One thing they tell you when you've had a major heart attack is that your life activities will have to be significantly reduced. They emphasize it even more when you've had open-heart surgery. "You'll have to cut back on your activities and take it easy. Alter the way you live your life. You can't be as active as you once were," is the usual way it's presented to a patient. That may be true initially, but what they actually do when they say that to someone is they scare the hell out of them. The unsaid part that's being stressed is always "If you don't, you are going to die."
Well guess what? We are all going to die. From the very moment of our birth, we are going to die, and that is an unalterable fact. But no one really knows when. And no one knows what will keep us alive for longer or shorter periods of time.
Yes, people can say if you stop smoking, you will reduce your risk of lung cancer—and they are absolutely right. But what has that got to do with sudden death? Nothing. It's statistics playing around with your fear factor. It's hindsight judgment of the worse kind. What they should be saying is "We all have a finite time of existence in this reality within this thing we call life. We don't have a clue how long anyone is going to live. But, while you are here, live it, and live it well."
When I came home from the hospital, I felt like a Mack truck had run over me, caught me by the collar, and had dragged me down the highway a couple hundred meters. Back in 1985, they hadn't quite gotten the science of cracking someone's chest down to what it is today. I figured very quickly that since I was still here, I was going to do something productive. There wasn't much I could do immediately after leaving the hospital. I was so weak I needed help sometimes getting up out of a chair. But I could still think. So, I decided to write another book. I called it Pulling the Plug.
What moved me to write it was an experience I had my first week after retirement. I was sitting in a hamburger place in Nellysford, Virginia, and overheard a couple of men talking at a table sitting behind me. One of them said something negative about Vietnam and the other commented that there were a lot of bad things people had done there, bringing up Mai Lai as an example. Neither of them had served in Southeast Asia, of course.
I introduced myself as a retired Army officer and suggested that more times than not it would be impossible to go back and properly judge something that might have happened within the circumstances of war. Using hindsight was especially the wrong way to go about it. To really understand it, you needed to talk with someone who was actually there and participated, and even then, you only got one perspective of a very complex issue. They both said they thought that was a crock. They both knew exactly what they would and would not do given certain circumstances.
I didn't argue with them, just smiled and went back to my sandwich. But it made me think. Most people don't really understand how everyone becomes a victim of circumstance in a war zone, and how we can be driven to do some things we might later regret. Now I was remembering that incident and decided to do something about it. I couldn't travel for some time to SRI. So I decided to write the book.
It's a good book, in that the reader really can identify with the primary character, who's idealistic and very righteous in his personal morality and integrity. As the book progresses, the reader experiences what the character experiences and doesn't notice how the reader's views are beginning to change. By the middle of the book, the reader is totally identified with the character and rooting him on. In the last third, the character finds himself in circumstances that are no longer black and white, but are becoming more and more gray. Some of his actions become more instinctive, very much reactions based in surviving the experience. All of a sudden, the reader realizes the righteous character they've been identifying with all along is doing things that are morally questionable, and not only does the reader feel these things are the right things to do, but the reader is hoping for even more. Suddenly, the reader comes face to face with what every young man or woman who's ever been to war comes to grips with—the fact that to survive, a human being will do almost anything. There's no real right or wrong to the actions one takes in survival, and judging a person's actions cannot be done in hindsight. To judge someone under such conditions requires you to be standing there and experiencing what that person is experiencing—the fear, the terror, the hopelessness of the situation.
Since 1985, it has been rejected more than 25 times. Everyone who has ever read it has loved it and I've never gotten a negative comment from an editor anywhere who has read it. I've even gotten a two-page hand-written note from an editor who apologized for never having served in Southeast Asia. But as much as everyone liked it, no one would publish it.
They said there was no market for Vietnam books—it's the war we lost. Or, no one would like it because it forces readers to face an ugly truth about themselves. It may also have been a bit too long. It was originally 790 pages (double-spaced). I've since gone back over it two or three times and have cut it back to about 565 pages in manuscript form. I also changed the name to A Necessary Evil, because no one understood what I meant by the original title. "Pulling the plug" is an expression I used to use when someone would cross the line of reason. If you push someone far enough and hard enough, he or she will eventually pull the plug and go for broke. I think anyone who's ever experienced combat will understand the term. Maybe there is a lesson somewhere here for the Israelis and Palestinians—put the plug back in.
It took only until the end of 1985 to finish it, an unbelievable accomplishment because the powerful heart medications I was taking wouldn't let me stay awake for more than a few hours at a time.
At SRI, some interesting things were happening. One day, Hal Puthoff was there and the next day he was gone. When I spoke with Ed, on one morning he said they were trying to find additional funding to keep the lab open, and the next day, he told me that Hal had moved on, leaving him in charge. I wished that there was something I could do to help the situation, but what they needed was breathing room and a new budget.
My old office had been grinding down to nearly a complete stop.
They now had Tom and Mel as viewers, but they were very busy looking for a new home. The new INSCOM commander was shutting them down. Regardless of the tasking sitting in the in box, he wanted no part of Stubblebine's legacy.
So, moving into 1986, I was trying to do more healing than viewing, when Ed contacted me and said he had obtained new funding. Would I continue to work with them? Of course, I agreed. Ed knew I was recovering, but began tasking me from time to time on a target-by-target basis—which was about all I could have handled anyway. A lot of the targeting came from agencies that had been tasking the unit in Meade. Most of them were priority targets; tasking the agencies couldn't live without.
We changed the operation a little bit, so that I could do the remote viewings from Virginia. Ed or Nevin would call me and tell me when I had a target in an envelope sitting on top of a specific table in the lab. I would work the target and forward the results back to them by fax or first class mail.
Most of the others who worked at the lab originally were still there, with the exception of Ingo, who had moved his training operations to an SRI office in New York City. He worked there until he was informed by the Army that his training was being terminated. When it happened, it was a great surprise to me and I remember thinking now no one would ever really know just how good it could have been, other than perhaps through Tom's remote viewing, which would be a reflection of his teaching. It was certainly unfair to Ingo, who had worked so hard to develop what the Army had asked him for.
In mid-1986, with the new contract at SRI and Scooter working full time as the director of The Monroe Institute, we decided we'd better start thinking about our own home. I wasn't sure just how long I was going to last (physically), and I had always dreamed of my own home, as had Scooter, so we started buying books and cutting our favorite rooms out of them—a bedroom here, a fireplace there, and laying them out on graph paper to adjust what we liked or didn't like.
Eventually, we agreed on how our house should look on the inside and outside.
I spent three months drawing the engineering plans and writing out the specifications, then went into Richmond and applied for a contractor's license for the Commonwealth of Virginia. I was tested and passed. I took the plans, specifications, building permit, and license to our local banker and asked him for a construction loan, which was transferred to our account within a few hours. I didn't know it at the time, but from the contractor's license, he took for granted that I was by trade a general contractor, when the largest thing I had ever built until that point was a coffee table.
The house now looks simple, but was in fact very complicated. It is a three-way split-level with a full basement on one end. The center supporting foundation is quite an intricate work of art. There are no cross ties in the vaulted ceilings, because the design itself supports the outer ceiling-bearing walls. The house is 5,030 square feet, of which 3,630 are finished space—and we built the entire house together. I was in charge of actual construction and Scooter was in charge of selecting the appropriate paints, colors, stains, woods, carpets, floors, etc. By construction, I mean I actually did all of the construction with another man, Adrian Stilson, a friend who is probably one of the finest brick masons in Virginia. I hired a helper, who lives close by—Daniel Crawford—who never balked at anything I asked him to do. Both are truly good men. The three of us drove every nail and laid every block, and I did all the wiring, electrical, plumbing, and detail work myself. I believe my finest accomplishment is the hand-cut Vermont black-slate floor in the foyer, which is actually a suspended ceiling in the basement and weighs in at around four tons.
When Scooter and I started building, the best that I could do was drag a cinderblock around on the ground using both hands. I was unable to lift a two-by-four by myself because I was still healing from my heart surgery and previous heart attack. When we finished a week shy of one year later, I was throwing 3/4-inch sheets of pressure-treated tongue-and-groove plywood from the first floor up onto the second floor.
I'd take a couple weeks every now and then and fly out to the West Coast to work in the lab, participating in experiments and doing whatever other tasking I couldn't do from home. It was hard being away from the construction site while I was doing the work at the lab, but it was also a good break for my body. I found that if you really want to do a better job at something paranormal, you have to find a way of balancing it out with something physical. It creates what I like to call a "rubber band effect."
One of the ideas we decided to pursue was doing a remote viewing while in the lucid dream state. Dr. Stephen LaBerge was running the sleep lab at Stanford University and we were able to talk him into participating with us in an experiment to see whether or not remote viewing could be accomplished while in the lucid dream state. Stephen is a fun sort of fellow with an intense interest in what goes on when we are in a state commonly referred to as sleep.
I flew out to the West Coast and reported to the sleep lab at Stanford. I had been playing with lucid dream states (LDS) for some time, as a result of having worked with Robert Monroe at his lab in 1983 and '84. I have always viewed LDS as a prelude to the OBE state of consciousness, or at least one of the last and easiest steps toward accomplishing a controlled OBE.
When I first arrived, Stephen asked if I had ever had an LDS experience, which I responded to in the affirmative. When I told him that I could control them and produce them pretty much at will, I think he humored me by pretending to accept my answer as the truth, but didn't really believe that I could.
Stephen's research is done as follows: The subject is what I call hard-wired to a 28-channel bilateral EEG, by having the leads superglued to the skin of their scalp. This takes some time, but does a good job of making contact and preventing the wires from coming loose while in the middle of tossing and turning on a bed.
The subject is shut inside a very well shielded and soundproofed cubical a little larger than the standard-size single bed. The walls of the cubical are about half a foot thick and very well insulated to eliminate sound—going in or coming out. Temperature, humidity, and light are well controlled within this chamber, and of course it guarantees that the subject can't get up and walk around during the experiment. There is a place where the subject can essentially plug their wire-head-umbilical into the wall.
In an adjacent room, well removed in terms of distance from the subject's sleeping chamber, scientists can sit and monitor the subject in the darkened room with an infrared camera, and can also see the bilateral output from the EEG on a computer screen. All of this data is time-hackedxiv and stored in a very large file for downloading later onto a more permanent disk for any future analysis.
Monitoring the subject, the scientists can see when the subject enters into each stage of sleep, the production of sleep spindles and eventually the REM nodes common to deep-sleep dreaming. So, it is impossible to fake the fact that you are sleeping and in a real dream state.
The LDS is when the subject is in a deep sleep dream state and recognizes the fact—that is, becomes consciously aware that he or she is dreaming and can then assume complete control of the state for whatever purpose the subject wants.
I didn't know that the subject can take it one iteration further and actually notify the observing scientists who are monitoring the EEG outputs on the computer screen, thereby letting them know that the subject is awake and aware inside his or her dream. The way this is done is quite simple.
For example, if I am in a dream and riding a bicycle down a dirt road in the country, and suddenly realize that I am actually dreaming, all I have to do is stop the bike, put down the kickstand, then, standing next to it in the dream state, look over both shoulders four times in rapid succession—left, right, left, right, etc.
In the EEG monitoring room, some very small spikes appear overlaid over the REM node, or within the REM activity being displayed. This is because, while in deep sleep dreaming, one of the few muscle sets that is not frozen by self-induced paralysis are the same muscles that cause the REM nodes in the first place—those operating the eyes.
The protocol we designed was that when they saw that I was actually in deep sleep dreaming and I was able to signal that I was awake and aware, I would describe a picture they had randomly selected and pinned to the wall of the lab in a sealed envelope.
If our experiment worked, we planned a further experiment where they would push a key on the keyboard for a computer that would activate a pseudorandom number generator running in the background, which would select a picture from a large group of pictures in a file and send it to a computer screen located in another room that no one had access to. (This room would be totally sealed, including duct tape along the edges of the doorframe.) Only the number of the picture was stored for later use in setting up an independent judging schema. But, we decided not to add this complication until it could be determined that we could produce sufficient LDS and subjects to study.
My job was to move out of body in my LDS state, enter the room by passing through the door, and view the picture on the computer screen.
Once I had thoroughly familiarized myself with the picture on the screen, I was to stand perfectly upright in front of the screen and once again send them a signal that I had collected the information, at which time they would then come into the sleeping room where the chamber was contained and wake me up to report.
When we started, I'm not sure anyone believed for a second that it would work. First I would have to fall asleep. Then I would have to dream. Once dreaming, I would have to remember that I had another job to do and become awake and aware. Then I would have to signal them. A target would have to be randomly chosen and projected in a sealed room. I would then have to access the target, study it, remember what it looked like, and signal them to awaken me. I would then report a description of the target onto a tape and draw it to the best of my recollection. No problem.
In the first experiment, I discove
red a major problem with the protocol. I actually was riding a bike on a dirt road somewhere in the countryside when I realized I needed to be awake and aware and had another job to do. I signaled them, then realized I had no idea whatsoever where the lab was, never mind what door I was supposed to be entering. I just stood there in my dream wondering what to do next. After thinking about it for a while, I realized that since I controlled everything that was happening anyway, I'd simply close my "dream state eyes," click my heels together like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, and when I opened my eyes, I'd be standing in whatever the target actually was. If it was a picture of Roman ruins in the Syrian Desert, then that's where I would find myself standing. Hopefully, the target picture wouldn't be the core of an active volcano, or the inside of a working iron furnace. I wasn't sure what would happen under those circumstances.
I closed my eyes and clicked my heels and when I opened them, I found myself standing in a lovely Bavarian valley filled with wildflowers and surrounded with beautiful mountains. The incredible reality of the target took my breath away. I've decided that this target needs to be displayed in the book because it is nearly impossible otherwise to explain just how incredibly accurate the dream was in comparison to the actual targeted image on the computer screen.
I spent what seemed in dreamtime to be about an hour walking around inside the dream location, after which I stood by the small barn and signaled them that I was ready to come out of it.
When Stephen woke me up, it was almost a surrealistic feeling, coming into reality, which felt just like the state I just left. I spent a few minutes re-grounding myself, then described my adventure on a tape and drew a sketch of the target picture, exactly as I perceived it from the viewpoint of my arrival. It was a nearly perfect match.
The Stargate Chronicles: Memoirs of a Psychic Spy Page 26
