Communion

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.

Or maybe we were receiving a visit from another dimension, or even from another time.

Maybe what we were seeing were human time travelers who assumed the disguise of extraterrestrial visitors in order to avoid creating some sort of catastrophic temporal paradox by revealing their presence to their own ancestors.

I wondered about my description of them as insectlike. Their appearance was actually more humanoid. There were no feelers, no wings, no tangle of legs. It was the way they moved — so stiffly — drat suggested the insect world to me. That, and their enormous, black eyes. What if intelligence was not the culmination of evolution but something that could emerge from the evolutionary matrix at many different points, just as wings and claws and eyes do. Primitive creatures have primitive organs.

If, say, some species of hive insect had become intelligent on some other planet — or even here — it might be very much older than us, and its mind very much more primitive in structure.

What would a more primitive intelligence be? I wondered if such a thing might nut involve less differentiation from creature to creature than we have . . with less individual awareness and independence.

If they were a hive, they might communicate as a hive, using a complex mixture of sounds, motions. scents, and even methods as vet unknown. Our knowledge of earth's hive species is very limited. An intelligent hive might as a whole be very powerful, but as individuals, quite limited both in strength and in understanding.

They might have, in essence, a single, enormous mind. Such a mind might chink very well indeed — but very slowly. That would certainly explain why they were being so careful in dealing with us. A single human being might be far less wise than they but also a lot faster thinking.

I had been assuming that any visitors would be vastly more intelligent than us. What if that was only part of the truth? In terms of earthly evolution, man emerged only very recently. Maybe that also means that man is not the lesser creature, but the more advanced one. If this was so, then older, less quick thinking and flexible forms might view us as quite a danger to them. They might even want to imprison us here in our earth, or do worse than imprison us.

And yet, I did not have the feeling that they were hostile so much as stern. They were also at least somewhat frightened of me . was certain of that In some sense, their emergence into human consciousness seemed to me to represent life — or the universe itself — engaged to some deep act of creation.

Sitting there at that moment, I suddenly realized that all my questions about whether or not my experiences were real were meaningless. Of course they were real. I had perceived them. A more accurate question was, what were they? They were not entirely mental, at least not in a conventional sense. Other people had witnessed their side effects. The light seen by Jacques Sandulescu on October 4, the scampering heard Annie Gottlieb, and the explosion perceived by myself, my wife, Annie. and my son suggested that whatever happened that night was more than a psychological experience. And the dozens of similar stories being told by such a cross section of the population suggested as well that if a psychological explanation was to be sustained. it would have to be a most radical one.

In one way, as I sat there at my desk in the middle of the night, I found the notion of all this witness reassuring. But in another way it actually seemed dangerous. It was corrosive to my understanding of myself and of reality.

My mind turned, inevitably, to the part of the hypnosis that had covered the apparent event in my childhood. I had no memory at all of being taken when I was twelve, let alone when we were aboard a moving train. And yet people report this experience beginning at all sorts of improbable times, the most improbable being while they are driving cars. If it is some sort of hypnagogic trance, why don't they go off the road, or at least run a light or so during the couple of hours the experience usually lasts?

My sister and father and I did take a trip in 1957 to Madison, Wisconsin, to see my aunt and uncle and their children. On the way back I was horribly sick. We had a drawing room on the Texas Eagle from Chicago to San Antonio, and much of the trip took place at night.

At that moment, I felt as if I had opened the door onto my familiar yard at the cabin and found no grass, no flowers, no tall hemlocks. All that was there was limitless, empty blue sky through which, if I crossed the threshold, I would fall forever.

On that note I gave up. It was pushing toward three o'clock in the morning and I was finally so exhausted that I could not stay awake. I went to bed. I do not remember any dreams. When morning came, it brought me only one thought: I had to see this through. I had to understand, as far as possible, what was happening to me.

No matter what it actually was, my inner self was reacting to this very much as if it were a real experience with real people. Over the next few days I faced the fact that I had a relationship with them, despite the fact that I could not even be sure they existed.

I wished that I could believe that the experience had never hurt anybody. But I couldn't believe that, not in view of the terrific stress I had been under. Before I underwent hypnosis, the great and agonizing issue was: Did it happen or not? In other words, was I a victim or a madman? This question was literally chewing up my soul. It was intolerable.

The day before I met Budd Hopkins I almost jumped out a window. I am lucky. I found Hopkins, and he found Don Klein. What if I had turned for help to someone irrevocably convinced that I was the victim of hallucination or psychosis and too inflexible even to entertain another possibility? I might have jumped. Don Klein's open-mindedness in the face of the fearful and the fantastic has been instrumental in helping me to learn to live with uncertainty.

Because of the intelligence of the approach, I became stronger. And with my strength there came, beginning in April 1986, a great deal of research. I read thousands of pages of material about the whole phenomenon and all its scientific and cultural implications.

If visitors are really here, one could say that they are orchestrating our awareness of them very carefully. It is almost as if they either carne here for the first time in the late forties, or decided at that time to begin to emerge into our consciousness. People apparently started to be taken by them almost immediately. but few remembered or reported this until the mid-sixties. Their involvement with us might have been very intimate, though, right from the beginning. Many of those who have been taken report very early childhood experiences, some dating from considerably before the first disks were reported after World War II.

What may have been orchestrated with great care has not been so much the reality of the experience as public perception of it. First the craft were seen from a distance in the forties and fifties. Then they began to be observed at closer and closer range. By the early sixties there were many reports of entities, and a few abduction cases. Now. in the mid-eighties, I and others — for the most part independent of one another — have begun to discover this presence in our lives.

Even though there has been no physical proof of the existence of the visitors, the overall structure of their emergence into our consciousness has had to my mind the distinct appearance of design.

Despite what they had done to me, I did not hate the visitors. Because I knew their strength but not their motives, they frightened me. But I wished to be objective about them, even to the point of saying that they could very definitely be something from inside the mind rather than from elsewhere in the universe. That they represented a real, living force seemed hard to dispute. But that this force might be essentially human in origin remained a definite possibility.

Certainly, they did not seem human at all. Under hypnosis I described the approach of the small figure wearing the strange cards and helmet. He stood all tiny and bursting with firmness at my bedside and made a semaphore gesture with his closed fists. I leaped out of bed, threw off my pajamas, and presented myself naked to him and his soldiers, thoughts of "the good army" filling my head. There was nothing human about him, except that he had two arms, two legs, and a head.

Given their general reluctance to expose themselves to us in an open and obvious manner, it may be hypothesized that they are trying for a degree of influence or even control over us, but one that at least presents an appearance of compliance on our part.

About two weeks after my last hypnosis session, the three of us returned to the cabin for the first time since Christmas. Anne still knew little, our son, nothing.

I did not realize until I arrived there that I had entrusted these two other people to this experience without letting them know what might be happening. But what could I say? That it could be dangerous? Was that true? Or should I have told them to decide for themselves?

Probably, but I didn't. Later, after Anne had herself undergone hypnosis and knew the whole story, she said that she would never, ever have turned away from the cabin. And our son — if he was involved there was little we could do except agonize. To hear my own mind tell the story. I had been involved most of my life.

As soon as we returned. I realized how precious our cabin had become to me. One would think that the discovery of something like this in one's life would create absolute panic, and special fear concerning the place where it had happened. At first the thought of the cabin filled me with dread, but by the time we went back I felt more reconciled to my situation. It was as if ignoring what had been happening to me required a very substantial effort. Screen memories and amnesia have to be maintained, and there is an emotional cost.

If mine was not an uncommon experience, it might be that we live in a society that bears a secret bruise from it. But as more of us allow ourselves to see what we have fought so hard to ignore, maybe the bruise will begin to heal.

Standing in our living room, I recalled my own distressed state in, really, the past year or so. How many times I had gone through that house or my apartment in the midnight, opening closets and looking under beds. I was always perplexed at myself, because I did not understated my urgency to investigate — especially the corners and crannies. I always looked down low in the closets, seeking something small. Under hypnosis I remembered that I felt as if something very strange was about to put its hand on me and take me away. It was a most curious feeling, not unlike the mood created by the sound of wind in night trees, or the cast of moonlight upon an uneasy stream.

On the surface I was quite normal, but there was this persistent undertone of fear. I felt watched. even though I knew that I was not actually being observed. I bought my dun. I had the burglar alarm installed. I got the motion-sensitive lights.

What was all this supposed to be for in that peaceful, crime-free corner of the world?

Even at the time I'd had trouble rationalizing my fears. Now it was clear that they referred not to conventional burglars and such, but to this furtive presence in my life. And this presence was coming to seem. to me to be quite real.

The moment I walked into the bedroom I was struck by what I can only describe as a sense of the true. Being in the place where the events had happened made it essentially impossible for me to separate them from other reality. The whole experience of the twenty-sixth, especially the first few moments, rested in the part of my mind that recalled reality, and was as completely distinguished from dream as any other real memory. Those first moments, when the person wearing the shieldlike cards entered the room, were a memory. I was not in any sort of trance when that happened. I was not asleep. I had been conscious and m a state that seemed m every way to be normal.

Now I stood in that bedroom looking at the door , at the floor, at the bed.

Then I saw, behind the door, an indentation in the wall that had been made by the door being slammed open with substantial force.

Did we do that, or did they do it?

Being in the room again, my memories of December 26 grew quite distinct. I could see the visitors coming, could recall my terror, my paradoxical loyalty to their commands. I remembered how it had felt to be touched by them. They were quick and precise in their movements. I remembered the smell of them, the look of their places, and above all I remembered how it was to be with them. There was fear, awe, even a sort of love.

It was cold in the cabin, and I soon went back downstairs and built a fire. We had supper and put our boy to bed with a story, then I sat in a favorite chair with a glass of wine and stared at the flames, thinking.

I wanted to approach this from the most productive viewpoint possible. Rather than trying to decide who the visitors may be and what they may want for themselves here, I thought to concentrate on my. own feelings and thoughts about them. Absent even a scintilla of certain knowledge about them, there really was no other meaningful choice.

I looked at the black picture window across the room, seeing only my own faint reflection. How clearly I recalled sweeping off the porch beyond on the night of the twenty-sixth, going into the air with the little people swirling around me. Remaining in my mind's eye is an image that I remembered under hypnosis of my cabin, of my dark bedroom window and my son's window below it with the night light shining faintly behind the curtains. As I left I felt a sorrow as if I had died, and that is why the moment was buried in amnesia.

Then there was an impression as if all the trees below me were suddenly swept up together in a great mass of flashing trunks and limbs. When they straightened themselves out again I was sitting in the small depression with some guards around me. I still had the thought that somebody was talking to me then, but I did not remember what was said. The voice I remembered was one that had appeared to be inside my head. This may seem like some sort of thought transference, but may also be something more understandable.

The brain is an electrical device. As such it has a faint electromagnetic field and even emits very, very weakly in the radio part of the spectrum. Specifically, it contains a portion of an extra-low-frequency (ELF) electromagnetic field wave at frequency between 1 and 30 hertz. The heart and musculature also develop electromagnetic fields in the extra-low-frequency range.

A more acute technology than our own might be able to mediate mental and physical functioning to a great degree by the use of sensitive ELF transmitters and receivers. It is more prosaic, perhaps, than the magic of extrasensory perception. but it has just enough plausibility to suggest that external control of the mind, and even the implantation of perceptions (hearing voices inside the head), is not beyond the realm of possibility.

I should add here that the earth itself generates a good deal of ELF in the 1 to 30 hertz range. Perhaps there are natural conditions that trigger a response in the brain which brings about what is essentially a psychological experience of a rare and powerful kind. Maybe we have a relationship with our own planet that we do not understand at all, and the old gods, the fairy, and the modern visitors are side effects of it. Admittedly, this idea is farfetched. But what of it? So are all the others.

Sitting in front of my fire, though, I found that I could not concentrate on hypotheses. My mind kept returning to memory. Intellectually, I was unsure about what the visitors were. But my emotional self did not share that indecision. My emotional response was to real people, albeit nonhuman ones.

Hypnosis had made the memories very vivid. When I rose out of the woods under hypnosis, I actually felt the sensation of rushing upward, just as if I were in an extremely fast elevator. I saw the trees below me, standing in the night, glowing faintly with a covering of snow. I can remember seeing them between my knees, getting rapidly smaller.

The space I entered smelled like warm Cheddar cheese with a hint of sulfur. This sulfur odor has been reported by others. There was a discarded coverall lying partly on the bench, partly on the floor. I had the strong impression that I was in a living room of some sort. For the most part, people feel that they are in an examination room.

Sitting before me was the most astonishing being I have ever seen in my life, made the more astonishing by the fact that I knew her. I say her, but I don't know why. To me this is a woman, perhaps because her movements are so graceful, perhaps because she has created states of sexual arousal in me, or maybe it is simply the memory of her hand touching the side of my chest one time, so lightly and yet with such firmness.

In subsequent months I found that people who have had the experience often felt that they were familiar with one of the visitors, and usually perceived this person to be of the opposite sex. People generally appeared for help with a single memory, maybe two. When they discovered a continuity of experience they were usually as stunned as I was. I also noticed that the fact that people report multiple-visitor experiences over the course of their lives had been published very minimally, even in the UFO literature. I was virtually certain that my own hypnosis was the first time I had encountered what seemed to me to be a fantastically improbable notion.

It was interesting to me that the idea of multiple experiences would be shared by so many people, given that there has been so little cultural reinforcement of it. Published accounts generally avoided this aspect, because a single experience with the visitors stretches credibility so much that an assertion like this seems impossible to maintain.

That night at the cabin, I found myself thinking about the one I knew, turning her presence over and over in my mind. She had those amazing, electrifying eyes . . . the huge, staring eyes of the old gods .... They were featureless, in the sense that I could see neither pupil nor iris. She was seated across from me, her legs drawn up, her hands on her knees. Her hands were wide when placed flat, narrow and long when dangling at her sides. There was a structure, perhaps of bones, faintly visible under the skin. And yet other parts of her body seemed almost like a sort of exoskeleton, like an insect would have.

She was undeniably appealing to me. In some sense I thought I might love this being — almost as much as I might my own anima. I bore toward her the same feelings of terror and fascination that I might toward someone I saw staring back at me from the depths of my unconscious.

There was in her gaze an element that is so absolutely implacable that I had other feelings about her, too. In her presence I had no personal freedom at all. I could not speak, could not move as I wished.

I wondered, before the fire, if that wasn't a sort of relief. I had reported that I had been terrified in her presence. Certainly I remember fear. But was that an accurate portrayal of my actual state? If I could give up my autonomy to another. I might experience not only fear but also a deep sense of rest. It would be a little like dying to really give oneself up in that way, and being with her was also a little like dying.

When they held me in their arms, I had been as helpless as a baby, crying like a baby, as frightened as a baby.

I realized that the extraordinarily powerful states I was examining could lead me in two undesirable directions. First, the sheer helplessness that they evoked created awe, which could lead to a desire to comply . . . and then to love. Second, the fear caused such confusion that one could not be sure how to feel.

Her gaze seemed capable of entering me deeply, and it was when I had looked directly into her eyes that I felt my first taste of profound unease. It was as if every vulnerable detail of my self were known to this being. Nobody in the world could know another human soul so well, nor could one man look into the eyes of another so deeply, and to such exact effect. I could actually feel the presence of that ocher person within me — which was as disturbing as it was curiously sensual. Their eyes are often described as "limitless," "haunting,"' and "baring the soul." Can anything other than a part of oneself know one so well? It's possible, certainly. To an intelligence of sufficiently greater power, it may be that we would seem as obvious as animals seem to us — and we might feel as exposed as do some dogs when their masters stare into their eyes.

The realization that something was actually occurring within me because this person was looking at me — that she could apparently look into me — filled me with the deepest longing I can ever remember feeling . . . and with the deepest suspicion.

I wondered that night in the cabin if it was the sheer impact of the experience that had fixed the image of this being so vividly in my mind, or had communion somehow come alive within me? And was she still here in some sense . . . watching even as I sat before my fire?

As I remembered her I found myself filling with a formless question. Groping for what it was that perplexed me, I recalled an exchange that now came to seem very important. I'd had a very distinct impression of her, that she was old. Not just aged, like an elderly person, but really old. Why had I felt this? I could not be sure.

I still remember her voice, soft, coming from I know not where, answering me: "Yes, I'm old." When she spoke in my head, there was a lilting quality to it. But when she used her voice, it was startlingly deep to be coming from so slight a creature. It was more than a bass: It sounded like it was booming out from the depths of a cave.

I remembered my protest to her when she reassured me about the operation not hurting me. The sense of helplessness was an awful thing to contemplate. "You have no right," I had said.

"We do have a right." Five enormous words. Stunning words. We do have a right. Who gave it to them? By what progress of ethics had they arrived at that conclusion? I wondered if it required debate, or seemed so obvious to them that they never questioned it.

The fire before me sputtered. I opened the vent on the stove and it obediently flared up again.

Maybe their right came from a different direction than one might think. If they were a part of us, it might be that we granted them the right they assert.

Listening to the crackle of the fire mingle with the ticking of the clock, I thought that perhaps I might welcome voices of instruction. After finishing Nature's End with James Kunetka, I began to feel strongly that the present world situation was unsustainable. I did not think that the world was actually ending, but I could easily have been persuaded that the biosphere would soon change so catastrophically that an immense amount of human life would be lost.

I wondered if a mind, contemplating terrors such as this, might provide itself with gods, if only to ease the burden of being alone with the fear.

If they were real visitors, though, I wanted to know the ethics behind their assertion of their "right." Of course, we ourselves barely question our rights over the other species on earth. How odd it was to find oneself suddenly under the very power that one so easily assumes over the animals.

I thought of some lowing cows, their bells tinkling on a long-ago Texas evening, or of my cat asleep on my lap back in the city. trusting its little self utterly to an affection that to me was casual, but to Sadie was the center of the universe.

I remembered when my father took me to a slaughterhouse in Fort Worth. and I heard the rumble of panic and saw the bucking backs of the steers and the creamy whites of their eyes.

I smelled the slick of manure and urine and blood, and heard the steady crunching of the blows and the blare of the saws.

And at a research institute in San Antonio I saw monkey cages with rows of doctored capuchins, shaved, their pink heads sewn or laid delicately open, and the trembling brain probes and the gabble of noise when the vocalization center of one of them was stimulated for the information of graduate students.

What did the monkey with the needle in its brain think of its observers? Were they gods to whom it submitted itself with a noble passivity because it could do nothing else? I saw monkey carcasses in the dumpster, too.

Try as I might, I simply did not have the feeling that the visitors were applying the same cold ethic to their relationship with us as we did to ours with the animals. There was something of that in it though, very definitely. I had been captured like a wild animal on December 26, rendered helpless and dragged out of my den into the night.

Nor did I feel that they were simply studying me. Not at all. They had changed me, done something to me. I could sense it clearly that night but I could not articulate it.

Later, I thought to myself that they were taming me. Maybe this gradual increase in the intimacy of contact that has occurred over the years has to do with that: They are taming us all.

After the dialogue about rights, the female called me their chosen one and I proceeded to get mad. I viewed it as a ploy and reacted with scorn. She wagged her head from side to side, singing "Oh. no. Oh, no." There was insistence in her voice, and humor.

I distinctly remembered seeing a woman wearing a flowered dress being told this. But where? When. The memory was free-floating, without reference. There was just this woman in a white floral-pattern dress standing before a group of them shouting "Praise the Lord" as she was told she had been chosen.

Maybe what they meant was that we have all been chosen — and we are all being tamed.

Nobody has ever domesticated mankind. We are thus a wild species, as wild as the day we first went howling across the savanna. Perhaps the self-taming process of becoming a civilized species did not tame us to visitors, but only to ourselves . . . and then not very well, given our violent history.

That first night back at the cabin, I looked at the couch where they had left me on December 26. I wondered if the old earth did not settle in some obscure, internal way just at the moment I came to consciousness there. Perhaps its low-frequency emissions changed and I fell not from that hidden room in the sky but rather from some lurching walkabout in my own night house. I wondered if there was any relationship between my experience and the mystic walk of the shaman, or the night ride of the witch.

I had read far in the works of mystical search and mythology, and in retrospect it surprised me that I would be so amazed when I finally reached down into the darkest part of the soul and found something there. Now that I was back at the scene of my experience, I felt that I always knew what I would find, and that all of my surprise was itself a sort of illusion.

I reflected that the abduction to a round room had a long, long tradition in our culture: There were many such cases in the fairy lore. The story called "Connla and the Fairy Maiden," as collected in Joseph Jacobs's Celtic Fairy Tales (Bodley Head, 1894, 1985). could with some changes be a modern tale of the visitors.

As suggestive as this was of the possibly historical roots of the experience, it was no more definitive of that origin than the whole texture was of the notion of recent visitors.

Maybe the fairy was a real species, for example. Perhaps they now floated around in unidentified flying objects and wielded insight-producing wands because they have enjoyed their own technological revolution.

Every time one decides either that this is psychological or real, one soon finds a theory that forcefully reopens the case in favor of the opposite notion.

The most difficult part of my hypnotic material was the sudden regression to 1957. How could I explain that, even in terms of visitors? To do so, I had to revise my whole understanding of what my life had been. At the beginning of this chapter I described myself as being deeply upset by that unexpected regression. Well, that was true.

But it was no more than a mild state of unease compared to how I felt after I had made a careful inventory of my past.