Communion: A True Story (20 page)

"I love her so much. You know, I can't believe I'm seeing this. One two three four five six. I look up from my book and there are six figures standing at the end of the bed looking right at both of us. She's turned over and she's asleep. I say, 'Anne, Anne, look at this.'

"They're menacing-looking. Strange. I don't understand where they even could have come from. They made no sound. They came out of the living room. The door is so dark. Nelson's sleeping under the bed." (Nelson was the family dog.) "'Nelson! Nelson!' Nelson's just sleeping under the bed. I feel like I've just gotten some kind of weight on me. I want to get tip. I'm thinking about my son. I want badly to get up. I'm thinking about my son. I do not know what's going on here. Is it because we're so high? Why did I ever get this apartment?

Why didn't I get an apartment downstairs? I feel like crying. because I can't get tip and the door is so dark. They're just standing there. They don't say anything, they don't even look like they're alive. Five. six. tar babies. Six tar babies standing there. Am I seeing things? 'Anne, Anne!' No one sees this. It must be that I'm seeing thins. I close my eves. I open my eyes.

And it's changed. Now they're around both sides of the bed. about halfway tip. like when you stop looking at them they start moving.

"I've lost my mind. I have lost my mind. This cannot be real. 'Anne.'- Anne!' I shake Anne. I don't stop looking at them but I shake Anne. They're wearing uniforms. This just is incredible. It can't be real. It cannot be true, it just can't be. 'Anne?' Why in the world won't she wake up, she's never been this damned asleep. 'Anne, will you wake up! Anne,
Anne!
Oh, Christ.' It's like I'm in another world. I can't make her wake up, and every time I glance at her they get a little closer to the front of the bed. This is really a bad nightmare, boy. This is a real foul nightmare, man! Oh, God, I wish I could wake her up!"

"Voice 1 [Basso profundo]: 'You're not trying to wake her up.'

"'I'm not trying to wake her up.' I feel calmer. better.

"Voice 2 [Light]: 'They're all right.'

"'They're all right.'

"Voice 2: 'They have to do that.'

"'They have to do that. Who's that standing out there?' I get the feeling this place is full of people. Someone keeps telling me it's all right, it's all right, all right. 'I know it's all right, but I still want to get up and uh — ah —'

"They moved again. When I tried to get out of bed they moved again. And they're standing one two three four five." (Total eight.) "Three up right beside my bed, four five at the foot of the bed. One two three on the other side of the bed. And goddamn Nelson is snoring away under the bed. Why doesn't the dog wake up, at least? What's the use of buying a dog? They aren't people, therefore it's a dream.

"Our boy says, 'Oh!' He says, 'Oh!' And he screams out loud, real loud l Screams again!

Ah! They pull — all — right down to the foot of the bed and I get up and I'm running like hell and he's screaming like hell, and that praying mantis is standing right in the middle of the living room. Right near the windows. And I run on in to my boy and he's put his arms out and he's got his face all screwed up and he's screaming. Screaming. I never saw that little boy scream like that before. Something happened — something happened to Anne. 'Anne? What the hell was that?' I pick him up. She comes in. He's like he's hard and cold. He's very cold.

He's got his diaper pulled down around his knees. It falls off. We're holding him, both of us are holding him. He finally calms down. 'What happened, Anne?'

"'I don't know.'

"'My God, something blew up in the kitchen.'

"'You keep him, hold on now. I'll go. It's a bottle.'

"He's falling asleep in my arms. 'What kind of a horde, honey?'

"'A bottle of seltzer blew up.'

"'You're kidding.' I've still got my son, I walk out there.

" 'Don't get in the glass. There's glass all over the floor.'

"I take him and I rock him. She's out there working on the glass and I'm rocking him.

We've got all the lights on. I'm rocking him.'

(Don then suggested that I was back in my bed, and that I would be able to see the ones around it very clearly.)

"They look like they're staring at me with their mouths opened. Only their faces do not move. I don't know exactly what they are."

"They're like the other one?"

"No, no, the other one is thin and bigger. They're stocky and little."

"What color are they?"

"Color? They're wearing blue uniforms. Dark blue uniforms. They're sort of gray. They look like they haven't been out in the sun in ten years. Sort of mushroomy-gray. Smell funny.

too. Like a burned match head. Just totally expressionless faces. Two big round eyes and a round mouth — and I don't think they even have noses. I really didn't look at them too hard. I don't know if they had noses. I was scared pretty bad there. This has to be a dream, because the dog is sleeping like the dead. Why do you feed a dog?"

Don then brought me out of the trance.

I was shocked by the unqualified reality of what I had seen. I just could not believe, in that moment, that the forms persisting in my mind were anything but real. And vet they had to be something else, surely they did.

There was a certain way of checking the reality of at least one of these memories, because there was one other person involved whom I knew well: my sister. I had been thinking about calling her. I did so the next afternoon, and asked her our now-familiar question: "What is the strangest thing you remember ever happening?"

"The time we were sleeping out in the back lot and the fireball came across the lot."

I sat there holding the phone and feeling as if I were falling down a deep well, and at the bottom of the well was somebody with huge, shining eyes.

"Can you describe it?"

"It was a big, green fireball. It came catty-corner across the lot. We all got scared and went inside. We slept on the porch instead."

"Did we tell Mother and Dad?"

"Mother said it was nothing to worry about, it was just a fireball."

I still do not remember seeing the fireball. All my life I have had a free-floating memory of a skeleton riding a motorcycle, a frightful effigy. Now I know the source of that image.

Were my sister's words confirmation? Yes — of the fact that something disturbing happened in that vacant lot so long ago. But the issue of what it was remains open.

What is most interesting here is really a pattern. It involves two types of interaction with the visitors. One type seems to involve the approach of a single individual or small group, as happened on the night of the fireball, at my grandmother's, in the apartment on East Seventy-fifth Street, and in the country on October 4. The other type of incident is the long visitation, as the ones that occurred when we were on the train in 1957, in Austin the August before the incident at my grandmother's, and on December 26, 1985. These experiences usually include more interaction and often take place on the visitor's own turf.

The short visits seem almost always to concern psychological activity, the long ones to involve more physical testing, almost as if preparations are made or results observed during those times.

By the time December 1985 came around, I may have had these encounters at least a dozen limes. And yet I never learned from them. Each time the experience took place, I was as frightened, as tormented, as astonished as before.

This is one of the most difficult internal problems connected with the experience. One would have thought that the mind, acting alone, would have compartmentalized all this material together, as it does with recurring dreams and nightmares, so that when I entered the state I would have had reference to other experiences of it, even though — as in recurring nightmares — the material would still have been terrifying.

My actual condition almost seems to suggest that there was an attempt to render me as helpless as possible, by placing me in a state where each experience was perceived in and of itself, without reference to past encounters. Thus each time the surprise was total.

Running through my memories there is a consistent flavor of intense terror. But is it only my terror. the terror of the body, biological terror.

There may be things about contact between beings formed in different biospheres that we do not understand at all. Perhaps they feel some instinctive emotion, too. I have the impression that these experiences are very intense for them, if not actually frightening.

If the terror is an unavoidable side effect of our biology, then the amnesia can be seen not only as an act of self-protection but as one of kindness also.

Assuming the correctness of my perceptions, this book then becomes a chronicle not only of my discovery of a visitor's presence in the world but also one of how I have learned to fear them less.

I look out my window. It is a warm afternoon, cloudy and thunderous, an afternoon of early spring. People go back and forth beneath umbrellas, their feet slashing in puddles. A helicopter sails across the sky, a jet angles toward La Guardia.

It's all so normal, so home. But what else was that in the sky — a flash of silver light, or something reflecting on my glasses?

The Image

The morning after the hypnotic session covering my experience with the fogbank (March 11, 1986) I awoke not only feeling as if I had been beaten up during the night, I was aware of something new in my mind.

At first the exact nature of this new manifestation was not clear to me. I was oppressed by it; there was an acute impression of being watched. Then I began to realize why: I
was
being watched — there was a face staring directly at me, the grave, implacable, subtly humorous face I had come to recognize from hypnosis.

A vivid image of her had emerged in my mind. It was so real I could almost touch it. This was disturbing and I was eager to expel it, assuming it to be a side effect of the hypnotic session, occurring because Dr. Klein had asked for so many details about her appearance.

It was so extraordinarily clear. I was in a panic. I couldn't live with this image perpetually reminding me of the visitors' enigmatic presence in my life.

I went into my office and sat on the floor, going deed into a state of meditation. I drew my concentration to my body, directing my attention to my physical center of gravity just below the navel, and away from my racing mind.

It took only a moment for me to see that the image had not gone away. On the contrary, it had be come far more clear. It wasn't anything like any other imagistic material I had ever had in my mind. I could not calm myself. I was frantic. For the first few hours it was static, simply staring back at me with those large, glistening eyes.

I have never had eidetic, or photographic, memory, so this image was something very new for me. An eidetic image is very much like a photograph inside the mind. This one, though, was far more than a photograph. It had the urgency of life about it.

Despite my attempts to explain it to Budd Hopkins and Don Klein, I could not succeed in communicating to others just how special it seemed to me to be. Nor did I really know this myself until a few days later, when some of the remarkable properties of the image were revealed.

I think that the image was somehow triggered by hypnosis. Maybe the intense state of concentration evoked it from my unconscious . . . or maybe I attracted the visitors' attention and they responded.

After the image appeared I did research into eidetic memory and found that it is very rare in adults, almost to the point of being nonexistent in Western cultures. What's more, the descriptions I found of eidetic images did not even begin to correspond to what I was experiencing. People did not report that their eidetic images had a life of their own.

This one seemed ready to reach out and touch me. I felt a strong sense of relationship.

Looking at it was more like looking at a person behind soundproof glass than looking at a picture.

I found that the image not only moved about of its own accord, it would move on command. It showed me its hands, its face, every detail of its body. Anne asked me to describe its feet and it leaned forward against something that I could not see and raised a foot, which appeared almost like a very simple version of a human foot. Instead of toes there was a solid structure split in only one place. Like all the joints, the ankle appeared simple in structure.

While I might indeed have been viewing the result of some extraordinary connection between myself and a real, conscious being, it may also be that this was an act of the imagination — the act of a mind calling upon itself to provide another argument in favor of this being an experience with an external component.

If what I was really dealing with amounted to some sort of deep and instinctive attempt to create a new deity for myself, to remain agnostic was to put the conscious me in the interesting position of opposing my own unconscious aim.

What if my unconscious got mad at me and started throwing off things that were really scary. even dangerous. We don't know a thing about conjuring and magic. We've dismissed it all, we who love science too much. It could be that very real physical entities can emerge out of the unconscious. That was certainly one of the hypotheses suggested by what had already happened. I worried that I might not be in control of this conjuring ability at all. I'd already conjured something awfully disturbing. What if there were even more disturbing things waiting in the pantheon of the subconscious?

That was on the one hand. On the other hand, maybe I could make this thing become a real, solid being. Frightening, but also fascinating.

Budd Hopkins suggested that I get an artist to render the image. We chose Ted Jacobs, because he is skilled in creating portraits from verbal descriptions.

It was when Ted carne over with his sketch pad that I discovered what was most interesting about the image. I was sitting with my eyes closed, describing this face as carefully as I could. I could see it in amazing detail, moving closer and then farther back, observing fine points such as the faint dusting of white, powdery fuzz that seemed to cover its cheeks and forehead, making it feel, I would imagine, to the touch ,as smooth as the downy head of a baby. The nose was not very prominent, but the end seemed sensitive, almost like the end of a finger.