We would surely be missing something important about our own nature if we refused to face up to the fact that hallucinations are part of being human. However, none of this makes hallucinations part of an external rather than an internal reality. Five to ten per cent of us are extremely suggestible, able to move at a command into a deep hypnotic trance. Roughly ten per cent of Americans report having seen one or more ghosts. This is more than the number who allegedly remember being abducted by aliens, about the same as the number who’ve reported seeing one or more UFOs, and less than the number who in the last week of Richard Nixon’s Presidency, before he resigned to avoid impeachment, thought he was doing a good-to-excellent job as President. At least one per cent of all of us is schizophrenic. This amounts to over 50 million schizophrenics on the planet, more than the population of, say, England.
In his 1970 book on nightmares, the psychiatrist John Mack -about whom I will have more to say – writes:
There is a period in early childhood in which dreams are regarded as real and in which the events, transformations, gratifications, and threats of which they are composed are regarded by the child as if they were as much a part of his actual daily life as his daytime experiences. The capacity to establish and maintain clear distinctions between the life of dreams and life in the outside world is hard-won and requires several years to accomplish, not being completed even in normal children before ages eight to ten. Nightmares, \ because of their vividness and compelling effective intensity, are particularly difficult for the child to judge realistically.
When a child tells a fabulous story – a witch was grimacing in the darkened room; a tiger is lurking under the bed; the vase was broken by a multi-coloured bird that flew in the window and not because, contrary to family rules, a football was being kicked inside the house – is he or she consciously lying? Surely parents often act as if the child cannot fully distinguish between fantasy and reality. Some children have active imaginations; others are less well endowed in this department. Some families may respect the ability to fantasize and encourage the child, while at the same time saying something like ‘Oh, that’s not real; that’s just your imagination.’ Other families may be impatient about confabulating – it makes running the household and adjudicating disputes at least marginally more difficult – and discourage their children from fantasizing, perhaps even teaching them to think it’s something shameful. A few parents may be unclear about the distinction between reality and fantasy themselves, or may even seriously enter into the fantasy. Out of all these contending propensities and child-rearing practices, some people emerge with an intact ability to fantasize, and a history, extending well into adulthood, of confabulation. Others grow up believing that anyone who doesn’t know the difference between reality and fantasy is crazy. Most of us are somewhere in between.
Abductees frequently report having seen ‘aliens’ in their childhood – coming in through the window or from under the bed or out of the closet. But everywhere in the world children report similar stories, with fairies, elves, brownies, ghosts, goblins, witches, imps and a rich variety of imaginary ‘friends’. Are we to imagine two different groups of children, one that sees imaginary earthly beings and the other that sees genuine extraterrestrials? Isn’t it more reasonable that both groups are seeing, or hallucinating, the same thing?
Most of us recall being frightened at the age of two and older by real-seeming but wholly imaginary ‘monsters’, especially at night or in the dark. I can still remember occasions when I was absolutely terrified, hiding under the bedclothes until I could stand it no longer, and then bolting for the safety of my parents’ bedroom – if only I could get there before falling into the clutches of … The Presence. The American cartoonist Gary Larson who draws in the horror genre dedicates one of his books as follows:
When I was a boy, our house was filled with monsters. They lived in the closets, under the beds, in the attic, in the basement, and – when it was dark – just about everywhere. This book is dedicated to my father, who kept me safe from all of them.
Maybe the abduction therapists should be doing more of that.
Part of the reason that children are afraid of the dark may be that, in our entire evolutionary history up until just a moment ago, they never slept alone. Instead, they nestled safely, protected by an adult, usually Mum. In the enlightened west we stick them alone in a dark room, say goodnight, and have difficulty understanding why they’re sometimes upset. It makes good evolutionary sense for children to have fantasies of scary monsters. In a world stalked by lions and hyenas, such fantasies help prevent defenceless toddlers from wandering too far from their guardians. How can this safety machinery be effective for a vigorous, curious young animal unless it delivers industrial strength terror? Those who are not afraid of monsters tend not to leave descendants. Eventually, I imagine, over the course of human evolution, almost all children become afraid of monsters. But if we’re capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn’t some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?
It is telling that alien abductions occur mainly on falling asleep or when waking up, or on long automobile drives where there is a well-known danger of falling into some autohypnotic reverie. Abduction therapists are puzzled when their patients describe crying out in terror while their spouses sleep leadenly beside them. But isn’t this typical of dreams, our shouts for help unheard? Might these stories have something to do with sleep and, as Benjamin Simon proposed for the Hills, a kind of dream?
A common, although insufficiently well-known, psychological syndrome rather like alien abduction is called sleep paralysis. Many people experience it. It happens in that twilight world between being fully awake and fully asleep. For a few minutes, maybe longer, you’re immobile and acutely anxious. You feel a weight on your chest as if some being is sitting or lying there. Your heartbeat is quick, your breathing laboured. You may experience auditory or visual hallucinations of people, demons, ghosts, animals or birds. In the right setting, the experience can have ‘the full force and impact of reality’, according to Robert Baker, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. Sometimes there’s a marked sexual component to the hallucination. Baker argues that these common sleep disturbances are behind many if not most of the alien abduction accounts. (He and others suggest that there are other classes of abduction claims as well, made by fantasy-prone individuals, say, or hoaxers.)
Similarly, the Harvard Mental Health Letter (September 1994) comments,
Sleep paralysis may last for several minutes, and is sometimes accompanied by vivid dreamlike hallucinations that give rise to stories about visitations from gods, spirits, and extraterrestrial creatures.
We know from early work of the Canadian neurophysiologist Wilder Penfield that electrical stimulation of certain regions of the brain elicits full-blown hallucinations. People with temporal lobe epilepsy – involving a cascade of naturally generated electrical impulses in the part of the brain beneath the forehead – experience a range of hallucinations almost indistinguishable from reality: including the presence of one or more strange beings, anxiety, floating through the air, sexual experiences, and a sense of missing time. There is also what feels like profound insight into the deepest questions and a need to spread the word. A continuum of spontaneous temporal lobe stimulation seems to stretch from people with serious epilepsy to the most average among us. In at least one case reported by another Canadian neuroscientist, Michael Persinger, administration of the antiepileptic drug, carbamazepine, eliminated a woman’s recurring sense of experiencing the standard alien abduction scenario. So such hallucinations, generated spontaneously, or with chemical or experiential assists, may play a role, perhaps a central role, in the UFO accounts.
But such a view is easy to burlesque: UFOs explained away as ‘mass hallucinations’. Everyone knows there’s no such thing as a shared hallucination. Right?
As the possibility of extraterrestrial life began to be widely popularized – especially around the turn of the last century by Percival Lowell with his Martian canals – people began to report contact with aliens, mainly Martians. The psychologist Theodore Flournoy’s 1901 book, From India to the Planet Mars, describes a French-speaking medium who in a trance state drew pictures of the Martians (they look just like us) and presented their alphabet and language (remarkably like French). The psychiatrist Carl Jung in his 1902 doctoral dissertation described a young Swiss woman who was agitated to discover, sitting across from her on the train, a ‘star-dweller’ from Mars. Martians are innocent of science, philosophy and souls, she was told, but have advanced technology. ‘Flying machines have long been in existence on Mars; the whole of Mars is covered with canals’ and so on. Charles Fort, a collector of anomalous reports who died in 1932, wrote, ‘Perhaps there are inhabitants of Mars, who are secretly sending reports upon the ways of this world to their governments.’ In the 1950s there was a book by Gerald Heard that revealed the saucer occupants to be intelligent Martian bees. Who else could survive the fantastic right angle turns reported for UFOs?