"I remembered vaguely before hypnosis that I knew someone there. But I just put that out of my mind because that's impossible. You can't — I mean, it's one thing to deal with something like that, and an entirely different thing to find out you know one of them already. [Laughs.]"
Budd Hopkins: "What about this thing about the woman —"
"This is just so strange! Will you stop for a minute, Budd, I just can't stand this. I mean, it's just we're gonna have to talk about this another time because I just need to rest."
"Let's go up and relax."
"Yeah, I've just had enough."
THREE
Farewell, green fields and hazy groves,
Where flocks have ta'en delight;
Where lambs have nibbled, silent moves
The feet of angels bright;
Unseen they pour blessing,
And joy without ceasing,
On each bud and blossom.
And each sleeping bosom.
-WILLIAM BLAKE, " Night"
THE COLOR OF THE DARK
Insight
Lost.
When I left that last session, it was with a deep sense of concern. I felt that I was entering an unknown region of the mind, perhaps of experience. I was doubly worried now for my sanity.
First, I still felt that I might be the victim of some rare disorder. Second, I questioned my ability to live with the notion that my whole life might have proceeded according to a hidden agenda. Neither of these alternatives was acceptable — hardly endurable — and yet one of them had to be true.
I walked the streets of New York, not thinking, Just absorbing the comfort of ordinary life. I walked but my impulse was to run. I was trapped: If I did not accept that something real was hiding in the deep of my life, then I had to accept myself as a disturbed man. But I did not feel or act disturbed. I felt afraid, and all my irrational actions could be seen as a response to unacknowledged fear.
I was a responsible husband and father. There wasn't any sign of psychosis in my personality. Don Klein was an acknowledged expert and, even after this hypnosis session, he told me that he thought I was sane.
But how could anybody not be psychotic and yet have these spectacular delusions?
As I walked I considered the problem. What should I tell my wife? And how about my son? To what degree were they involved? Never in my life had I felt as I felt then: trapped in a mysterious cavern of a life that had once seemed so clear and understandable.
How could it be that this went back into my childhood? How could it be? And if that wasn't true, and my mind had chosen to do this to itself, then what was it doing, and why?
Much later I listened to the tapes of other people's memories and hypnosis sessions (with their permission) and read Budd Hopkins's book, Missing Time. I then participated in a colloquy with other people who remember being taken. There I found that multiple-episode memories are quite commonplace. Many people who report being taken report a lifetime pattern much like the one I had discovered.
I wrestled with the notion that something might have been happening in my life — real encounters — that were having a tremendous, hitherto unconscious effect on me. Certainly I had acted as if this were true before any conscious memories had emerged. The conscious memories didn't really come before the first week in January 1986. Yet, as early as the summer of 1985 I had become nervous about "people in the house," even to the point of buying expensive burglar alarms and, in October, a shotgun.
I even tried to move — back to central Texas, where I grew up. It is interesting to note that I was, if anything, even more fearful in Texas than I was in New York. Did this mean that I unconsciously recalled even more frightening things happening there?
When I finally got home to my apartment it was to a bright, warm household with dinner waiting. Ten minutes later I really felt as if I had left the shadows behind.
But then my son went to bed, and soon after Anne turned in. When the lights were low my home seemed no more sheltering than a place of air.
When it was time to be alone in the night, what I now had to take with the was a corpus of staring owllike faces, a shockingly revised personal history, and a great deal of fear.
That night I wished to God that I could somehow shed myself and step out fresh in the world. The visitors persisted in my mind like glowing coals. I could see those limitless, eternal eyes glaring right into the center of me. Visitors seemed to inhabit every shadow, to move in the course of the sky.
I went out again and walked some more, going down through SoHo and into the empty streets of TriBeCa.
When I finally went back to the apartment the cats came up to me and started to twist and turn around my ankles — and then went bounding away. My cats. I shut myself in my office and sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to collect myself.
As soon as I relaxed, it was as if I had opened a hatch into another world. They swarmed at me, climbing up out of my unconscious, grasping at me. This was not memory, it only worked trough the medium of memory. It was meeting me on even level, caressing me as well as capturing me. This emergence was like a kind of internal birth, but what was being born was no bubbling infant. What came out into my conscious mind was a living, aware force. And I had a relationship with it-not a fluttering new one, but something rich and mature that ranged across the whole scale of emotions and included all of my time. I had to face it: Whatever this was, it had been involved with me for years I really squirmed.
What might be hidden in the dark part of my mind? I thought then that I was dancing on the thinnest edge of my soul. Below me were vast spaces. totally unknown. Not psychiatry, not religion, not biology could penetrate that depth. None of them had any real idea of what lives within. They only knew what little it had chosen to reveal of itself.
Were human beings what we seemed to be? Or did we have another purpose in another world? Perhaps our life here on earth was a mere drift of shadow, incidental to our real truth.
Maybe this was quite literally a stage, and we were blind actors.
To gain some semblance of control over myself, I decided to make an inventory of possibilities I sat down at my desk and began to write.
Even if the visitors were real, there was no reason to believe that they were simply creatures from another planet.
I speculated. It could be that the 'visitors' were really from here. Certainly the long tradition of lore suggested that something had been with us for far more than the forty or fifty years since the phenomenon took on its present appearance. The only trouble with this theory was that what has been happening since the mid-forties seemed more than just a little different from the fairy lore. Now there were brain probes and flying disks involved, abductions and gray creatures with staring eyes. Surely no change had taken place in the human psyche extreme enough to account for such a radical change in the appearance of the fairy. And yet, there was undoubtedly something here .... I thought perhaps the visitors were somehow trying to hide themselves in our folklore.
Another thought was that the visitors might really be our own dead. Maybe we were a larval form, and the adults of our species were as incomprehensible to us, as totally unimaginable, as the butterfly must be to the caterpillar. Perhaps the dead had been having their own technological revolution, and were learning to break through the limits of their bourne.
Or perhaps something very real had emerged from our own unconscious mind, taking actual, physical form and coming forth to haunt us. Maybe belief creates its own reality. It could be that the gods of the past were strong because the belief of their followers actually did give them life, and maybe that was happening again. We were creating drab, postindustrial gods to place of the glorious beings of the past. Instead of Apollo riding his fiery chariot across the sky or the goddess of night spreading her cloak of stars, we had created little steel-gray gods with the souls of pirates and craft no more beautiful inside than the bilges of battleships.