Communion: A True Story (22 page)

Lying in that bed, I felt a very strong sense of responsibility. I had to communicate in some nonthreatening manner. I was an emissary of sorts — although perhaps only to the court of nightmare. If so it was a strange sort of bad dream, in that the terror began to pass even though the dream hadn't ended.

Again it took an absolute concentration of will, a centering of my attention and the application of the most careful effort to the muscles of my face, but I did manage to smile.

Instantly everything changed. They dashed away with a whoosh and I was plunged almost at once back into sleep. Now I did dream — qualitatively a very different experience from what had just transpired. Frankly, I'm quite certain that the beings I saw were not a dream, and probably not a hallucination. What they were was an enigma.

Interestingly, my dream was an unfrightening repeat of one of the few really terrifying nightmares I have ever had. This was of being chased through a stark stone palace by a robot with beady pop eyes. This time, however, I didn't run and the robot finally sat down and contented itself with staring at me.

The next thing I knew, morning came. I opened my eves, feeling absolutely drained.

Anne said, "Well, it was a quiet night," and proceeded to make a beautiful breakfast while I sat and stared.

Everybody was happy and well around the breakfast table. The
Times
was as thick as ever and the coffee and waffles were delicious. I was back in my world again, with my own familiar family. When I told Anne about what had happened, she laughed merrily at the idea of the painted suit of aged design. and reset the clock on the stove. which had lost five minutes during the night.

I found that one of the other people I have met has also had an experience involving visitors in archaic quits. This suggests that the visitors are not too interested in our clothing, or confused about its significance . . . or perhaps that their thought processes have not gotten very far vet in regard to clothing. It may be that, if we ever meet them openly, they will not be quite as naked as the creature who emerged in
Close Encounters
. Perhaps they will be wearing double-breasted suits circa 195Y, complete with pocket handkerchiefs.

What happened the night of March 15 was fundamentally different, and more open, than any other contact I have had. The visitors almost irrefutably announced themselves to toe.

They allowed the m see them while in full possession of all my other memories of them —albeit in a more or less completely restrained physical condition. And they preceded their appearance to me by the witness of the uninvolved child, the one person there that night who had absolutely no relationship to this at all.

Who had come to see me during the night? Did they really drop down from the sky, or have then come from some other cosmos, a place where dreams are real and reality a dream, where shadows and those who cast them are one and the same?

Weeks after writing the material preceding in this chapter I met a woman who said she thought of her visitor as a man, and proceeded to describe a small being, very geode, with round eves like shiny black buttons arid a tiny, almost nonexistent mouth.

This was what I had seen, or a model of it. The suit must have been a form of communication.

Why not simply speak? They have a voice of sorts. I have heard it, others have heard it.

And they can also speak in the center of the head. I wondered if it all had something to do with my request for confirmation. Were the three real ones holding a scarecrow near me because they wanted to see what I would do with my limited physical mobility and did not want to expose a living being to the danger of my touch?

In retrospect, I am glad that I did not reach out. My impression is that these people, if they exist, are more than a little afraid of us: They are deeply afraid. I suppose it was best to smile rather than move my hands toward them, but I wish that there had been touch. Could there have been, or would my fingers have crossed only air? I suppose that I will always wonder.

I asked for confirmation, not proof. It seems that they took me at the exact meaning of the word.

FIVE

I rage to know

what beings like me, stymied by death

and leached by wonder, hug those campfires

night allows,

aching to know the fate of us all,

wallflowers in a waltz of stars.

-DIANE ACKERMAN,

"Lady Faustus"

ALLIANCE OF THE LOST

Recollections of My Family

Trapped in the Dark

From the beginning, I had been disturbed that my wife and son might have been involved in this. At the least, they had suffered with me through my upheavals. At the worst, they were as entangled as I am. Our son has been preserved from almost all conversation about it and from direct experience of my personal trauma. Even before I knew exactly what was happening to me, my first concern was to leave his happy childhood intact.

When I realized that my memories fitted in with material described in
Science and the
UFOs
, I did not cell Anne. I didn't tell anybody. As I have said, my initial impulse was to hide everything, and when I could not do that I sought professional help through Budd Hopkins. I told Anne nothing and our son less than nothing.

Thus when Anne was first hypnotized to aid her in recalling the nights of October 4 and December 26, she was aware only that something very unusual seemed to have happened on those dates. I did not keep it all from her out of some desire to preserve her the purity of hypnotic recall. I kept it from her because there was a possibility, however remote, that visitors had been around us in the night.

Thus the "visitor hypothesis" had been discussed by us only in general terms. Only after her first hypnosis, which took place on March 13, 1986, did I indicate that I felt there might have been some nonhuman presence involved in our lives. On the evening of March 15, she was treated to the spectacular 179 witness of the little girl at our country house. It is a testament to Anne's courage chat she remained there that night.

It is also true, though, that Anne has a very active mind, and she was far too curious to simply retreat. Once she understood that something might be happening, our familiar teamwork system began to function, and she took over the intellectual direction of our study, bringing to it her own creative and open mind, as well as her steadfast insistence that all speculation proceed from known facts.

Before hypnosis Anne had a vague memory of me warning her of fire on the night of October 4, of hearing an explosion and our son calling out to me. Neither of us can understand why she did not respond to the warning, in view of the explosion. She had no memories at all of the night of December 26.

There were also some prior memories. The previous March I had told her that I "flew around the room" one night. I remembered this as a vivid dream. But flying dreams aren't unusual, not even faintly pathological. They are generally associated by psychiatrists with hidden desires to escape stress. In 1982 we had the experience of the white thing, which was dealt with to detail in Anne's hypnosis.

On March 13, 1986, Anne was hypnotized by Dr. Robert Naiman. We chose a psychiatrist other than Don Klein so that there could be no possibility of his questions taking on some sort of unnoticed direction because of what he already knew.

I felt that there was a real chance here to find some answers, and I wanted to do everything possible to encourage that outcome. Anne and I are a very deep, total marriage. If something was
really
happening to me, then she had to know. She would have some involvement. If she had reported nothing, then to me it would have indicated that mine was an essentially psychological experience — perhaps shared in some unusual ways, but essentially psychological. Thus the visitor hypothesis would no longer have been among the more likely ones. I think that I would then have concluded that a hitherto undiscovered mental process with a definite physical effect was probably operating.

Bob Naiman had worked before with people who have had this experience, and took the same healthy and supportive stance that Don Klein did.

Budd Hopkins was present at Anne's session. Questions asked by him are identified with his name. All other questions were asked by Dr. Naiman.

Despite all the progress I had made in dealing with this experience, I must admit that Anne's hypnosis disturbed me all over again. It was clear that she was not specifically expecting or seeking anything. And yet
something
was there, and in a way that subtly implied that it has had a profound effect not only on her memories but even on her role in our life together.

Her hypnosis does not reveal a person trying to concoct a story, but rather one trying hard to avoid remembering something she has been cold in the strongest terms to forget. She was compliant all right, but not with the hypnotist. She complied, it appears, with something else that issued previous. stronger suggestions. And they overpowered the hypnotist's efforts for a very obvious reason. My wife appears to have been made to believe that my mental health depends on her not remembering, on her providing me with a safe haven in ordinary reality when I need one.

I suspect that she is right to believe this. Even under hypnosis she protected this role, which is probably essential not only to my mental health but to that of the whole family.

The regression began with her memories of the night of July 30, 1985. She did not know it at the time, but there was some evidence in one of our son's school journals that an event.

involving her might have taken place on that night, when she and he were in the country and I was away on business. Rather than suggest to her in any way that we thought this might be the case, Dr. Naiman began with that night without telling her why.

Hypnosis

JULY 30, OCTOBER 4, AND DECEMBER 26, 1985

SESSION DATES:
March 13, March 21, 1986

SUBJECT:
Anne Strieber

PSYCHIATRIST:
Robert Naiman, MD

Dr. Naiman: "First we want to concentrate on July thirtieth, 1985. You were with your son?"

"Yeah."

"You were in the country then?"

"Yeah."

"Who was there?"

"A lot of workmen came that day, so I wouldn't be too lonely because I didn't have the car. Whitley took the car to go to the city. The workmen were going to be there, so I wouldn't be too lonely. I believe I bicycled to the store. I went to the store. I remember thinking how am I going to go to the store. I wouldn't want to drive anyway but I've got my bicycle and I can leave my son because the workmen are there. And I did. We wanted something to make some treat or something. We wanted some snacks or something."

"He wanted some snacks?"

"And I did too. I remember it was going to be lonely putting him to bed that night and it was. I don't remember anything strange."

"Was it unusual for you to be there alone with him?"

"Yes, because we always all drive up together and I can't drive very well, and I wouldn't want to drive so I'm never alone there with just our son overnight."

"I want you to concentrate on coming back from the grocery store with the treats."

"Yeah."

"When was that?"

"It was afternoon. Late afternoon. About four or three, I think, because the workmen were there but they were leaving."

"What are they working on?"

"Building the pool on the deck."

"And they left around four, and n was just you and your son?"

"Yeah."

"And then what?"

"I don't remember what we had for dinner. but it would have been something fairly simple. I might have baked something, but I don't remember. I think I went to get some chocolate chips, and we made cookies. It must have been earlier in the day because I might have given some cookies to the workmen. I think we did. Maybe that was another time, but it could have been that time. I remember we did that once. And that's the kind of thing I would have gone to get. I wouldn't have had any chocolate chips, and I think that's what I went to get. I wanted to get a paper and I wanted-yes, I remember that. And I said, 'Why should I wait when I have a bicycle?"'

"So you and your son had dinner together. the two of you?"

"Yeah."

"What time would that be?'

"Six or so. [Sounds perplexed.] I don't remember dinner. Were we invited somewhere? I don't think so"

"And what time would you be putting him to bed?"

"Around eight. Seven-thirty."

"Something you were not looking forward to?"

"Well, it's hard being all alone all day with a .kid and I'm tired at night. and I'm not usually the one who puts him to bed. And I'm not as good at reading stories as Whitley is, and I don't look forward when Whitley's gone to putting him to bed."

"But it went all right?"

"Yeah . . . I don't
remember
. No . . . I couldn't have watched TV because we had no TV

reception. But we had the VCR. I don't think I had a movie to watch. I don't remember. I remember Whitley came back and it was earlier than I thought."

"When was that?"

"The next day."

"Do you remember anything that night, when you were sleeping alone?"

"No — I — well, no."

"Did your son call you during the night?"

"I don't think so."

"You slept your usual sound sleep?"

"I think so. But it's lonely going to sleep in the country alone at night. I might have heard some noises. It seems like maybe I did, but they weren't any thing because I had the doors locked."

"And you have a burglar-alarm system?"

"Yeah."

"Do you often hear steps . . . sounds?"

"Not steps . . . I doubt if it was steps. You don't always hear sounds. It was pretty quiet.

Not noisy."

"All right, so let me give you one more minute to concentrate. I want you to concentrate as hard as you can because you have this very special brand of concentration ability right now, this capacity to concentrate. I want you to just concentrate on that night from sundown on."