in San Antonio, as I MY to do every week or two. I told her nothing about this matter. And how could I? I had not thought of a way to explain what was happening to us to my seventy-year-old mother on the telephone.
We talked for a time about a friend who was in the hospital. Then, without warning, she suddenly described my father's death to me. I did not ask her to, nor was I even hoping that she would. In the past ten years I have heard this description only once before, the day after he died. She recounted how she had been sitting near him while he lay on the couch. He had spent a restless afternoon. The doctor believed that his heart would soon fail, and had told my mother this just a few days before. Still, they had been together for so long she could not imagine him dying.
In the last years of their marriage they had become extremely close, often sitting hand in hand together, in the wordless communion that sometimes blesses very old relationships. I can hardly imagine a more gentle or loving end to their long time together than what happened at the last.
Mother told me again how she had suddenly heard Dad call her name, and had gone to him and said, "Karl? Karl, wake up." He was lying still and silent .... It was as easy as that.
How was it that she would suddenly retell this story again, after all these years, at the very moment I needed to hear it? The combination of the memory of that terrifying night and this story, told in my mother's calm, sure voice, led me into the most enriching of insights about my buried fears and quilts. I blamed myself for the lack of intimacy in my relationship with my father. He reached out more than he withdrew. Even though I loved him, I moved away. I grew up and left him to age and die without the comfort of his oldest son.
Also, though, I had to make my own life. Beyond its moral sense, the word conscience has always meant to me an active knowledge of one's inner truth, an acceptance of all the sacrifice on the part of others that has been required for one's own development. The prime sacrifice is that of the parents. One can preserve the guilt one feels for it — as I now see that I had done — or one can temper it with acceptance and use it as a building block in the edifice of maturity. In a moment that night, beneath the feather-pounding of the silver wand, I was given a potential that could greatly enrich my life.
If this was a real visitor, giving me a real blessing from some other reality, then why was it hidden in amnesia where I could not gain access to it? Maybe my experiences were only a side effect of some sort of study. Or maybe it was known even then that this rich treasure would eventually be open to me, because the whole experience had been designed in detail by insightful minds engaged in a slow process of acclimatizing humanity to their presence.
Maybe, though, there was another truth here. Perhaps the hypnosis revealed not just the possible presence of visitors but the action of a hidden and tremendously therapeutic potential which, if correctly marshaled, could be of great value.
While there is a long tradition in the fairy literature of the Middle Ages of the use of wands to grant insight, and the angel in the Book of Revelation is said to strike the elect thrice between the eyes and cause them great suffering, modern accounts of visitors contain only one oblique reference to this process. A woman who had an enigmatic visitor encounter in the fifties slowly became insane thereafter. As she did so she would claw at the center of her forehead in the same place where I was struck with the wand, to the point that she gouged herself almost to the bone.
It would be easy to say that the material revealed here is the work of a mind making opportunistic use of some nocturnal disturbances to gain contact with fears that it needed to explore. The glaring difficulty with this supposition is that the whole transaction remained hidden in amnesia until many months later. There is the additional problem of the witnesses, and the "clap of thunder" coming before the "lightning."
The easy route would be to dismiss this material as entirely psychological. That would also be a mistake, at least until the physical effects are explained completely, in detail, and satisfactorily.
A terrifying thing happened to me. Perhaps it involved visitors from somewhere-maybe even from inside the human unconscious. For me, though, the most important thing about it was its essentially human effect. I was a human being, and my part of things involved having a human experience. Even if there was a visitor, it seemed clear that concentration on the human part of the encounter was the key to understanding what meaning it may have for me.
And if the visitor was no more than wind in the eaves or the moon lighting the fog . . . then it was a key to what I mean to myself.
Events of December 26, 1985
SESSION DATE: March 5. 1986
SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber
PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Klein, MD
We met again a few days later. I had occupied myself with other things during the previous four days. but it was hard. It was a great effort not to go to the library and get half a dozen books about close encounters, and another half dozen about possible psychosocial causes for such experiences. But I agreed with Dr. Klein and Budd Hopkins that I must remain as ignorant of this material as possible until after my hypnosis.
Yet I kept remembering that face, darting, the sharp dark eyes glistening, and the silver wand glittering as it rose and fell.
I couldn't believe it could be anything other than an act of mind. While I was prepared to accept that there may be a visitor presence on earth, I was not prepared to find one of them at my bedside practicing psychotherapy with a fairy wand. Surely it wouldn't be that personal.
Surely it would be at least a little like what we would expect.
But there are deep, deep waters running here. If these are indeed visitors, they know us well . . . better than we know ourselves. More than visitors, they may simply be "others," an aspect of being which we have not yet understood.
No matter what exactly is made of it, the combination of all the flying-disk sightings over the past two generations and the smattering of abduction accounts certainly suggest that something strange is going on. Maybe just a strange form of hysteria, but if so an awfully strange one . . . that combines huge lights, little scampering feet — and intimate intrusions into the soul.
Budd Hopkins told me that first hypnosis sessions were often traumatic. These memories are buried for a reason: They are frightful in the extreme. When they first emerge, the mind lives through the panic it has been avoiding. While my experience with the wand is almost unique, the being I saw wielding it is of a type commonly reported.
It was during this week that I began to have a relationship with my own memories. There had been a being present. I had seen it. And I had seen others in December. I remembered the way they had smelled, the way it had felt to be carried by them, the way their pace had looked inside.
I felt complex emotions, ranging from the deepest inner unrest to what I can only describe as an urgency to compliance. I wanted to come together with them on my terms, to find some sort of mutuality.
I have never felt so tiny, so helpless. My boy's words haunted me—" . . . a bunch of little doctors who took me out on the porch . . ." There is nothing so hard as being a parent frightened in the night for your child.
When I returned to Dr. Klein's office, I described myself as "uneasy." He said, "Is that all?"
I admitted: "Terrified."
"Very understandable."
We began the session covering December 26 as soon as I was comfortable. Again, Budd Hopkins was present and allowed to question me under the same rules agreed to in the previous session.
"I want to take you back to December twenty-sixth. Going back to December twenty-sixth. Arid you are having supper. You are going to talk to me now, but stay completely asleep. Completely, deeply asleep. Where are you having supper?"
"In the country."
"Tell me who's there."
"Anne and our son."
"How are you feeling now?"
"Nice."
"What are you doing?"
"We're having super."
"What are you eating?"
"Goose. Cold goose. It's a used supper ... Christmas dinner. And cranberry sauce. Sweet potatoes."
"How do you feel?"
"I'm very happy. I'm feeling great."
"Had you been feeling great the previous few weeks?"
"[Long silence.] I had a hard time up until Christmas."
"What sort of hard time?
"[Long pause.] Was-scared. Unhappy. I felt like the world was caving in on me. Kept thinking there were these people hiding in the closet. Went all through the house every night. Checking."
"Were you checking anything out?"
"I was checking out the house."
"Did you have any idea why you were searching?"
"In case there might be somebody hiding in the house."