Dreams and the Paranormal

Dreams and the Paranormal

T

he other night (20/10/01) I had an unusually vivid dream. I hitched a ride in a UFO and asked to be taken, not to the moon as suggested, but to Hell and Heaven. Hell was a vast, gloomy warehouse filled with mouldering junk and listless, hungry, hopeless, shuffling crowds, like the unemployed I recall from the Great Depression. Heaven was unbelievably lush and beautiful, rather like a vast boutique hotel, with exquisite gardens and sumptuous décor. In short, Hell reproduced the life of the poor and Heaven that of the rich. In this Late Sensate culture, we are so incorrigibly materialistic that we even envisage the spiritual in coarsely material terms.

            Reading the above after a lapse of some six weeks, I realize I had completely forgotten this dream. Had I not written it down, I should never have recalled it. There are doubtless sound, neurological reasons for this. All the more reason then to ponder carefully over the very few dreams that do reman in our minds for months, years, or even decades. In 1995, while in Kalgoorlie, I dreamt of a UFO and was awestruck at its numinosity. It was circular and moving very rapidly across a cloudless sky at great height, like a small, silver moon. Recalling it, I feel this dream has great significance, but still have no idea what it means. We write messages to ourselves in scripts we cannot decipher.

            The earliest dream I can remember dates from Christmas Eve, 1935. I dreamt I was sitting on the kerb, repeatedly pulling on a Wellington boot. The sexual symbolism is childishly ingenious. No wonder the dream stayed with me.

            The other dream, experienced at six or seven, has haunted me for decades. I woke up, convinced that there was a dreadful presence in my room. Terrified, I stumbled out of bed to seek refuge with my parents. As I emerged from my bedroom, a small gnome-like creature, of immense strength, seized me and bore me downstairs, floating me through a locked front door and out onto the front lawn, which was bathed in white light. I was so appalled I woke up, having apparently experienced a dream within a dream. From that day on, I developed a nervous facial tic, which has plagued me all my life. My experience bears a striking similarity to reported alien abductions.

            When my present wife was expecting my daughter, a week or so before the birth, she came to my study to tell me excitedly that a huge owl was sitting on a tree branch right outside the landing window of our house in Malaysia, staring in unblinkingly through the glass. I told her jokingly that it was probably Pontianak, a local spirit said to haunt women in childbirth. She mounted the stairs to look at it again, calling me to come see it because of its unusual size, for it was almost two feet in height. Uninterested, I went on working. Later, I told her the owl could not have been sitting on a branch because there was no tree anywhere near that window. In any case, I added, there were no owls of that size in Malaysia and, furthermore, owls shunned the light and would never come that close to a lighted window. She admitted I was right but insisted she had not been mistake as to what she saw, particularly as she had twice spent a considerable time looking at it. It was not until twenty-three years later that I learnt that what she must have experienced was a ‘screen image’, common during encounters with aliens. Owls and deer, both creatures with large eyes, take the place of the alien since their images are acceptable to us. The process seems akin to hypnosis. In this case the huge owl had to be placed on a non-existent tree to complete the illusion.

            My present wife was a toddler during the Japanese occupation of Singapore. She lived through horrors, most of which she was too young to recognize. The worst of her memories was that of repeatedly finding herself standing in a lane outside her house, paralysed, feet glued to the ground, watching the sky open like a camera shutter, to the accompaniment of a thunderous noise. This happened repeatedly, always at dusk. As a result she always grew deeply depressed at twilight. I told her she was probably experiencing an air raid, through she insisted she was never allowed out during the American air raids, when the family took shelter under the house. She had this dream almost every night for close on thirty years. When, finally, she went to a psychiatrist for counselling, he told her this was evidence of a possibly serious trauma and asked her to come back the following Monday, so that he could discover under hypnosis what had really taken place. From that night onwards the dream never returned. Later, she became convinced that she had been abducted by aliens when young. Not only does she have no interest in UFOs; whenever she tries to watch a film or read a book dealing with any aspect of the subject, she promptly falls asleep. I believe this is her form of self-defence. My youngest daughter behaves in exactly the same way. Several abductees reported seeing a door in a UFO open like a camera shutter.

            Having narrated the above, I pause and ask myself if I really believe that my wife and daughter have been abducted and monitored by aliens. In an attempt to answer this question, I have not only read every book on the subject I can get my hands on but also have for many years been President of the Australasian Society for Psychical Research, one branch of which (Uforum) specializes in ‘ufology’. Try as I may to banish it, the riddle haunts me. Incredibilia nisi crederim…

            Why does anything to do with the paranormal arouse such detestation in academia? The palm for intolerance and intellectual viperishness belongs to the members of CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, many of whom are academics. Even some of their own members have been worried by the abhorrence and loathing displayed in their publications and lectures. Professor Ray Hyman, a distinguished psychologist and a CSICOP member, once remarked: “Parapsychologists are nice, honest people, while the critics are cynical, nasty people”. He also spoke of “fundamentalism” and “witch-hunting” in connection with CSICOP. Though it calls itself scientific, CSICOP is decidedly unscientific in its practices, especially in its use of ridicule, rather than reasoned argument, to discredit its opponents. Psychoanalytically, such pathological hatred can be accounted for by subconscious fear.

            My own convictions about the existence of psi (ESP and PK) took many years to develop. During my undergraduate days at Cambridge, I was vociferously rationalist, materialist and sceptic. In the winter of 1953, however, I moved out of my rooms in Emmanuel College into a furnished house in Chesterton. It was the paranormal events that transpired there which first made me start examining the soundness of my own worldview, though it took several years and a great deal of study and self-searching before I was finally reluctantly forced to discard my earlier materialism as wanting.

            The house I rented in Chesterton had been built some forty years earlier by a couple who had lived in it all their married lives. The lady of the house had died shortly after the war. Her husband had lived in the house by himself until he was persuaded to move to a nursing home, in which, when I moved in, he was dying. After his death, I bought the house to avoid the trouble of having to move again. During my first few months there, I was troubled by inexplicable phenomena. Doors would swing open and then slam shut by themselves; light switches would click up and down; footsteps were heard in the hallway and on the stairs when I was alone in the house. Strangest of all, gravel from the path would fall onto my desk and books while I was studying, or strike me on the back and shoulders – a typical poltergeist phenomenon, had I but known it.           My mother, who was not given to idle imaginings and had in any case been told nothing of the events that had taken place, came to stay and was awakened during the night by a sound like the loud cracking of a whip. Opening her eyes, she saw an old man standing by her bed, scowling at her and brandishing something above his head. She was so frightened that she had a bout of arrhythmia and would never sleep in that room again. My Siamese cat, Qing, would frequently arch his back and spit at something we could not see. On one occasion, something in the lounge frightened him so much he tried to get out of the room through a chimney, though a fire was burning in the grate! Only great terror could drive a cat to such extremes. Another time, in another room, he fled howling up the curtains, defecating with terror as he did so. His misery continued until one morning I was awakened by the stench of gas. Wrapping a wet towel round my face, I came into the kitchen  to find all the taps on the gas-stove inexplicably turned on and poor Qing dead in a corner. Later, one of the neighbours, cat-lover told me how nice it was to see a cat round at the place because “poor old Mr Stern couldn’t stand cats”. These, and other events of the same nature, eventually sent me off to the library to see what I could make of them. But it was not until the arrival of a Nigerian friend that I began slowly to change my hitherto stubbornly sceptical views of the paranormal.

            Odumegwu, a mature-age Ibo student from Nigeria, was one of my closest friends at Cambridge. When he first came to lodge with me, I mischievously put him in the back bedroom, the one in which my mother had refused to set foot again after her ghostly experience.  I had told him nothing of the strange happenings in the house. He came down to breakfast the next morning looking triumphant. “So! You were very cheeky to put me into that room last night. I supposed you wanted to see what would happen.” I confessed that this was so. “Well, when the spirit appeared, I just told him he was dead and suggested he should go away. Then I said a few prayers in Ibo to help him on his way to heaven and off he went. He won’t be back! Poor fellow! He was very cross that you were living in his house. He thought you were a ghost! And he didn’t like either your mother or your cat. He though that such ghosts had no business to be here.”

            I was reminded of this conversation nearly fifty years later, when I saw The Others, a film in which a family of ghosts living in an old house believe that the present owners of the house are spirits come to haunt them. Matthew Manning, the English psychic, had a similar in his house in Sawston, near Cambridge, with an old man who was convinced he was still living in the eighteenth century and that Matthew was an interloping spirit. The old man could see only the surroundings he was accustomed to, being totally unaware of modern appurtenances in the house. For example, he persistently referred to the downstairs toilet as “the pantry”, and at least once left a candle burning there, being quite unaware either of the room’s changed function or of the existence of electric light. He was also oblivious of the TV set, radio, washing machine and so on and even of the traffic outside.

            In the winter of 1955, Odumegwu tole me that his wealthy young Nigerian friend Y had impregnated his landlady’s daughter and refused to marry her, though he went on sleeping with her. Worried about the situation, he advised him to move out, but Y refused to do so. Two weeks later, Y was found dead in his bed-sitter, having apparently gassed himself. He verdict was “suicide while of unsound mind”. After the inquest, Odumegwu went to see the landlady and told her he had seen in a vision that she had murdered his friend. Y’s room had a gas meter outside, into which he would insert money. Since he suffered from the cold, it was his custom to leave the gas fire burning until the money ran out. The landlady had waited until the small hours of the morning and then put a few shillings in the meter. The gas came on and Y died in his sleep. The landlady laughed in Odumegwu’s face, told him he had guessed correctly, and then challenged him to go to the police. She had committed the perfect murder and she knew it. Odumegwu then told her that God would judge her by soon depriving her of her reason and left. He informed me in a matter-of-fact tone that he intended to drive her insane, having in his youth been instructed by a witch-doctor how to do this. He had been warned only to use the hex to punish the most heinous crimes and judged this to be one of them. About a month later I heard from a friend who had lodged next door to Y that the woman had in fact gone mad, run out into the street screaming and brandishing a knife, and been taken to a mental hospital. To this day I do not know whether Odumegwu’s hex actually worked, or whether the landlady’s sense of guilt, exacerbated by his threat, unhinged her.

In 1954, while up at Cambridge as a graduate student, I dreamt repeatedly that an African youth was sitting in my kitchen holding a bloodstained axe. I related my dream to Odumegwu, who looked grave and said that it was a very bad omen. A few days later I answered the door one morning, to find a well-dressed, young Nigerian undergraduate who told me he had just come over from Oxford and wanted to see Odumegwu. Noting that he seemed rather distraught, I told him Odumegwu was at a law lecture but should be back soon, invited him in, gave him tea and biscuits in the kitchen and chatted to him, somewhat uncomfortably, until Odumegwu arrived. Shortly afterwards, I heard them leave in a taxi. Odumegwu did not return until late that night. He told me that the student, from a prominent Ibo family, had married an English shop girl in Oxford, against his parents’ wishes. When he discovered that she had been sleeping with another man, he had killed her, brutally, with an axe and then taken the train to Cambridge to ask his friend to help him. He was found guilty but insane, sent to Broadmoor and eventually repatriated to Nigeria, where he was confined in a mental home. Odumegwu asked me why I had not noticed that the man’s navy-blue suit was stained with blood. I told him that not for one moment had I connected him with the African in my dream and so had assumed that the suit was simply in need of dry-cleaning.

            Another friend of mine at Cambridge, Z, once told me, when he was drunk, that he had murdered a man who had wronged him repeatedly and severely by pushing him under a train in the London tube during the rush-hour. I was horrified, since I had dreamt the night before that Z had done just this. Even now, I prefer to believe that Z was lying and that my dream was simply a precognitive vision of our conversation. But the doubt remains. After that drunken confession, Z and I tended to avoid each other. He later became an alcoholic.

            Henry, a serious-minded young friend of mine, had four girl friends one after another when he was in his early twenties, all of whom, to his chagrin and fury, jilted him. All four eventually died young, two of cancer, one in a car-crash and one in childbirth. Henry, who has considerable psychic powers, which he tries to deny, sometimes suspects he may have unconsciously brought about their deaths through psychokinesis. Few of us are willing to believe that certain people can do this to others; it is too disturbing to contemplate. Parapsychologists call this phenomenon ‘negative prayer’. Nearly all psychiatrists and psychologists regard claims of hexing as delusional, even though there is a considerable body of evidence in their favour. For example, film exists showing the Russian psychic, Nina Kulakinova, stopping the heart of a frog under control conditions. It is surely only a step from this to stopping or damaging a human heart.

            In 1985, while living and lecturing in Athens, I had dinner one night at a university colleagues’ house. My charming dinner companion, who spoke little English but excellent French, turned out to be a niece of Admiral Hippolyte Tanagras, with whose monograph on the evil eye I was well acquainted. The Admiral had retired from the Greek navy many years earlier to devote himself to psychical research. Being particularly interested in the evil eye (Italian: mal occhio), which is greatly feared throughout southern Europe, he decided to investigate the phenomenon scientifically. He would go to a Greek village, ask who had the evil eye, and then approach the person – it was nearly always a woman – offering her money if she could demonstrate her powers by withering young plants or killing insects. He brought such plants and insects with him, along with a control group. His researches, published by the Hellenic Society for Psychical Research, demonstrate that certain people with a reputation for having the evil eye do in fact have the power to cause plants to wither and small insects to drop dead. The implications are unsettling, as in Henry’s case, discussed above. Had Henry been living in a peasant community in southern Europe, he would have been given a wide berth. Admiral Tanagras’ niece told me that her uncle was convinced as a result of his researches that those who had the evil eye were often able to make people sick or even kill them, though he could not mention this in his scholarly monograph. Like most Greeks, she herself wore a small glass eye on a gold chain and urged me to wear one too. While a great deal of work has been done on psychical healing, it is puzzling that no parapsychologist that I know of has repeated Tanagras’s simple experiment, under strict control conditions. This is odd, since if one can demonstrate that psychical healing is possible, then one can presumably do the same for psychical harming. I believe that unconscious fear may lie at the root of this omission.

            Bernard Shaw said that he was once making fun of an opponent of his during a lecture when he suddenly became aware that the man’s wife was sitting in the front row, glaring at him with hatred. He was taken violently ill almost immediately and did not recover for some time. Psychologists would ascribe this to autosuggestion, even though Shaw was a noted rationalist and, as such, supposedly immune from superstitious fears. If Tanagras had tested the woman in question, he may well have found she had the same abilities as his Greek subjects who possessed the evil eye.

            Anthropologists have repeatedly attested that the Australian aboriginal practice of cursing an enemy by ‘pointing the bone’ has been shown to work even though the subject was hundreds of kilometres away and could not possible have had any conscious knowledge of the curse. The spell – for such it is – seems to act in the way a magnifying glass concentrates the rays of the sun, directing them intensely to a single point.

            While driving in the Wirral one Sunday morning in the mid-fifties, I suddenly felt impelled to stop the car outside an isolated house in the countryside, not far from Chester. Though I am normally averse to making contact with stranger, I walked up to the front door, knocked on it and asked the lady of the house if the place was haunted! She greeted me warmly, told me I was clearly psychic, and invited me in to meet her husband. They then told me that the house, which dated from the fifteenth century, had been built on the foundations of an earlier building of Norman origin. In the garden, they showed me the remains of a tower, which had once served as a stronghold and prison and was said to have been connected with the notorious Hugh Lupus, a rapacious and cruel Norman feudal lord who had ruled over the area. The tower and the house were both so badly haunted that they had seriously thought of leaving many times. However, they had slowly learnt to live with and even communicate with the entities that inhabited the place, many of whom seemed to be in torment. Among other things they showed me a massive Jacobean oak table, at least ten feet in length, which, so they alleged, had raised itself a foot or two into the air during a séance, travelled the length of the room and then smashed into a door several inched thick, cracking it from top to bottom. The atmosphere of the house was oppressive; I would not have cared to spend the night let alone live there. I urged the owners to contact the Society for Psychical Research and ask them to send a team up to investigate the phenomena, but as far as I know they never did so. I still find myself wondering what could have compelled me to act as I did, especially since the delay had made me late for an appointment. It was this incident that first made me realise that I had to come to terms with the phenomena whose existence I had up till then been strongly attempting to deny, in spite of my experiences in Cambridge.

            Why was this house so badly haunted? The Wirral, the peninsula between the Mersey and the Dee, where I grew up, suffered atrociously under the Normas. In 1135, the malignant Randulf Meschines, third earl of Chester, burnt down all its villages, drove out its inhabitants and decreed that the whole peninsula should become his private hunting preserve. Any peasant found there was promptly blinded, mutilated or put to death. For over three hundred years, the entire peninsula was transformed into a virtually uninhabited wilderness, as attested by the late fourteenth century poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, written in the north-western dialect by a poet who knew the area well:           

Then fared he over the ford at Holy Head till he eft bonk [i.e. ‘landed]

In the wilderness of Wirral.

The Wirral became notorious as the refuge of outlaws, who found shelter in its overgrown forests, which stretched ‘From Brecon Point to Hilbre,’ as an old rhyme tells us. (Hilbre is now an island, due to the encroachment of the sea). The Wirral was also notoriously dissident, being “first to rebel, last to be subdued” as one chronicler puts it. It is not surprising that the old house I was so strangely drawn to visit was so badly haunted, given that it stood on the foundations of a Norman stronghold, which must have witnessed atrocious suffering during these centuries of cruel repression. In many of the places with which I am familiar, I can still feel the past casting its long, psychic shadow upon the present. 

COPYRIGHT (C) 2010 J D FRODSHAM