by Derek » Sat Dec 29, 2007 4:40 pm
I just finished reading Stan Gooch’s The Origins of Psychic Phenomena: Poltergeists, Incubi, Succubi, and the Unconscious Mind, recommended by that vociferous internal orgasm addict and obscurantist music theory scholar, Great Galactic Ghoul. I thoroughly enjoyed the book and I learned a few new things, too, so thank you, Ghoul. Your next Extra Cheesy Fried Chupacabra at the local Minnesota Taco Bell is on me.
Big Stan Gooch has this theory that we all have two minds, so to speak: the conscious mind that we’re all familiar with during our waking moments, and the unconscious mind that takes the driver’s seat at night, during our dreams. Nothing really new there, right? But here’s where Gooch gets interesting: he believes the conscious mind originates from our cerebrum, and the unconscious mind originates from the cerebellum—so it would be more appropriate to refer to the two modes as Consciousness A and Alternative Consciousness B.
As our consciousness shifts from one mode to the other—from sleeping to waking, for instance—a lot of crossover action necessarily happens in-between. Some of us know those moments as hypnagogic hallucinations (dreaming while we’re awake), but Gooch goes further, laying the blame for poltergeists, sexy succubus encounters, and hell, even spontaneous human combustion, all on the unconscious mind’s ability to seemingly externalize its contents—often scaring the crap out of us in the process.
Over the years, I’ve had more than my fair share of hypnagogic hallucinations and I’m wondering if others here at RI share that tendency. I’ll relate just two examples to get the ball rolling. This first one happened to me a few weeks ago:
I’m in bed dreaming I’m awake. I see a figure made of glowing white light enter our bedroom. It’s in the shape of a striding, man-sized teddy bear (in other words, not too threatening…). The white light teddy bear stands at the foot of our bed and I make a decision to let it enter me, mingling its energy with mine. It immediately does so and I feel a sharp shock as it disappears inside me. The shock is so painful and unexpected that it wakes me up, in actuality.
This second example is a link to a far stranger and more sinister encounter written up by my brother Crash for his blog at [url=http://nittwittridge.com/2007/11/26/crash-on-crash]NittWittRidge.com:
“…Our house had lovely wide redwood decks on the upper two floors that looked out onto the sea, just a few blocks away. The deck off the master bedroom, where Justine and I slept, was covered with thorny wild rose vines and suspended about twenty feet off the ground. It could only be accessed through the bedroom’s sliding glass doors. But one night not long after my UFO article’s publication, I woke up around two in the morning and saw a shadowy man standing on that deck, peering in at me. I sat bolt upright in bed and tried to shout, but I couldn’t find my voice. I was almost paralyzed with terror, because the shadowy man’s face was crawling with what looked like luminous blue fireflies….”[/url]
So... any further thoughts? I’ll take them from either Consciousness A or Alternative Consciousness B. I try not to discriminate… although, come to think of it, that lack of discrimination might be the source of a lot of my problems.
Last edited by
Derek on Sun Dec 30, 2007 1:39 am, edited 2 times in total.
Mere coincidence... or mind-fucking conspiracy? You be the judge.