170 MIND MONSTERS
between the objective world and the subjective universe It is through them that our monsters have been kept alive
Yet Bullard reminds us that there is 'a more down-to-earth side as well . . . These aspects lend the solidity of physical reality to the phenomenon: And, as he reminds us, 'folklorists have never resolved this mystery of the likenesses'.
To explain the way the stories seem like visions, yet share remarkable patterns around the world, science faces three options Qust as do we in this study). First, societies may somehow learn the correct form of their visions just as they learn behavioural responses. Or, second, there could be some
thing innate within the mind of a species - at a deep level where ideas converge And, third, of course, it could be that these experiences represent a form of reality which only the creatively visual people are able to perceive
Any one of these answers would resolve the problem, but it would be wrong to say that by assigning these phenomena to
the province of creatively visual or imaginative witnesses we are necessarily affording them no more substance than hopes, wishes and dreams. 124
Alawn Tickhill from Kent wrote to me commenting on this.
He actually claims to be a sort of modem medicine man. His headed stationery lists his job profile as 'shamanic medicine ways . of personal power and vision, shamanic craftwork,
counselling and tuition'.
He believes that the witnesses to monster reality are having:
'non-deliberate shamanic experiences . . . (they) accord very much with the types of experiences which shamans deliber
ately seek, and therefore have little or no conceptual framework in which to fit them'. The UFO experience, or the presence of a lake-monster tradition, or a spate of big-cat sightings offer this framework and thus introduce logic and ordering into what are otherwise accidental visionary encounters.
As if to make my point, Alawn describes himself as a typical shaman: 'I have a high IQ -
156
on the Cartel scale - am an artist, good image maker, much of a loner, have a history of psychic-type experiences, etc:Of course, psychologists struggle just the same as the rest of us in trying to evaluate the nature of such visionary experiences.
They invent names, like my oz factor, to describe states of
consciousness. But this really does little to explain what brings them about in the first place
If a person enters what the psychologists call a 'fugue' state and wanders off for hours or days acting as if he were another individual, is that because his fantasy life has taken over, or because he has become 'possessed' by a spirit? When a person starts to hear messages in his or her mind and assumes them
to come from a dead person or a spaceman and sets himself (or more usually herselD up as a medium, clairvoyant or abductee, is that because the voices come from his or her own fantasizing mind and he/she is ignorant of this fact, or because he/she is truly receiving some sort of communication that other people cannot perceive? These questions have no adequate answers, and will not have any whilst science continues to treat the paranormal as if it were an academic AIDS carrier. 125
However, all is not completely lost. There is some very excit
ing work going on in psychology at the moment. It really began in 1983 when two Americans published a paper on their testing of a group of 52 highly intelligent people (several of who possessed degrees or even doctorates).
Theodore Barber and Sheryl Wilson were interested in what made a person a good hypnotic subject, so they compiled ex
tensive psychological profiles of 27 women who were very easily put under the influence and 25 who were almost imposs
ible to hypnotize What they found was that almost all the good subjects 'had a profound fantasy life, their fantasies were often
"as real as real" [and they have] vivid memories of their life experiences:
They labelled these people 'fantasy-prone personalities' (fpps) and suggested that about 4 per cent of the population might be so designated (i.e as many as l in 25 people).
Among the things that Barber and Wilson found about the fpps was that most had grown up believing in elemental beings such as fairies and many still thought they had seen them: 58 per cent had invented fantasy playmates as children (as opposed to just 8 per cent in the control sample of poor hypnotic subjects} Almost all of them confused their fantasies with reality from time
to
time, since they were so vivid, and likened the experiences to being 'inside' a 3-D movie in which they were taking part without knowing the script.172 MIND MONSTERS
Many reponed that when in idling states of consciousness (e.g. driving alone) they had had to pull up and stop because they saw figures ahead (e.g. a child). The figures were not there in reality. Some considered these figures to be ghosts wandering about and which they just had the ability to see with regularity.
Among fpps
95
per cent recalled in considerable detail events in their lives before the age of three and a third could recall scenes from just the first few months oflife. This is a factor I have found with a number of victims of monster reality, not because I knew the question was relevant but because the witnesses themselves had realized it was unusual enough to mention. I am confident in predicting that if paranormal researchers ask this question in future interviews we will find that an overwhelming majority of percipients of monster reality share such early life recall.I should add that the Barber and Wilson control sample demonstrated just a
12
per cent recall of this type of memory and from asking members of my immediate family that does not seem to be an underestimate. So the extreme levels of recall of fpps are clearly unusual and significant.As
we might predict,92
per cent of fpps had lengthy track records of psychic experiences, far in excess of the occasional strange thing that might happen in an average person's life.Common among;t experiences reported were empathy with loved ones, telepathic messages, premonitions, out-of-body experiences, vivid apparitions, and near death visions of a life beyond. (These are listed in descending order of the extent to which they were reported in the study, but even the near death visions were many times more common than with the control sample - and generally this psychic bias was six to ten times more commonplace with the fpps than with the non fpps,Jl26 Two years after this work was published, Susan Myers and Harvey Austrin at St Louis University extended it to
200
individuals, including males and females, and found exactly the same pattern. They did note that women were more likely fpps than men and estimated about 3 per cent of the population could be labelled fpp based on their results. But these were just the extreme fpps. Their work offers a useful breakdown which shows that everyone has some rating on a kind of fpp league table.