A Silent Explosion

MY MIND PLAYING TRICKS ON ME

I once read about a study that found that a surprisingly high proportion of the 'normal' population reports having heard voices at least once.  Not inside their heads, but 'actual' voices, seemingly heard with the ears.  This is entirely credible, as it's happened to me, too -- and not once but a few times, as I remember.  Not conversations or sentences, and certainly not commands to pick up a heavy blunt object and nail the nearest person with it^^, but just single, incomprehensible syllables shouted close to my ear, almost like a bark.  Just once though, I thought I heard my name spoken.

Then there was this other episode.  I don't know if it belongs in the same category as hearing voices, but anyway it was memorably strange.  I was lying in bed.  Whether waiting to fall asleep or just waking from sleep, I don't remember, but suddenly there was an explosion;  an intense blue-white light flashed, dazzling my eyes;  I was thrown like a rag doll, perhaps a couple of feet straight up into the air, fell back onto the bed, bounced, and fell back again.  There was a kind of throbbing sensation as I lay there, and I felt the bed waving and vibrating under me.  All without any noise whatsoever;  that's how I knew it was a subjective experience, not an actual disaster -- but what an odd hypnagogic/hypnopompic hallucination, if that's what it was.  Oh, and that old man up above (Doctor Lao?^) is a detail from one of my own paintings.

EDIT (March 4, 2012):  Actually, something like this has been written about before.  I don't know why I didn't remember it when I first wrote this post, but Robert A. Monroe, in chapter 12 of his autobiographical classic of paranormal literature, Journeys Out of the Body (1971), describes an incident that sounds very much like this.  He wrote that right after he lay down in bed, an explosion took place that hurled him clear across the room and left him tingling all over as if he'd been shocked with electricity.  All without any sound.  At first he thought there had been a real accident in the house, but then he looked up, saw himself still quietly lying in bed, and realized it had happened to his 'astral body'.

Speaking Of Ghosts

MORE OF SAM'S OLD ART

I may have received 3 visits -- that I recall -- from a ghostly visitor or visitors.  Either that, or I have experienced three extraordinarily vivid and realistic hypnagogic hallucinations about ghostly visits.

[Henceforth I will use the term 'ghost' to refer to disembodied spirits in general]

According to my dream log, the first incident occurred in April, 1998.  The third incident was in June, 2008.  Oddly, I could not find any record of the second, but as I remember, all three 'visits' were fairly similar in nature.  The details I'm going to leave to the reader's imagination, as they were graphically sexual, except to say that even though each incident commenced while I was in bed and in a near-sleep state, while it was happening I was completely alert (so it seemed to me) and aware of what was going on.  When the 'ghost' touched me it was absolutely real;  I felt the mattress sag under its weight (ironically, I suppose this detail could actually argue against it being a real ghost -- would a ghost have weight?  Well.., but then, why not?  You could always argue that encounters with ghosts happen in some sort of non-rational, alternate setting where inner mind and external reality blur into each other).

The first visit was briefly alluded to in this previous entry as an example of consciousness maintained into the hypnagogic stage (more happened than that little detail in the description, however).  And after the second visit I actually considered the possibility that I had really been visited by the ghost of someone with whom I had had a relationship some years before, and whom I knew to have died recently of illness.  But after reflecting on the details of the incident I eventually decided if it really was a ghost, it probably was not her.

One thing that I will mention is the fact that throughout the duration of all of the incidents I kept my eyes closed, even thought I was dying of curiosity.  Why did I not open my eyes and look, and prove to myself whether there really was a ghost there or not?  Because of the sheer reality of the situation -- it all felt so real that I was actually afraid to look! Specifically, I was thinking of one of the episodes in the old Japanese movie Kwaidan -- based on a literary anthology of ghost stories of the same title, originally collected and published by Lafcadio Hearn, an American writer of Greek-Irish origin who settled in Japan and became a naturalized citizen in the 19th century -- which concerns a selfish samurai who abandons his wife and goes away to marry a rich lady;  years later he returns, having finally found his conscience and driven by remorse -- and is welcomed back by his wife, who seems not to have changed a bit, and is strangely glad to see him despite his disgraceful treatment of her.  They spend a night of passion together, and in the morning he awakens to find... that he had made love to the moldering bones of his long-dead wife, in the rotting ruins of his old house.  And I was afraid that if I forced my eyes open and looked, I might see something along the same lines, like this upside-down detail from a painting I did in graduate school (the skull is actually copied from a photograph of a ceremonial object used in Tibetan Buddhism):

Anyway, even if these events were all subjective experiences with no supernatural input, I can well see how back in the days of the witch hunts people could become convinced of the most farfetched things.  If one of these visits had happened to, say, a peasant farmer in Germany in 1620, he would absolutely have believed that he had had a real encounter with a succuba.  He would have told someone, word would have spread, suspicion of commerce with dark forces would have been aroused, and before he knew it he would have been clapped in irons and carted off to the witch prison in Bamburg.  Or perhaps a country parson in Ireland in 1820, told of similar visitations by a girl in confession, might have taken a kinder view of things and told her it might have been one of the 'Good Folk' who had taken a fancy to her or something -- alarming, and still unholy, but at least not a capital offense like being a witch.  And of course, a 21st century UFO conspiracy theorist might well believe that he had been abducted by space aliens, who did unspeakable things to him before returning him to his bed, with his memory incompletely erased.

I am sorry, though, to have concluded that these 'visits' probably had nothing to do with my poor Julie.  

* * *

One day I received a call from her, out of the blue.  It was completely unexpected;  it was long after our relationship had ended on a sour note and she and her husband had moved away (yes, I was "the other man").  We had not communicated since then.  It turned out that she was suffering from late-stage cancer.  So.  She was making peace with me before the inevitable happened.  I was shocked, but I'm afraid that, in a misguided effort to encourage her to not lose hope and to keep fighting, I spoke as if it weren't really that bad, that spontaneous remissions happened all the time, etc.  Thinking back, I'm sorry to realize she might well have found my reaction rather casual and uncaring.  If that were the case, it must have hurt her terribly to think I was cold to her even to the end.  It remains a weight on my heart.  It would have gladdened me to believe that her ghost had come to visit me.