Contest | Non-Fiction | The Paranormal (May 2007)

[Icarus]

For this month, we'd like to hear about your paranormal experiences, whether they be séances, out-of-body moments or visions. Pretty straight-forward. One entry per person and please stay below 1,000 words.

Submissions are due by 11:59 p.m. on May 24th. Good luck!

[josiehenley]

hooray!! one of my favourite subjects.

[starrwriter]

When I was growing up, I developed a paralyzing horror of military life, most especially the basic training period known as boot camp. To me, boot camp seemed like incarceration in a mental institution run by evil witch doctors. My horror was instinctive and visceral. I could just feel it in my gut -- a combination of fear, loathing and a vague sense of nausea.

Of course I watched World War II movies like most boys my age and I even cheered battle scenes when Tokyo Joe and the Jerries got blasted. It wasn't combat or fear of death that horrified me. It was the inhuman robotics of military rank and file. I simply knew it wasn't for me, no way, no how. I believed in individualism and liberty, which I felt was my birthright in America.

Which is why the part of war movies showing boot camp always disturbed me. A young recruit would go in like a tough guy and come out acting like Sad Sack. He appeared to be missing something -- his testicles, perhaps? How could one be a war hero without cajones?

I stayed up most of the night before my induction into the Air Force, listening to the album "Hair" over and over again. It was the Age of Aquarius, according to the songs, but I was going in the opposite direction.

Boot camp was everything I had ever dreaded and worse. The drill instructors or DIs called us every filthy name imaginable and forced us to do absurd things for absurd reasons. Raging against the insanity was stifled -- mostly by the recruits themselves as they gradually ceased to be individuals and sank into Group Think.

"Just shut up and do what you're told," one recruit would say to another. "Nobody wants to be here."

I went along most of the time, doing absurd things mainly because everyone else was doing them as well. Monkey see, monkey do. What the hell did this have to do with being brave or a real man? Calling it simian behavior would be an insult to chimpanzees.

Two recruits in my flight eventually cracked under the strain. The first woke up in the middle of the night screaming and he was taken away by ambulance, never to be seen again. The second guy, who missed his wife, broke down a few days later and couldn't stop crying. He was given a dishonorable discharge, which he was convinced he deserved.

I had an out-of-body experience during boot camp. I was alone in our room one day and from the bed where I sat in running shorts I could see my uniform hanging in the open locker. Suddenly, it seemed as if it were me hanging there -- by the neck, so to speak. I was the uniform, no longer a real person, with only one stripe to show for my loss of humanity. I couldn't shake the horrible feeling for a long time afterward.

One night, while I was standing "fire watch" (which was actually a test to see who could or could not tolerate prolonged sleep deprivation), I was thinking about my wife like the guy who cracked up when I felt a tear roll down my cheek. I wasn't crying, but somehow my tear duct was. I felt like I had lost control of my bodily functions and it was frightening.

During my military service, I saw an award-winning 1970 film called Tribes that illustrated how I felt about boot camp. Jan-Michael Vincent plays a hippie who gets drafted into the Marine Corps during the Vietnam war. Darren McGavin is the DI who tries unsuccessfully to make a Marine out of him. McGavin is a lifer and veteran of three wars who can't understand the young man's anti-military attitude. Vincent finally explains it to him in terms that struck a chord in me:

"You and I, we're from different tribes."

That was it, I told myself. Different tribes. Man was a tribal creature who developed allegiance to his particular tribe and its values. I was from the oldest tribe, peace-loving hunters and gatherers who were egalitarian and believed in cooperation rather than competition. Military men belonged to a much newer tribe that worshipped power and privilege for the few and practiced the black arts of oppression and terror against the many.

The two tribes were like oil and water, which didn't mix together. What horrified me was a kind of existential death -- being blended into an unstable personality constantly trying to separate itself into the component parts.

I got out of the Air Force with all my mental faculties intact (as J. D. Salinger might say), but I came close to snapping more than once. That's what happens when you try to turn a young man into something completely alien to his nature.

[solrev]

A near death experience
I had a near death experience long before that phrase even existed. Long before I had heard others speak of similar experiences. I went through the tunnel but now it seems more like a wormhole from a sci-fi story. As I traveled toward the light at the end, I was traveling at a high velocity. There was no physical manifestation at all of speed; my hair was not blowing around, etc. The funny thing was that I could hear the voices from outside the tunnel at normal speed, as if I was still there. When I got to the end of the tunnel and stepped into the light, there was no one there. There was a golden staircase and on the staircase were golden statues. The scene was much like you would see on the steps of your church on any Sunday, frozen in gold. I could not see the top of the staircase. In fact the staircase and I was all that existed. If I looked to the right or left it appeared dark but it was not dark it was empty, a glimpse of nothingness.
I though, I must be dead. I guess that if; I go up this golden staircase I will end up in heaven. So I started climbing the staircase. Along the way I noticed the golden statues had changed. The carefree statues at the bottom had turned into statues under stress. The statues were discarding things they must have been carrying like coats, etc. I continued up the staircase not filling any stress but a feeling of uneasiness came over me. By the time I reached the top of the staircase the statues had turned into people crawling and digging into the staircase with there hands to pull themselves up. I thought the staircase was symbolic of ones struggles to reach the top of the staircase, heaven itself and not all make it.
When I reached the top there was no heaven. I stood on the edge of a great abyss of emptiness. I was stunned no heaven and one more step into the abyss. I thought, I was one of the ones who did not make it, one more step into hell itself. I just stood there I did not know what to do, but no way was I going to step into the abyss. Then a hand passed in front of my face all I could see was the hand and part of the arm wearing a loose fitting white robe. I thought God must have sent an angel to push me into the abyss. I was to frighten to turn around, I fully expecting to be pushed into the abyss. Nothing happened and peacefulness came over me. I knew that whole interpretation of the golden staircase was wrong. At that moment I never had a clue what was right, I was only aware that I was wrong.
I am not sure the staircase even existed any more, but still I was not about to turn around and look. I was not even sure there was still someone behind me. Then the hand slowly passed in front of my face again. As the hand dropped below my eyes, right in front of me was planet earth. It was if I was looking at planet earth from a space shuttle. Planet earth and I surrounded by the abyss. The hand passed in front of my eyes the third time. The blue green planet turned into a round picture of a tropical paradise. Somehow I knew that I was looking at the Garden of Eden. No sooner did this thought cross my mind the picture changed and picture after picture flashed by. It was like looking at a round TV screen, I say that now but at the time I had never seen a TV.
I heard stories that when you die your whole life passes before your eyes. But my life was not passing before my eyes the whole history of planet earth was. I knew it was in chronological order by the weapons being used in the war pictures. If you pass the whole history of the planet in a short time, it seems like all you will see are battles of war, only the weapons change. I am not sure, time even existed in the abyss but the pictures were on fast forward. Finally I saw the mushroom cloud of an atomic blast. The show ended and the planet earth was before me again.
The hand passed before my eyes a forth time. I saw coming out the abyss a dark cloud. If you saw the movie the Ten Commandments then you saw the cloud meandering toward the planet. The cloud eventually covered the whole planet. Then a white cloud appeared and it also meandered toward the planet. The two clouds waxed and wane against each other as if trying to push one and another off the planet. I thought the final battle of good and evil. Eventually the dark cloud lost all contact with the planet. The cloud floated away into the abyss. The white cloud consumed the planet then melted into the planet.
The hand passed in front of my eyes a fifth time. The planet was gone the abyss was all that was there. As the hand disappeared, I heard my own voice speaking out loud. What message to whom, how? My voice came out of my mouth without thought. I was thinking the whole time but now I was speaking without thought. There was no response and I woke up. I thought to myself that was a weird dream. Dreams like that can scare the hell out of you and yet it was not a nightmare.

[josiehenley]

I’d like to say that my astral projection experience was exciting and adventurous. Perhaps it involved sexual exploration with other astral projectors, or travel to distant lands on the wings of an alternate plane. However, as this is a non-fiction piece, I’ll stick to the truth. My story may be seen as mundane, but in its own way it is groundbreaking. Until this point I’d been a sceptical semi-believer. I was prepared to consider that paranormal experiences seem real to the person undergoing them, but that there must be a perfectly rational biological explanation for the phenomena.

From childhood, I had always wanted to believe that some things exist outside of our everyday world, but my scientific brain demanded proof. In the spring of 1995, at the age of twenty-four and sleeping erratically while working night shifts, I was to be given the proof I needed.

I had been enduring some interesting sleep patterns. The shifts I worked were 9pm to 3am, physical work in a warehouse. I’d get to bed at around 3.30 and sleep till 7, when my lover would rise to begin her day. Then I’d drift off again till about 11 and drag myself out of bed to pursue my daytime work of writing, editing and proofreading. The phone might wake me, or the postman. Sometimes I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep, the sun on my window. I’d go downstairs and snooze on the sofa. My cats would help out here, arranging themselves into the various pockets in the duvet and purring me to sleep.

Overnight I slept like a dead dog, but during these mornings I had several disturbing experiences. Bizarre nightmares of the sort that I’d never had before, where everything was exactly as it was in reality: I was asleep in my bed, it was daylight and the clock displayed the correct time. Yet there was another presence in the house – sometimes walking up the stairs to my room, sometimes sitting on the bed next to me. Although this person never identified themselves, or did anything worrying, I had an overwhelming sense of menace and fear. Occasionally I felt someone pressing down on my chest while I slept.

I had other experiences – lucid dreams where I would find myself aware that I was dreaming and able to control events. These were some of the best times in my life, where I flew, breathed underwater, was a rock star and performed magic. I read up on lucid dreaming and other sleep phenomena as I was fascinated by what was happening to me. I began to enjoy my mystical mornings, but was never able to predict whether they would be ecstatic or terrifying. Gradually, the frightening dreams occurred more often than the pleasant ones.

A few months into this job, I experienced sleep paralysis. I would wake abruptly and find myself unable to move. Straining against an unknown force, I would suddenly break through and jolt upright, my limbs jerking involuntarily. But I wasn’t truly awake and would fall asleep again only to repeat the process a few minutes or a few seconds later. To an observer it must have seemed that I was having some sort of seizure.

Commonly, I would wake several times in the space of an hour, each time returning to the same point in a nightmare. Now I found that I was waking so much that when I eventually rose, I felt that I’d not slept at all but been involved in a fight or danced all night. The culmination of this episode of my life, and the event that drove me to visit the doctor, was a true out-of-body experience that I cannot explain in any other way than that I astral projected.

I hadn’t been able to sleep in my bed, and had come downstairs with the duvet as was my habit. I’d switched on the gas fire, got myself a milky drink and curled up on the sofa. Eventually I fell asleep, warm and snug in just my knickers, with the fire on low and the duvet wrapped around me. I don’t remember whether I dreamed, but I began to notice that I was floating above the sofa. The duvet was still over me, but it was dangling, the edge brushing the floor. This was disconcerting, and more so as I drifted towards the fire.

I woke and landed on the sofa with a thud, hunched up my shoulders and fell back to sleep. This repeated several times, each time I glided closer to the fire. I got the feeling that I was being drawn to the chimney and would be sucked up and out of the house. I began to panic, thinking that the duvet would catch against the fire and be set alight. I tried to pull it up and tried to turn away from the fire, but I seemed to have no control over the inevitable drift away from where I should be.

It didn’t occur to me to look down, to see if my body was still there. Nor did I wonder at the time how the duvet had come with me. I simply accepted that this was happening. Afterwards I tried to dismiss it as another strange dream, however, the feeling of being sucked out of my body was very real and it has remained with me. The next time I experienced sleep paralysis, I noticed this same feeling – a disassociation between ‘my body’ and ‘myself’ which would return with a jolt to the correct alignment.

I was not epileptic, and once my sleeping pattern returned to normal, the frequency of these phenomena waned until I was finally free of them. The experience has left me, though, with the lasting belief that there is something other than pure physicality in the human experience, some sort of soul or spirit, however it is expressed, which can separate itself from the body under certain conditions.