Communion: A True Story (27 page)

I went to my wife and looked down at her sleeping form, my mind full of question and wonder.

Our Son

We have been careful to preserve our child from the faintest suggestion that he might be dealing with something outside of normal experience. We have told him that he has had some scary dreams. Oddly enough, he seems to take this notion to be a sort of adult fantasy. His own descriptions of what he remembers are completely straightforward, and he doesn't characterize them as scary.

While he is more than willing to call them dreams if we want him to, he seems equally comfortable with the idea that they are memories. This exactly parallels my own perception: The material has the taste of real memory, and yet it is so strange that it also seems like a dream.

I have asked my son to describe any strange dreams he recalls. He has never been hypnotized and he won't be until he can decide for himself if he wishes to do it. No matter what the source, this material can be very disturbing indeed under hypnosis and it is certainly not the business of a parent to assault a child's mind by such experimentation.

Here are some of my son's dreams, in his own words.

"Well, I was dreaming that I was on a boat with Ezra [a friend of his] and someone was attacking and we were about to dive off and I was in the middle of the air when I switched to this dream where I was in the hospital in the future where they were trying to cure some kind of disease. I'm not sure what it was. And I was taken out of my bed and onto a cot and out on the porch."

"Who took you out of your bed and onto the cot?"

"Some kind of doctor."

"What did he look like?"

"Oh, he was a very short and fat man with glasses that came out pointed upward like that.

[Gestures as if eyes have a pronounced slant.] And he always has a big fake smile on him.

[Smiles from ear to ear with his mouth closed.] He kind of kept it there except when he was asleep."

"How did you know he was asleep?"

"Well, he had — well, that's because he worked in the night and slept in the day "

"What did his eyes look like?"

"He was wearing regular glasses. His eyes were a kind of greenish-blue color. Dark. The only two faces he had was this. [Again demonstrates smile.] And then a small one when he was sleeping. [Makes an O.]"

"Mouth open?"

"Yeah."

"When his mouth was opened, it was round?"

"Yeah. Puckered. Big puckered."

"Did you see him when he wasn't smiling?"

"Yeah, when he was doing the operation on me." "What kind of operation?"

"Well, it was kind of like a test."

"What did he do?"

"It was a disease on my arm."

"He did something to your arm?"

"No, wait. He kept your nose cold like when you eat a lot of ice cream."

"Did it hurt?"

"No, not really."

"You say you were examined on the porch. What do you mean by that?"

"Well, they took me onto the porch. There was no way to get me into an operation room because of all the moving equipment. And then by the porch light I mean kind of like the outside lights at the country house. You know at the country house there's that porch light?"

"Yeah."

"That's the light that was on. Then they took special lights and examined my nose and took X rays and stuff." (This last statement could easily be a buried memory of a babyhood injury to his nose. which involved an X ray to determine whether it was broken. But this memory seems to be mixed in with other material of a totally different nature.)

"What kind of lights?"

"Some were blue lights and they would look through the front of it and the blue light would make them see through me without an X ray."

"And there was an orange light that was supposed to see not my bones but the inside skin and what was happening. Instead of having X rays and stuff, they had lights. They had big lights. Green lights."

"Ever remember a dream where a monster came in the house and Mommy fainted?

What's that from?"

"That's one of my journal stories."

"Yeah. Why'd you make that one up for your journals Do you know?"

"I don't know Not really. I remember it vaguely. Because I wrote that one along time ago." (Early Call. It watt now March.) "It was free journal story period and I couldn't think of anything. I was tossing and turning in my desk truing to think of something. And then suddenly that dream just popped in my head "

"What was it like, that dream?'

"I was in a — I didn't explain it totally on the journal. It was in a cornfield, my mommy and me, and I was chewing on a piece of corn and my mom was telling fairy tales. And then suddenly this big, big — about let's say from the lobby of this building up to the top —hovered over us. It was colored orange, green, had blue feet." (Orange and green are colors associated with lights on the flying disk that has been seen in our area.)

"It was a thing, like an animal or a creature?"

"It wasn't like anything. It was just this big, massive thing. It had these big bumps all over it that were blue and its feet were orange —"

"Do you suppose you were seeing something flying over- you that was blue and orange and green, and you were confused as to what it was?"

"It was like it was flying. Kind of."

At this point I felt that I had made a mistake with me last question, in that it was so heavily weighted with suggestion. I concluded our conversation by reassuring my son that he'd had some really neat dreams that were very interesting to hear about.

He then went about his afternoon business, reading
Tin-Tin
and making a St. Patrick's Day card for his grandmother.

I sat in my chair, haunted by what my son had said. Most particularly, I thought of the incident in the cornfield. I will relate a dream I had had shortly before we spoke.

The three of us were together in the English countryside to my dream. We had rented a cottage. The inside of the cottage was identical to our cabin. I was confused, because Anne and our son were not there and it was already the evening. I was sitting up in bed when I got a call on the phone. I remember saving to the caller. "No, it's all right, they're full staving out all night." On some level I was full of fear. but on another I seem to have accepted their disappearance by justifying it to myself

In the middle of the night there was a knock at the front door. I opened it to find my son in the company of a group of "rescue workers," ordinary men and women with deep, soft, and loving faces. My son was naked except for a dark blue cap that one of them had put on his head. He was moving strangely, as if he had no control over his own muscles. His eves looked as if he were in some sort of trance. I gathered him in my arms, because they told me that touch and hugging would bring him back to normal. Then I looked around for my wife.

They shook their heads sadly, and the care and love radiating from their eyes was such that I was not bereaved but reassured that she would be back soon.

Then I was abruptly transported to another place. I was given to understand that Anne and our son had been found here, hiding. It was a cornfield. just like our son's dream.

At bedtime that night he wanted to talk more about dreams. I did not record our conversation, but he complained of two things. The first one was that when he started to go to sleep, his whole body would tingle and he would feel as if his hair were standing on end. A voice would then ask him about his day. how he felt, and "private things" which he did not wish to discuss with me.

He also complained that he saw a skeleton looking at him when he was trying to relax.

The conversation went as follows:

"A skeleton?"

"Yes, and it keeps staring at me like it was right in front of my face and it won't go away "

"What does it look like?"

"Well, its — oh. It's not a skeleton, it's one of the thin ones that stood around behind the doctors."

"What thin ones?"

"You know, the thin ones that are always saying 'We won't hurt you'? Them. It's not a skeleton, it's one of the thin ants."

The appearance of these people has never been discussed with my son at all, not by anybody, and vet his description of short ones and taller, thin ones is not only consistent with my own observations, it is consistent with the experiences of many of the other people who have encountered the visitors.

He had bought a book of haiku at the Strand used-book store that afternoon, a book entitled
A Net of Fireflies
. I did not tell him that I had bought the same edition when I was twenty and living with my grandmother, and derived immense pleasure and comfort from it.

He wanted us to read haiku to one another. I read:

With tender impact on the icy air,

The peach-buds burst: their silken petals flare.

He smiled his huge smile and commented, "That was really a lot of pictures for so little words." Then he read:

Without a sound the white camellia fell

To sound the darkness of the deep stone well.

Afterward he said, "Dad, you know, we like the haiku and all the beautiful words. But the thin ones, it's like they
are
the haiku. Inside, they are haiku."

That night a father staved a long time with his child, wondering about the soft fire of communion that might be hidden between the breaths of his life.

SIX

No building ever came into being as easily as did this

temple — or rather, this temple came into being the way a
temple should. Except that, to wreak a spilt or to desecrate
or destroy it completely, instruments obviously of a

magnificent sharpness had been used to scratch on every
stone — from what quarry had then come? — of an eternity
outlasting the temple, the clumsy scribblings of senseless
children's hands, or rather the entries of barbaric mountain
dwellers.

-FRANZ KAFKA,

"
The Building of the Temple
"

A STRUCTURE IN THE AIR

Science, History, and Secret Knowledge

What Is Going On?

In the past forty years the question of the real nature of the UFO experience has been addressed by psychologists and psychiatrists, most notably Carl lung, by public personages ranging from presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to Senator Barry Goldwater, by a plethora of scientists, by the United States Air Force and various security agencies, and by the general public.

In addition to all this recent interest there are reports of disk sightings, of airships, of little men in silver clothing, dating back over a thousand years.

I began this search by assuming that I was dealing either with a mental aberration or a visit "from another planet." If I had been asked, I would have said that the nature of my experience indicated that the visitors hadn't been here too long, and that I had been studied by a team of biologists and anthropologists.

Judging from the extraordinary range — not to mention the age — of some of the material I have found, thin cannot be the whole answer. Even if partially true, there is much more to it than a recent arrival of more or less comprehensible visitors. Whatever this may be, a correct and final understanding of it certainly poses an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual challenge of unprecedented complexity and subtlety.

There is so little final knowledge of this phenomenon that it is impossible to do more than speculate about its actual nature. But speculation need not be random; it can be careful and directed.

The visitors could be:

• from another planet or planets.

• from earth, but so different from us that we have not hitherto understood that they were even real.

• from another aspect of space-time, in effect another dimension. from this dimension in space but not in time. Some form of time travel may not be impossible, only unlikely and probably very energy-intensive. For example, if we could convert a human being into some sort of energetic medium — say light or radio waves — then place a reconverter 100,000 light years from earth, a person could step through a door here, feel as if he had come out the other side instantaneously, then step back and find that he was 200,000 years in the future. A cumbersome time machine, but it would work. We cannot assume that time travel is out of the question.

• from within us. I keep returning to this hypothesis because I find it so endlessly interesting and at its core so compelling. I suppose the idea that the gods we create would turn out to be real because we created them has a certain ironic appeal to a modern intellectual.

• a side effect of a natural phenomenon. We know so little about how magnetism and extra-low frequencies of all kinds affect the human organism. Perhaps there are natural electromagnetic anomalies that trip a certain hallucinatory wire in the mind, causing many different people to have experiences so similar as to seem to the result of encounters with the same physical phenomena.

• an aspect of the human species. We have a very ancient tradition of afterlife. The respect with which Neanderthals buried their dead in the Middle East more than thirty thousand years ago suggests that this belief may actually predate our own species.

Maybe we do have an afterlife, but not quite in the way tradition suggests. Maybe you and I are larvae, and the "visitors" are human beings in the mature form. Certainly, we are consuming our planet's resources with at least the avidity of caterpillars on a shrub.

Ancient astronomers of India believed that the Siddhas (human beings who have attained perfection) revolved between the clouds and the moon, having been transformed into a lighter, less material state.

Maybe the ancient and revered concept of human spiritual transformation relates to the emergence of the adult from the larva.

In our society
transformation
has a bad name, having been associated with various meditation fads and instant success groups. But real transformation has nothing to do with gaming a better life in this world; deliverance does not involve trying to use Buddhist chanting techniques to acquire a new Mercedes, nor is salvation a side effect of Fundamentalist healing services. Transformation for a Zen monk, a Moslem sufi, a Catholic, or a Jehovah's Witness is the same: It is a matter of delivering one's self into the possession of God. Meister Eckhart puts it very well when he says, "We must become as clear glass through which God can shine." But this involves giving up the "self," which feels just like dying.