Authors: John Norman
When I had the courage I took a flashlight and crawled into the tunnel. It was several yards long, and, ascending, opened into the garden where the young Henry, on the rope held by my father, had played.
It was then night, and I looked up from the hole, at the stars.
It is natural to distinguish between reality and illusion. The usual way this is done, given the fact that illusions, dreams, and such, can occasionally possess great force and vivacity, so to speak, to borrow two expressions from the troublesome 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume, who looked into these matters, and was good at backgammon, is basically in terms of a sort of epistemic authoritarianism possessed by reality, a tendency to cross borders and trespass, whether we like it or not, an experiential stubbornness and intrusiveness, an experiential invasiveness and violence, so to speak, which insolently imposes itself upon us, one over which we have no controlâand coherence. In short, we can't do much about reality. I can't build a brick wall by thinking about it, but I could be injured if I walk into one. Reality seems to be spontaneous, so to speak, and simply there, to be dealt with. I can think about a peanut-butter sandwich but the peanut-butter jar remains in the pantry. To be sure, there are some thoughts we can't help either, and which simply show up, which impose themselves on us, such as Susan in her slip, or less. But clearly there is a serious difference between thinking about Susan, and Susan, or, at least, we commonly suppose so. So, to summarize this point, we usually distinguish between reality and illusion in virtue of two criteria: involuntariness and lawfulness; reality happens to us; we cannot control it; and, secondly, reality is coherent; it fits together; we don't expect strawberry jam from the cold-water faucet, and, if we get it, we grow suspicious. Erasers which talk to us cast doubt on their own credibility. Reality, you see, stands on its own two feet, and keeps its balance. Illusions on the other hand, whereas they may occasionally share a certain spontaneity or “thereness” with reality, tend to be far less stable, far less coherent. They come and go in a way that trees, as far as we know, don't. An obvious example is the dream, which fails to cohere with waking life, often luckily.
There is a story about a Chinese philosopher, perhaps you have heard it, who allegedly dreamed for three consecutive nights that he was a butterfly and awakened on the third morning wondering if he were a man dreaming he was a butterfly or if he were a butterfly dreaming he was a man. This is much like the story of the butterfly who allegedly dreamed for three consecutive nights that he was a man and awakened on the third morning wondering if he were a butterfly dreaming he was a man or a man dreaming he was a butterfly.
Without attempting to resolve this issue as to who was what, or which was which, which task we willingly consign to interested zoologists, please note the lesson implicit in these two illuminating, if eccentric, anecdotes.
If illusions were indistinguishable from what we normally take as reality, with respect to stability, givenness, coherence, and such, then we would have, for all practical purposes, as far as we could tell, two realities, perhaps quite different from one another. Why should we not, logically, partake of two lives, in two worlds, entering each as we awaken from the other? Presumably we would have no sense of which, if either, or both, were real.
I mention these matters in order to contextualize, however briefly, and inadequately, a story told to me in the course of a long walk I once took in the company of a friend of mine, who is a practicing clinical psychologist. It deals with one of his cases, one which, I gather, he wished to share with someone, but one which he felt it would be injudicious to introduce into the professional literature. I think the reason for that will be shortly evident. In any event, I withhold his name, first, in the interests of privacy, and, secondly, in virtue of nature of the case itself, in which it seems, rather obviously, an anomaly is involved. He has, however, I hasten to mention, authorized this account. Had he not done so I would have been reluctant to bring it to the attention of the public. You will shortly see why.
The case dealt with what appeared to be either a hoax or an unusually extreme mental aberration. There was no question of institutionalizing the individual in question, whom we shall call Paul, because he appeared to be, other than for his supposed aberration, in no way dissociated from reality. He functioned effectively and pleasantly in his work and personal relationships. Indeed, in most respects it seems he would have been regarded as a congenial, moral, productive, and healthy human being. It was one of those rare cases in which either there was nothing whatsoever the matter with him, or something very much the matter with him, categorically and devastatingly so.
Initially my friend, after his first dealings with Paul, which were in all respects routine and reassuring, was convinced that Paul was in little, if any, need of counseling, but, of course, there remained an interest in why he had sought counseling in the first place, which seemed to require some explanation, and suggested that it might be worth while scheduling an additional appointment or two. Paul did not impress my friend as the sort of fellow whose interests in counseling were likely to be either superficial or academic. Presumably there was something involved here which was not altogether obvious. Paul's difficulties, if they may be so termed, as it turned out, when he at last felt sufficiently at ease with my friend to speak more freely, had to do with a series of unusually vivid dreams. This, in itself, would be nothing unusual, but the reports on these dreams were unusually graphic, and suggested the complexity, richness, and detail of a carefully prepared, meticulous fabrication. This was not the way that dreams were remembered. At one point, my friend was prepared, with disgust, to dismiss Paul as the conscious perpetrator of some sort of pointless and inexplicable joke, or hoax, but, as it gradually became clear, or at least seemed to, that Paul was desperately, helplessly, even tragically, serious about these peculiar episodes, my friend began to suspect that he was dealing with something far more serious than a prank or fabrication, that his patient was profoundly and seriously disturbed.
Paul, you see, seemed to believe in these dreams.
At the risk of inviting not only skepticism but derision on the part of the reader, I will briefly, and bluntly, state the nature of Paul's delusion, as it was explained to me by my friend.
Paul, it seems, believed himself to be living two lives, one he shared with us, in our time and place, and one he did not share with us, though perhaps he shared it with others, in another time and place.
This was the nature of his delusion.
When he, fearing and fighting sleep as he might, eventually fell asleep, it seemed he awakened, as nearly as we can tell, as a simple peasant, a young man of his own age, in 14th century France. When he fell asleep at the end of a long day of toil in that life, he would awaken in his bed, in the life with which we are familiar, in his apartment in Manhattan.
Putting aside the more obvious possibilities of pointless fabrication and such, this delusion has its fascinations. It is easy to see, given certain suppositions, research, and such, how he might have somehow, subconsciously, generated these dreams. An analogy would be a fixed series of self-induced hallucinations, but that would be only an analogy, as what we are dealing with here is a series of dreams. One does not commonly think of hallucinating in one's dreams, certainly not in any familiar sense of hallucination. My friend's major interest here, aside from the awesome detail and clarity of these dreams, was what end these dreams might possibly serve in Paul's psychic life. Why, so to speak, was he doing this? It did not seem they were wish fulfillments, at least in any familiar or comprehensible sense of such things. He found these dreams unwanted, and disturbing. He was not, in this other life, the dream life, an aristocrat, a holder of power, a brave knight, an esteemed burgher, a rich merchant, or such. It seems he was only an ignorant, indeed, illiterate, peasant, confined, it seemed, to a life of toil, filth, poverty, misery, superstition, and ignorance.
Putting aside for the moment somewhat facile, if plausible, attempts to explain these dreams, let us briefly consider certain aspects of what we might be attempting to explain.
As you might suppose, my friend was much impressed with the clarity and detail of the dreams. Paul had, it seemed, in this other life, the delusory dream life, a family, a mother and father, and brothers and sisters, some of whom had died in infancy or childhood. He had had certain diseases, accurately described, which he had survived, and which many others had not. He knew the districts in his area, the animals, domestic and wild, the crops, their times of planting, local coins, the taxes, places to fish, local roads, places where he occasionally stole apples with other young men, and had once been caught and flogged, and so on. He was familiar with feast days, and festivals, local clergy, rituals, processions, customs, and so on. Too, of course, he was familiar, most obviously, with the dialect in his area, which it seemed he spoke natively, having been apparently born and raised in the local parish, beyond the precincts of which he had seldom ventured.
One of the oddities here was that my friend, after independent research, of a rather scrupulous nature, could find nothing in Paul's background to explain these dreams. He had never, as far as my friend could discern, had an interest in this historical period, nor had he ever, as least as far as my friend could determine, researched the area or time. How then would he have obtained this information, much of which seemed genuine, and some of which could be independently established.
Before we address these issues, I will state one last anomaly.
I have mentioned the dialect spoken by the French lad. My friend had Paul describe one of his dreams in that tongue, and this, with Paul's permission, he recorded, which recording he later submitted to linguists and historians at a well-known local university. The language appeared to be related to modern French, but, if at all, remotely. The authorities expressed skepticism as to the authenticity of the dialect, which pleased my friend. That was precisely what he wished to hear. This pleasure, however, was short-lived, for this negative appraisal, shortly thereafter, upon further scrutiny, by yet further authorities, was not only reversed, but resulted in demands for the original manuscript from which it had doubtless been taken. Not only was this one of the few extant examples of the dialect in question but, if authentic, it was the only one in existence, it seemed, in which a common fellow, a laborer of the time, had, presumably by dictation to a cleric or scholar, recounted the activities of his day. This sort of thing, of course, in itself, eventually aroused suspicion. That was not the sort of thing which in those days would have been done. Who would have been interested in listing the sordid details of a common, unimportant life, too, details which would have been so familiar to contemporaries as not to have been worth recording. Accordingly, the final assessment was that whereas the dialect was authentic, interestingly, amazingly, the recording itself must have been based on a fabrication, largely on the grounds of its content.
We now have some sense of what is to be explained, and some understanding of some of the troubling problematicities involved.
How then might we account for this sort of thing?
Most obviously we might suppose Paul to be some sort of charlatan, a master showman of sorts. Whereas at the time, at least up to the end, that seemed the most likely explanation, there were yet several obvious objections to accepting it uncritically. It appeared that neither Paul nor his friends and acquaintances had the resources to manufacture such an elaborate facade of authenticity. It would have taxed the expertise and erudition of the finest period linguists and historians. Secondly, Paul, as far as we could tell, was not the sort of person who would have had the least interest in perpetrating so egregious a fraud. Too, my friend doubted that he was even morally or psychologically capable of doing so. Thirdly, rather than attempting to exploit his experiences, or draw attention to himself, he seemed most anxious to conceal the entire matter and, if possible, to rid himself of what was apparently to him a recurrent, wretched affliction.
There were, I suppose, other possibilities, but, on the whole, these appeared so remote, so unlikely, so preposterous, that their consideration was almost tantamount to their dismissal.
Illustratively, to delve into absurdities, one might speculate about time travel, or parallel worlds, coincidence, reincarnation, and such matters.
Consider the option of coincidence.
What could be more absurd than to suppose that mere coincidence could account for the data in question?
Suppose the following: You decide to spout, or write down, what are to you nonsense expressions, sheer gibberish, and so on, for an hour or so, and then you discover, several years later, that by an interesting coincidence you had unwittingly produced a complex text in an obscure, ancient language not even understood at that time by scholars. I suppose one could have such a coincidence, but does it seem likely? Too, that is only an hour's speech, or transcribing, or whatever, not hundreds of hours spread over a period of months.
Coincidence would be possible but it does not seem probable.
Similarly, reincarnation does not seem likely as an explanation here, though perhaps one might find it more plausible than coincidence.
On this hypothesis one would suppose that Paul was recalling, somehow, seriatim, and in detail, the events of an earlier life.
Putting aside dubieties appertaining to reincarnation itself, such as the role of the brain in consciousness, the nature and variabilities of a self, the “residential peculiarities” of housing a given consciousness successfully and effectively in domiciles as diverse as those of insects, elephants, sponges, fish, and giraffes, we note two difficulties which would seem to arise even within the theory of reincarnation. First, it is commonly accepted that, say, a dog will not recall its previous incarnations as, say, a herring, and that a human will not recall his previous adventures as a squirrel in 4th century Wales. In short, that incarnations are closed off from one another. On the other hand, there are individuals who claim to recall former lives, and so we will not press this point. More importantly, incarnations, whether recalled or not, are usually understood as being linear, so to speak. In this case, we would rule out reincarnation in the case of Paul because his lives seem to alternate, so to speak, and to exist, in a sense, simultaneously, a sleeping existence in one life giving rise to a waking experience in another. Whatever this might be, it is not reincarnation as reincarnation is normally understood.