Fringe-ology

by Steve Volk

  I wasn’t certain what brain process triggered this. But I liked it. Still, my skepticism created a gulf between me and Botkin’s soldiers.

  We sat together for somewhere between three and four hours—me, Botkin, and six veterans of the Vietnam War. Botkin had secured us a big conference room for the day, and I sat and listened as each soldier took turns sharing his individual story. I wondered if the people not speaking might be bored, being forced to sit through everyone else’s tale. But the camaraderie they shared was clear. They liked being there in the same room with each other, for each other; and a couple of times, when one of them started to cry, the others urged him on. “Don’t bury it,” they might say, or—echoing Botkin—“Stick with that.”

  The amount of misery these men suffered, not just in war but for decades after arriving home, was staggering. As hard as they tried, they simply could not turn on all the old feelings and behaviors that comprised their former, civilian identities. They hurt, and they self-medicated. They drank, smoked pot, or turned to harder drugs like coke and heroin. They tried to talk to their mothers, their fathers, their wives or kids, but they felt as if they were hollering across a chasm and into the wind, their voices lost in the space between. But they at least understood each other—their fellow soldiers. And so they came to the VA, and the best relief they got, for many years, was just being around other similarly wounded men.

  “I see another vet,” one soldier said, “and I don’t even have to like him, as a person, and I love him. You know what I mean?”

  Another told me, “I’m not saying this to scare you. But if I had to kill you right now I could just turn off all my feelings and do it, like a job, and not feel anything.”

  I had heard similar statements before, from ex-cons, who were trying to tell me what prison life had done to their minds. So I was neither shocked nor scared when this soldier talked about how easy it would be to kill me. But the next part moved me. “I don’t like that,” he said.

  To a man, they said the closest they’ve come to normal was through “Dr. Al’s Magic Wand.”

  EMDR provided them the first real progress they had felt since coming home. But IADC took them to a whole different level of healing. One solider said he used his IADC session to resolve his differences with his mother, who died feeling estranged from him after he returned from the war; he still felt pain at the loss of her, but IADC had allowed him to acknowledge that pain. Another vet told me he spoke to an enemy solider he had killed, and, incredibly, the enemy forgave him. “He’s in a better place,” he said.

  In the years since, these men learned how to hold down jobs and feel optimistic again. They still cried sometimes over the past. But now they felt in control of the experience rather than subsumed by it.

  I waited a long time before I popped the paranormal question. But eventually, I had to ask, “So, do you feel these visions were real, that you were really visiting with the spirits of the people you saw?”

  “I know it,” said one soldier, immediately.

  Another said, “I can’t prove it, but I believe it’s real.”

  Then a big bear of a soldier interrupted: “Dr. Al said he gave you the stick. What do you think? Was it real?”

  I understood that the most parsimonious and logical explanation for my visions was that they were some form of spontaneous, waking dream—an imagining triggered by the power of suggestion. I also knew those visions felt great and seemed to provide me with fresh, positive memories of two people I had lost. Today, I wonder if those visions are so clear in my mind because EMDR does mimic the REM stage’s role in memory processing. But none of that mattered to me then. What mattered to me was that I had just listened to this group of soldiers tell me their painful stories for several hours, and I was not about to come between them and a hard-won sense of peace.

  In this book, we have already learned that the brain mediates all experience. Divining the objective reality of what the brain shows us is harder than we think. Call that my intellectual out, if you like; or simply call me a coward, if you’re of a mind, for failing to raise my own sense of disbelief. But more than five years later, I remain comfortable with how I responded. Strict philosophical materialists usually hold that all paranormal belief is harmful. But that isn’t what I found in talking to the men at that table. So I had one job that I could see: to get the hell out of their way, as fast as possible.

  “I don’t know,” I told them. “It was such a strange experience. And I’m still trying to process it.”

  “Give it time,” one of the soldiers advised me. “You’ll see.”

  I nodded and moved on. And in time, I did see. I never did have another flashback to my brother-in-law’s hospital room. And even to this day, when I think of my brother, or my brother-in-law, I no longer first see images of them in failing health. I see the men who appeared in the wake of Botkin’s wand. I see the men from my IADCs.

  This is not an argument for the objective reality of what I saw. This is not an argument for life after death. But it is an argument that we might do better to set aside some of these epistemologically unanswerable questions from time to time. It is an argument that, at least in the case of Botkin’s soldiers, sometimes paranormal belief simply works. Whether it points to an objective reality or not.

  There have been no well-researched, controlled studies of the effectiveness of Botkin’s method. He has been trying to get that kind of project together for many years, looking for some independent researcher to come in and assess whatever it is he’s wrought. He has told me, at various times, about psychologists and institutions that have expressed an interest. But as of the summer of 2010, he is still looking.

  Is IADC effective? In a scientific sense, we don’t know. In an anecdotal sense, hell yes.

  Botkin, in the absence of independent research, has now trained sixty therapists in eight countries who are using the IADC procedure to help patients deal with trauma and grief. I spoke to a few of these therapists, who felt IADC was working for their clients. And Botkin’s soldiers have remained willing to promote IADC, largely because they want soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan to hear about it. “I went many years till I got what I have,” one soldier told me. “I don’t want them guys to have to wait twenty years for this.”

  The problem is that name—induced after-death communication. The problem is the way we respond to topics with any paranormal association at all. There could be other applications for Botkin’s method. The visions he elicits might even be used, like lucid dreams, to rehearse for real-life tasks. But in promoting his therapy, Botkin may get his sternest challenge from fellow practitioners of EMDR—people who know how hard it is to gain acceptance for an idea associated with the fringe. In the course of my research, in fact, I called psychologist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of EMDR’s leading champions. We had a great discussion, until I brought up Botkin’s method.

  “That sounds like the patients are making reconstructions after the fact,” he said. “No one reports experiences as dramatic as that, and it just sounds … too flaky. We’ve been dismissed, EMDR, in the psychological community for too long. We’re getting over that now because people see it works. And nobody wants to go back, to being seen as flaky.”

  Chapter 10

  You Can’t Go Home Again

  Has Anyone Else Encountered a Ghost in My Old House?

  I never worry about being driven to drink; I just worry about being driven home.

  —W. C. Fields

  There are a couple of loose threads left dangling here, and for me they are interrelated: What happened in my childhood home, and what happened in Hawaii?

  As for the Family Ghost, some readers no doubt feel certain we experienced a real spirit—a poltergeist that made its presence known in, shall we say, the ghostly way, by banging around at night. Skeptics likely consider my family victims of a collective delusion. I wanted to find out everything I could, so I wrote letters to the family who lived in the house immediatel
y after us and also to the current owners. I’m not going to name any of them, for reasons that will become clear shortly. But I succeeded, first, in contacting the family who moved in right after we left.

  My initial conversation, with the mother, was awkward. I started by writing her a letter, telling her that I was interested in her experiences in the house. I made no mention of anything paranormal because I didn’t want to risk tainting her response. But this left me at something of a disadvantage on the phone. After all, she didn’t know what I really wanted to find out. “So … ,” I asked her. “How did you like the house?”

  “It was fine,” she said. “You know … nice house.”

  We made more small talk, comprised mostly of painful silence, till finally she said, “Um, is that all you want?”

  “Well,” I said, “I was wondering if anything … odd might have happened there.”

  “Oh jeez,” she said. “I was wondering if you were gonna bring that up! That place was haunted!”

  In the ensuing weeks, I spoke to her, her husband, and two of their daughters. I learned that the girls were supposed to sleep in my sisters’ old room but almost never did. “I hated even walking past that room,” one of the daughters told me. “If I went in there, I just got creeped out.”

  The youngest daughter claimed she once saw a stack of pennies just shoot across the room. But the spookiest stuff in this story belongs to the parents. The feature I found most compelling was the father’s account: the heavy wooden door he installed in the downstairs bedroom sometimes boomed at night, like someone was pounding on it. “I’d see it coming up in the frame,” he said, “like it was gonna bust.”

  He would get out of bed and open the door. But no one was there. Over time, he heard it often enough that he devised a plan to leap from the bed and fling open the door, mid-thump. And the next time it happened, he did. But again, there was no one there. Furious, he lit off through the house, looking for his kids. He admits now, they were way too small to bow the door inward so violently. But when something strange happens in a person’s house they often do look for prosaic explanations first. As this man stalked through the hall and out into the rest of the house, however, he found his kids asleep upstairs. Out cold.

  Does this story mean my old house was haunted by some sort of spirit that went into hiding when we chased it away and came back when a new family arrived? That two fantasy-prone families occupied the house? Or something else, something we haven’t thought of yet?

  I’m willing to let you decide. But I kept looking. By the time I’d heard from this second family, they had long since moved from my old house. And I’d written a pair of letters to the current occupants.

  The first letter just indicated my interest in speaking to them about the house. In the second letter, I was more direct—explaining that we’d experienced some odd happenings there, which my family attributed to a ghost. The owner never responded—who could blame him?—and eventually I knocked on his door, figuring my request for an audience would be much harder to dismiss, face to face on the front porch.

  My father came with me because he wanted to see the old house. And I wanted him to see it, too. We had departed almost twenty-five years earlier, and since then we’d lost three immediate family members and added six new babies. So there was a lot of nostalgia involved in going back.

  When I knocked on the door, the owner answered—a big man, with thick forearms and broad shoulders. When I announced who I was, he immediately came out onto the porch, waving another man to follow behind him. I felt no threat at all. And once he was outside, with the door closed, he spoke.

  “I got your letters,” he said, “and I didn’t answer because of my son. I don’t want to scare him.”

  It is for this reason that I am not naming the current owner of the house, or the intermediate owners, and I haven’t mentioned the location of the house in this book. I suppose, for those interested in sleuthing, all of this would be easy enough to find. But I ask, in consideration of the current owner’s wishes, that you not. Besides, there was nothing to see or hear there, anyway, at least as it relates to the Family Ghost. “I think you give that kind of stuff power when you talk about it,” the man said. “So I wouldn’t talk about it with you. But, ah, nothing’s happening.”

  He quickly turned away from my gaze, and I am perhaps not alone in taking this as a mixed message. My own spidey sense, built up in my years as a journalist, told me that this man had more to say. But it was also clear to me that he wasn’t going to share it. This doesn’t mean he was hiding some ghostly goings-on. He might merely have wanted to avoid scaring his children with a ghost story. But he was definitely withholding.

  He told us that he was a building contractor and that he had refurbished the house himself. The man he called out with him turned out to be an employee, and he quickly seconded his boss’s statement: closing his eyes and twisting his lips into a tight grimace, he looked away, shook his head no and muttered, “Nothing’s happening.”

  To say I found his conviction underwhelming would be an understatement. But again this could have meant any number of things. Maybe the employee was just a timid guy, uncomfortable with speaking to a journalist? Standing there, I wished, for a moment, that I had entered into this reporting situation as I had so many others—with some leverage. I’d like to have pressed them a bit, to make sure nothing was happening. But the truth was, I both believed and disbelieved in the Family Ghost—and they had no reason to talk to me at all.

  Still, we got to see the house. The new owner brought my father and me inside for a tour. And what we saw amazed us. This new family had taken everything we remembered and refashioned it into something else entirely. They knocked down almost every wall upstairs, converting the three bedrooms—including my sisters’ old room—into two. Downstairs, the conversions were only slightly less massive. My mother’s kitchen was twice its former size, encompassing what had been a separate dining room. And they had even taken our old dark, scary basement and turned it into a cluttered workshop and weight room. The new owner’s wife followed us around, smiling tightly the whole time, as we ooahed and aahed at our now unrecognizable old home.

  We left after maybe a fifteen-minute tour. The owner politely walked us to the door, and that was that. We were silent until we got in the car and started the engine. Then my father was the first to speak.

  “That’s it, Steve,” he said. “Our old house is gone.”

  The Family Ghost, true to its form, whatever its form—unlikely plumbing problem, unlikely ghost—had fled further inquiry.

  To my surprise, however, this particular part of my story still wasn’t over. And an answer of a kind did arrive—in a most unexpected form and place.

  Chapter 11

  Our Time in Hell

  Lucid Dreaming and Its Most Potent Lesson for Science and Spirituality

  Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.

  —William James, “The Energies of Men”

  I lay down, planning to put myself to sleep while meditating. I was midway through my trip to Hawaii, on day five of the workshop. My mind was relaxed and focused on LaBerge’s suggestion for a simple mantra: The next time I’m dreaming, I’ll remember to recognize that I’m dreaming.

  I’m not sure how long I kept that mantra going. But I distinctly remember the strange sensation of feeling myself disconnect from my body, like a plug pulled from its socket. Then I began to drift, downward, through the floor of the bedroom. I passed through the wood with a subtle, satisfying friction, expecting to see the first story of the building I slept in—the refrigerator, the chairs lining the wall, the screened exit door. But instead I saw … stars.

  I was in outer space.

  And just like that, I was lucid.

  There was no need for a state test, no need to ask any questions at all—and again I felt that sensation of zapping into another reality, of going to sleep in one world and coming to, suddenly, in another.


  Points of stars appeared in sharp relief, out in the distance. Strange mists, collections of gas, floated pretty as dandelion seeds in the air. My body felt suddenly solid and real. My muscles tensed slightly as I dropped gracefully through the sky. The sensation of descent was so realistic, I even felt my dream hairs stand up on my dream arms. And after a few moments of enjoying all this, I looked down to see where I was headed.

  I could see something in the distance, a squarish platform coming into view, but couldn’t quite make it out. I felt hyperconscious now. And I knew that was a good thing. As LaBerge had advised us, the version of reality we create when we dream is incredibly tenuous. Look away from an object, and turn back, and its nature can change entirely. LaBerge has developed some techniques to stabilize the dream. My favorite is the act of rubbing my “dream hands” together, like I’m trying to warm them over a fire.

  Why does that work?

  Well, remember, the dream is much like waking consciousness, without sensory input from the waking world. Rubbing the dream hands together provides the brain with sensory input from the dream world; and those sensations create a greater sense of reality, helping the dream persist. But in this dream, of falling through the sky, the air flowing over my skin kept the dream world stable. There was no need to rub my hands at all. And after a few more seconds, I could finally make out what lay below me: the squarish shape I saw was a giant Monopoly board.

  A Monopoly board as big as a small island in the Pacific.

  As I continued falling, I could see the content of the squares running along its perimeter. There was no Park Place and no Broadway, no Go to Jail square. In fact, all the squares surrounding the board contained images of a man, and a woman, together, in different silhouetted poses. And in the dead center of the board, there was a hole. I was headed straight for it.