Alexander Binder c. |
"Every movement became impossible, and every scream was smothered by the plant material that was growing around his mouth and throat. Thoughts raced through the mind: This wasn't a nightmare, the reality of the room was far too distinct and his perception and thinking were far too clear. Were the plants taking revenge on humankind, or had aliens conquered the planet?" The above account sounds like a scene from a bad horror movie. But it isn't. Dr Stephan Matthiesen, a physicist at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, sent me the account last year saying he had personally experienced this terrifying scenario and lived to tell the tale. It's taken from his book The Normality of Altered States of Consciousness. Dr Matthiesen is a scientist and looked for a rational explanation of what had happened. He was right do so, because what he had experienced was an example of a surprisingly common phenomenon known as sleep paralysis. Many similar experiences have been reported to the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit I coordinate at Goldsmiths, University of London.
One of our students, Peter Moore, used to suffer from sleep paralysis on a regular basis. One night, for example, he awoke to find himself unable to move and with a strong feeling of tension across his chest, making it almost impossible to breathe. He could see his bedroom and managed to tilt his head, only to see an evil-looking black cat sitting there hissing at him. But what was most terrifying about this vision was that the cat's white skull was inverted and dripping some sort of black goo. By a huge effort of will, he finally managed to break out of his paralysed state with the intention of attacking his visitor, only to find himself delivering a right hook to thin air. Jeremy Deane, a fellow student at Goldsmiths still suffers regular attacks of sleep paralysis, particularly if his usual sleep pattern has been disrupted.
As is often reported, he can experience multiple episodes in a single night. His experiences typically involve paralysis, difficulty breathing, strange proprioceptive hallucinations such as his body vibrating, and bizarre "hyper-real" visual hallucinations during which objects may metamorphose into nightmarish objects. For example, clothes lying on the floor may become dead bodies or a ceiling fan might turn into a "faery" with the blades as wings and the central bulb as an animate, speaking face. In his own words: "The experience is usually terrifying, but I have been able to control it and sometimes it has been very pleasant (occasionally there can be a sexual element, or 'floating' feelings accompanying what appears to be an out-of-body experience). "Common images are bearded, goblin-like demons laughing or whispering sinister speech, a faceless girl (usually covering her face with hair, moving around in bed moaning and feeling my body), hands appearing from the wall and attempting to strangle me. A hung man talking in the corner of the room, and some of the most bizarre experiences may include up to a dozen 'critter' entities (think Gremlins movie) laughing and talking about me. The environment tends to feel like a holographic dollhouse, the experience peaks and then the hallucinations mysteriously vanish when I regain control of my body."
....Although most people do not opt for a paranormal interpretation, the experience is so common it only requires a small percentage of sufferers to do so to account for the very large number of claimed paranormal encounters. Sufferers can be just as terrified by the experience even if the episode does not involve any ostensibly paranormal content, sometimes experiencing their unwanted intruder as a burglar, a murderer or a rapist. Even sufferers who are well-informed about sleep paralysis and do not experience the more florid symptoms described above still experience intense fear unlike anything they experience in waking life.
This strongly suggests that the fear is not a consequence of the experience but an integral part of it, possibly caused by over-activation of the amygdala, the part of the brain that is responsible for fear. This is illustrated by an account from Lori Ball, a healthy 53-year-old woman from Ohio who is not only well-informed about sleep paralysis but is actually cognisant of what is happening to her while it's happening: "I try to scream (though I have great difficulty making any sound), attempt to flail around, anything, to get the attention of my husband. It is a feeling of panic, entrapment and desperation so horrifying that I have difficulty describing its magnitude. "If my spouse notices my discomfort and responds, in my mind it's never soon enough. One cannot simply tell me to 'wake up' and tap me on the arm. Often I need to be shaken somewhat to be fully present. At that point I wouldn't care if he slapped me hard as the terror of being in that paralysed state, totally helpless, is overwhelming. Knowing that it will end eventually is of no comfort. Every second is hell." (read more here, at the Guardian)
When I read David Icke's descriptions of Satanic rituals conducted by the ruling elite in service of their reptilian overlords I think of ROSEMARY'S BABY and the Satanic panic of the 1980s, and yes, to an extent I believe in the Satanic 'repressed memory' phenomenon, but then again, this is nothing new --it goes back to the Middle Ages. One of my own relatives, great x8 aunt Mary Easty, was hung as a witch in Salem, MA in 1692 (another relative, Mary Edwards, escaped). And I see the current mindlessly draconian persecution of non-violent drug users as similar to this hysteria, a hysteria that could only be born of misunderstanding, fear and resentment towards those who dare hint that this reality may be only a stepping stone to something far stranger.
Some psychedelic drugs 'open' your eyes and mind to vast dimensions which the average person, terrified in his little suburban shell, doesn't want to see and so fears. Those with opened minds will then have an advantage in seeing these things, so the timid average person wants to make it illegal to even look. It's paranoia but I think simple 'paranoia' doesn't quite describe this phenomenon. Who hasn't been resentful about not being included in a special invitation, not invited to the party? Drug users often form their own inner circle clique, not unlike what conspiracy theorists imagine is going on in the highest levels of power, only in this case the concept of 'power' is itself being undermined.
Someone deep in an LSD experience for example, can move completely outside the mind-control grip of 'Power' as embodied at the highest levels of law, capitalism, military, police, education, medicine, etc. The whole structure these elite groups have set up is revealed as just one belief system that's been ironed onto the forehead of its controlled population.
On the other hand, this power elite-instilled 'dream' of 3-D time-space is very easy to stay in, and hard to escape for long, and people live their whole lives in this dream - never daring to doubt that you must do whatever your doctor tells you; never question what they give you to take; never doubt you should pay your taxes or obey the rules; never question the common opinions that have you sneering at the ideas of UFOS yet believing half-heartedly in Jesus. So you're always trying to hedge your bets, afraid of looking foolish (but to whom?) if you commit 100% to your beliefs, and then they turn out to be false.
In the below flow chart you can see how dark negative energy (the dark green) works in the overlaps and cracks between different forms of reality. We're trained to dismiss nearly everything but the yellow and maybe some of the black (whatever small part of it is useful psychoanalysis) but in failing to comprehend the whole structure we're like flowers who presume their root system has no relation to our daily life since we can't see it, therefore we should cut ourselves off at ground level, and if we die then it's our own dumb fault. Perhaps we've been trained to think this by evil groundhogs who want to eat up our roots and so what better than to convince us they don't matter? Thus the DNA code strings our scientists don't understand are dismissed as 'junk.' And sleep paralysis can never be more than what it looks like from the outside, sleep.
David Icke strongly believes in the idea of a widespread Satanic-reptillian network of sexual evil and powerful ritual at the highest levels of government, but is this all occurring in the same 'conventional' shared reality, or on a higher psychic plane? I'm thinking of the children in the 1980s whose hypnosis-derived testimony sent dozens of ordinary people to jail. The hypnotists found, after awhile, that the more sessions of hypnosis they conducted with the kids, the more and more lurid and ridiculous the recovered memories until it became obvious the stuff these kids were recalling could not have possibly all happened, at least not all of it, otherwise there wouldn't even be time for these kids to make it to school, or eat dinner.
Time collapses in these repressed memories, so is that a result of the cover memory's distortion of the truth, or are these rituals and abductions occurring somewhere outside of our conventional time space 3-D realm? Is it a place that is somehow in-between sleep and waking, as occurs in sleep paralysis? Maybe sleep paralysis and hypnotic trances are our most vulnerable states, and aliens and Satanists wait for us right in that gap between consciousness and dreaming, like Kodiak bears positioned along a tricky bend in a salmon stream. In other words, the repressed memories aren't memories at all, but happening right now, in parallel realities to the experience of the hypnotist's office.
When I was five I was deeply traumatized by a nightmare that started from what I assume was the urge to get up in the middle of the night to go down the hall to the bathroom, but I was so tired I fell asleep in front of the bathroom door, and as I was sleeping slowly kicked it open with my foot, but instead of the usual bathroom floor there was a giant white tiled, brightly lit pit below the door frame, like a gigantic institutional bathroom, and at the bottom sat a huge man, at least 18 feet all, with jet black hair and beard stubble, wild-eyed, in a hospital gurney. I tried to get up and get away but I was powerless to move or resist. He grabbed me in the stomach area with his huge hands and proceeded to just push his fingers into my stomach and chest, causing me excruciating agony while he laughed a huge laugh. It went on and on, the agony was unbearable. I woke up in the morning feeling traumatized by the pain and was afraid to go to sleep for months afterwards.
Now in the light of our pedophile-centered society that could easily be read as a 'cover memory' of being molested, either by a home invader or my own father. However, even in the morning I knew it was a dream and had no fear of my father or anyone else. I remembered it vividly, but it had no associations with anything 'real' - what it most resembled was something I saw a bit later, Nightmare on Elm Street, only without the knives and crazy hat.
So on the one hand it was just a dream; on the other hand, the pain I felt was so real I remembered it and felt it for weeks. So what was it? It was certainly one of the most traumatic things in my childhood, but no one could help me cope with it beyond assuring me it was 'just a dream.' Still, was I in fact molested by some astral traveling psychic mental patient spirit monster, ala Bob in David Lynch's TWIN PEAKS?
I would say now based on the weird 'facts' I know from the above chart, that I was sucked into the green area from the dark circle of my dreams (see above chart) and mauled by a maniacal spirit who had somehow managed to crazy his way into the spaces between our collective conscious realities... a kind of Bob / Freddy Krueger hybrid. Strange as it sounds, nothing else makes sense.
I would say that in this model then, sleep paralysis would be a kind of tractor beam from the dark green oval at the top of the chart, pulling those too close to the edge between sleep and 3-D wakefulness into the hands of the grays or whomever wants to screw around with our astral bodies.
All this doesn't mean I doubt the validity of real 3-D space time abductions both by aliens and Satanists as well. Children disappear all over the world every day, and it's chilling. But I do think there has to be more to it than one or the other, just as there's more to nearly everything. When we get into this ritual shit, we're talking about opening dimensional doorways, so these layers which are usually separated are suddenly bled together.
This also explains the vast network of Satanic ritual memories 'recovered' via hypnosis in small children. With a little coaxing I'm sure I could have 'recalled' my dream in Satanic signifier terminology, and perhaps it was a ritual; perhaps this guy had a lock of my hair or something and was using it in a black magic ceremony somewhere far away in his white-tiled mental institution cell.
In terms of hypnotic regression and 'recovered' memories couldn't it be that the person under hypnosis is describing (when dealing with both alien abduction scenarios AND Satanic rituals - don't forget in each one the victim is generally lying down on a table of some sort, i.e. sleeping) what is happening in that moment? That is to say, the process of hypnotism and being under the control of an authority figure / hypnotist / doctor is immediately fictionalized, given the cover of dream symbolism, and returned to the hypnotist in this symbolic variation.
I don't mean this theory to sound 'simple' or to rationalize a very real unknown. The validity of these 'recovered' experiences, such as those recorded by Bud Hopkins, have been verified by independent sources (i.e. two abductees remembering each other under hypnosis, even though they had no actual contact outside of the 'experience.') to the point I personally think alien abduction is by now, by any sane thinker with all the facts, a given, and anyone who thinks it's all made up is living in sheltered denial. Dr. Leir's recovered implants alone are enough to convince, probably, any sane jury in the world, were the greys on trial.
That said, we're still talking about beings who clearly are not limited to the 3-D time/space linear swamp of human perceptions; they probably work beyond even our own conceptions of life and death. That said, they may just find it easier to 'get us' while we're sleeping and/or passing from waking into dream or vice versa, like highwaymen waiting behind trees on the road to grandma's dream house, and also on the stairway to heaven. These beings travel not through outer external space, but through the fissures of reality that we can't yet see or explain.
If western science doubts the validity of these ideas they merely show themselves to be in their own private dark ages. What science can't explain can fill a book, and what a book it is!
Trying to pin this stuff to a linear time-space-matter-consciousness model is like arguing the impossibility of space travel due to the great distances between stars, as if no other conception except linear space time is possible, even though Einstein and atomic physics have already proven otherwise. Scientists in the 19th century would have scoffed and hung you for witchcraft if you told them it would soon be possible to fly from New York to California in half a day, or talk to people in real time on other sides of the planet via small portable black rectangle. That, they'd tell you, will never happen --the distance is too great. As for putting man on the moon, ridiculous (though David Icke maintains it still just might be!).
But not all science is hear-no-evil reductive. The more physicists find out about the way electrons work, for example, the more astonished they are as literally everything the crazy mystics of thousands of years ago ever wrote is proven true. The problem is, physicists are too left-brained to recognize the full implications of their findings, and other fields are reluctant to take these discoveries very far along into practical application, since the results would be too much like witchcraft! One day our scientists might even have the nerve to let go of their proton colliders and lab coats altogether, and just take a bunch of psilocybe cubensis mushrooms and float in a deprivation tank again, like William Hurt in ALTERED STATES. What they experience might show them the myopia of their thinking when it comes to space travel and alien life. In insisting on using this very rigid, positivist model of reality, they shut out a good 99% of 'reality' itself. They're like Amish farmers smirking off ideas that one could ever reach California in less than a day, considering their horses can only go 12 miles an hour.
Man Ray - Marquise Cassati |
But the TRUE danger is in forgetting the wolves really are there, outside the perimeter of waking reality, to the point you sneer at and ridicule even the person being devoured. Everyone is a boy who cried wolf as far as you're concerned, until you're the only one left, brandishing your left brain contempt like a soggy torch as the wolves close in from all sides.