Footprints in the Sand

In Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe, the tale of a man marooned on a desert island, Crusoe is one day walking along the beach, when he comes upon the imprint of a naked human foot.

At this moment Crusoe does not require the services of a statistician. He does not need a second opinion. He knows, without any argument, that there is now another person on the island.

There are many, many events in the annals of psychic phenomena which are instances of such footprints in the sand. They do not require debate. They are far beyond the reach of any coincidence — just how far I shall try to say in later sections. To deny the validity of such instances, and the relentless implications that follow from them, is to take up a position actually far more unreasonable than the ‘unreasonable’ belief in psychic phenomena.

Let us at once look at some examples. These are the tiniest sample of many hundreds of such cases. Those that I have selected often involve animals, for reasons I will explain in the next chapter.

In the late 1930s, Osbert Wyndham Hewitt was living in Headington, near Oxford. He owned a cat named Mitzi, of whom he was extremely fond. At the time of the incident which follows Hewitt was away from home, staying with friends in London. He and they spent the evening after dinner hotly debating the rights and wrongs of the Spanish Civil War. All went to bed late.

Once asleep, Hewitt began to dream. In his dream Mitzi came into the room dressed as a volunteer for the Spanish war and very badly hurt. She cried and sobbed and begged him to kill her, because the pain she was suffering was more than she could bear. As is the way with dreams, Hewitt was not surprised that Mitzi could speak and did his best to comfort her, telling her he would take her to hospital. His assurances had no effect, however, and Mitzi went on screaming and sobbing. Hewitt awoke very distressed at 4 am.

Next morning at breakfast he told his hostess of his dream. He had just finished his account, when the phone rang. The hostess answered it. On the line was the housekeeper in Headington. She wanted to report that Mitzi had been badly hurt. Mitzi had come into the house via Hewitt’s bedroom window around 4 am, waking the household with her howling. She had been found crouched on his pillow with one ear torn nearly off. Hewitt at once returned home, taking a vet with him, and in due course Mitzi recovered fully from her wound.

Among all the significant detail of this event we should not overlook the circumstance that Mitzi came to her master’s bed, suggesting that she was actually attempting to find him — so that there is an intention. Then from the point of view of dream analysis we note also that the dream ‘logically’ makes Mitzi into a soldier. She had, of course, been fighting.

A similar story concerns a Mr Grindell-Matthews, an inventor of some reputation.

In the autumn of 1924 Matthews was given a six-month-old kitten. Owner and pet rapidly became devoted to each other. Then one evening the cat fell from the roof of Matthews’s house in Hanover Square in London. When examined she had lost one tooth and appeared to have a broken back. A vet, after consultation, advised putting her to sleep as the only possible course of action. However, the cat clung so affectionately to her master — and moreover was in no apparent pain — that he decided to have her X-rayed. A fracture of the spine was confirmed. The cat could live, but would probably not walk again. Matthews made his decision — now undertaking, among other things, to feed the animal every two hours with a drip-feeder for several weeks. In due time the cat did recover and resumed its engaging ways, occasionally walking on four legs, but more usually dragging her hindquarters.

About a year after the cat’s injury, Matthews had to go to New York on business. The cat was left in the care of the housekeeper.

One early morning three weeks later, in New York, Matthews awakened from a nightmare, sweating profusely. In his dream he had seen his cat struggling in the hands of a man wearing white clothes. The man had had a goatee beard. Though now fully awake, it seemed to Matthews that his room reeked of chloroform. This smell haunted him for the next ten days, though no one else was able to detect it.

Later during that morning of the nightmare Matthews cabled to London for news of the cat. He received no reply. Full of unease, and cutting short his trip, he set off to London ten days later.

On his arrival home the housekeeper — who had been afraid to reply to his telegram — told him that she had had the cat put down. It had refused to touch food after his departure and was starving to death. The sight of the paralysed cat dying of starvation had been too much for her. She had called the vet and had the animal put to sleep. The vet had not been previously known to Matthews. He had a goatee beard. The time of the cat’s actual death coincided with the time of Matthews’s nightmare.

The details of this story again speak more than adequately for themselves. Among the points I shall emphasize later is the enormous distance involved — several thousand miles — and the hallucination of the smell of chloroform.

The last of this trio of examples concerns the novelist Rider Haggard.

On the night of July 9th, 1904, Haggard had a long, vivid nightmare. During it he experienced what he describes as a sense of awful oppression and a desperate, terrified struggle for life. He was aroused from this nightmare by his wife — but the dream then continued briefly.

Haggard, as he woke, now thought/dreamt that his black retriever, Bob, was lying on its side among brushwood by water. The writer tells us: ‘My own personality in some mysterious way seemed to me to be arising from the body of the dog . . . In my vision the dog was trying to speak to me in words and, failing, transmitted to my mind in an undefined fashion the knowledge that it was dying.’ Once Haggard had awakened properly, his wife asked him why he had been making those weird and horrible noises. In her own later testimony Mrs Haggard described these moans as not dissimilar to the moans of an animal.

These events took place around 2 am.

Next morning the tale was told to the rest of the family at breakfast. A complete joke was made of it, with the usual ragging about what not to eat late at night, and so on. No attempt at all was made to look for the dog, because all knew perfectly well that he was in the yard with the other animals. That evening, however, the youngest daughter of the family, whose special job it was to feed Bob, reported that she could find no trace of him anywhere.

The next day a fruitless search of the neighbourhood was made and continued on subsequent days. Not until the following Thursday did Haggard and his manservant, Charles Bedingfield, discover the dead body of Bob in the Waveney River, floating against a weir and very severely mutilated. Their first thought was that the dog had been deliberately destroyed by a person or persons unknown. On their way home, however, they were hailed by two plate-layers employed by the railway. These said that they had found a torn dog’s collar (which proved to be Bob’s) together with some flesh and black hair on a railway line on a bridge over the river, some distance away. They further said they had observed the dog’s body floating among the rushes below the bridge on the previous Monday.

The vet who subsequently inspected the body of the dog was of the opinion that its injuries (forepaws cut off and the skull smashed) could have been caused by the impact of a train, which could also have had the effect of flinging the body clear of the bridge and into the water. The vet was, however, of the opinion that the dog must have died almost instantly. A knowledge of the infrequent trains, the time of the plate-layers’ discovery of the traces on the line and so forth at first allowed the firm conclusion to be drawn that the dog had been struck and killed on the Saturday night, around 11 pm. Subsequently, news that the train in question had been running late, due to defective carriage lights, moved the time of death on by an undetermined amount.

I think once again we can let this story speak for itself. A point of special interest, though, is the continuance of Haggard’s dream after waking — only a brief hallucination, unlike Matthews’s enduring one of the chloroform. But this kind of evidence will enable us to connect these psychic dreams both with traditional mediumship and many other trance states.

We ought to note, in these stories, the very high reputation of the individuals concerned. These are highly respected and respectable professional people. They have no partisan connection with the field of psychic phenomena. In every instance the testimony of several independent and reliable witnesses is involved. The Haggard incident was actually printed in full in The Times and was the subject of exhaustive public debate.

The aspect of ‘public debate’ is well worth emphasizing. Not all psychic events happen behind closed doors in dark rooms. They can occur in the full glare of the public eye — as the following account (by Immanuel Kant) shows even more clearly.

In the year 1759, towards the end of September, on Saturday at 4 pm, Swedenborg arrived at Gothenburg from England, when Mr William Castel invited him to his house, together with a party of fifteen persons. About six o’clock Swedenborg went out, and returned to the company quite pale and alarmed. He said that a dangerous fire had just broken out in Stockholm, at the Södermalm, and that it was spreading very fast. He was restless, and went out often. He said that the house of one of his friends, whom he named, was already in ashes, and that his own was in danger. At eight o’clock, after he had been out again, he joyfully exclaimed: ‘Thank God! The fire is extinguished; the third door from my house.’ This news occasioned great commotion throughout the whole city, but particularly among the company in which he was. It was announced to the governor the same evening.

On Sunday morning Swedenborg was summoned to the governor who questioned him concerning the disaster. Swedenborg described the fire precisely, how it had begun and in what manner it had ceased, and how long it had continued. On the same day the news spread through the city, and as the governor thought it worthy of attention the consternation was considerably increased; because many were in trouble on account of their friends and property, which might have been involved in the disaster.

On Monday evening a messenger arrived at Gothenburg, who was despatched by the Board of Trade during the time of the fire. In the letters brought by him, the fire was described precisely in the manner stated by Swedenborg. On Tuesday morning the royal courier arrived at the governor’s with the melancholy intelligence of the fire, at the loss which it had occasioned, and of the houses it had damaged and ruined, not in the least differing from that which Swedenborg had given at the very time when it happened; for the fire was extinguished at eight o’clock.

Do we really appreciate what happened here? On a day in 1759 (long before telephones or any other method of communication over distance) a public figure of considerable note and reputation (Swedenborg was special assessor to the Royal College of Mines), travelling from Britain, arrives at 4 pm in Gothenburg, Sweden. At 6 pm he announces that a large fire has broken out in Stockholm. Stockholm is 250 miles away on the other side of Sweden. At 8 pm Swedenborg announces that the fire is over and has halted three doors away from his own house, although the house of a friend has been completely destroyed. The next day, Sunday, the news of Swedenborg’s vision spreads through the whole town. It is only on Monday evening that the first messenger arrives from Stockholm, bringing confirmation of all Swedenborg’s claims.

This story came to us from Immanuel Kant, a contemporary of Swedenborg’s and, of course, one of the world’s outstanding philosophers.

The accounts in this chapter are not given with a view to talking anyone into acceptance of the paranormal — although — certainly with a view to carrying him or her towards it. I believe that acceptance of the paranormal can only come through one’s own personal experience of it. The more modest aim in quoting these stories is to show how absolutely unreasonable is the position of those who are absolutely sure that the paranormal does not exist. When we meet people who still maintain that a first case has not been made out for the existence of the paranormal, we necessarily have to take the inquiry into the psychological state in which these individuals find themselves.

We are not tied to anecdotes and reports from the past. We have any number arising at the present time.

Dr Fernand Méry is a vet of more than thirty years’ standing, living in Paris. He has published a book relating many incidents from his working life, entitled Our Animal Friends.

I must emphasize that Méry’s book contains only one instance of a paranormal event For, once again, Dr Méry is no occultist. He is one of the large majority of individuals who give little thought to the paranormal, beyond perhaps that of idle curiosity, until the possible moment when it so dramatically touches their lives.

A friend of Méry’s, prior to going abroad, had given Méry his cat, Timmy, a pet the friend had had since it was a kitten. A year passed, during which Méry’s friend made no contact at all either by letter or telephone. Then a letter came. In it the friend apologized for not having written for so long a time. He said that he was only writing now on account of a dream he had had the three nights previously, on October 10th and the two nights thereafter. In the dream he had seen Timmy with bandages all round his head. The cat kept climbing up at his window to get in, but always fell back.

On the night of October 10th, and the two subsequent nights, Timmy was dying of meningitis, with his head wrapped in bandages.

This story never fails to move me, but it also never fails to fill me with anger — anger towards my ‘half-witted’ scientific colleagues and their empty prattle of statistics and coincidence.

From the point of view of evidence it is of course a marvellous story, beautifully concise, with no loose ends and a wealth of significant agreement. But once again we see also the influence of the dream-work. Dreams not only usually, but habitually, transmit their information by the use of symbols, not by words. The state of mind which Timmy was transmitting was something like: ‘I need my master, but I cannot reach him’; or ‘but he does not help me’. Therefore the window is shut, the master does not open it, and the cat always falls back from his attempts to get in.

The symbolism is perhaps clearest from the master’s point of view — and it is of course his dream. The window is shut because he has ‘shut out’ Timmy from his life (and, incidentally, his friend Méry also). There is a great deal of guilt in this dream. Quite aside from the paranormal element, it is a perfectly reasonable dream for someone to have who knows he has behaved badly. The otherwise normal functioning of the dream and its wholly acceptable symbolism in terms of standard dream analysis should, I think, help some otherwise sceptics to accept this dream in its paranormal entirety.

Can we accept an animal as the ‘sender’ of the message — or was the sender Méry himself? Can animals form (not in words, of course) concepts as sophisticated as ‘I need my master, but he does not come’, or ‘I wish a particular person were here’, or whatever?

The answer is yes, but it is by no means the foregone conclusion that most animal lovers imagine it is. Virtually all examples of so-called animal intelligence (such as the sheep-herding activity of the sheep dog, for instance) really involve pre-programmed, instinctive actions that are entirely mindless. These actions exist as ‘printed circuits’ in the animal’s brain, and are triggered instinctively and compulsively by the presence of certain stimuli. This is not intelligence. However, I have myself for some time been collecting examples of the ability of the rare, gifted individual animal to form concepts, analyse situations and devise solutions to self-posed problems. These are given in Appendix II.

What of the animal as receiver?

Writing in the correspondence columns of the NewScientist (which, to its credit, printed the letter) Dr W. J. Tarver, chairman of the Veterinarians’ Union, made this comment:

Not many people have experienced, as I have, the noise of kennelled dogs who have been settled for a week or two, become wildly excited around the exact time when their owners commence the journey back from holiday…It does not seem to matter how far away the owners have been, the message still arrives.

We have also a great many accounts of animals reacting violently to the actual distant death of their owners. Here is one that touches such accounts and that of Dr Tarver. A dog was quartered with a local vet while its owners were away on their holiday. One morning at 10 am this dog began howling and barking in an alarming fashion. He kept this behaviour up for an hour or so. Then abruptly he stopped. He did not display such behaviour on any other occasion during his stay. The vet naturally examined the animal carefully at the time, but could find nothing wrong with him. When the family returned from holiday the vet reported the incident. The couple reacted with astonishment. At 10 am on the morning in question they had been caught in a flash flood, and had climbed on top of their car as a last resort. They were rescued at 11 am.

So common are accounts of paranormal communication between people and animals in danger (or of course simply between human beings) that any general theory of the paranormal must have a sub-section concerning what I call this ‘love and mayday’ element. (‘Mayday’, the international distress signal used by shipping, comes from the French m’aider, meaning ‘help me’.) At the moment of death, and in times of great danger, the chances of the occurrence of a paranormal event are greatly increased. The individuals between whom paranormal communication then occurs almost invariably have close emotional ties — the ‘love’ aspect of my equation.

The emotions generally are heavily involved in the paranormal, as are dreams. Such observation will lead also to the question, what parts of the nervous system must therefore be involved?

The Paranormal
Chapter Three

The Psychic Universe – Minor Key

The psychic experiences we have looked at so far have carried an obvious sense of significance. We have been, as it were, in the deep end. But there is also a shallower end to the psychic pool and the shallow end is actually far more extensive. As a fairly firm rule, psychic experiences are rarely of great or even of any significance in terms of their content. In content the large majority are trivial. There is not the slightest point in denying that fact, as many wish to do. Actually the question why triviality of communication should be the rule (when there is so much of importance we would dearly like to know) is a very intriguing one.

While still acknowledging the general triviality of much psychic communication and intercommunication, we can nevertheless legitimately suspect in at least some instances a hidden subjective significance. As Freud showed in the case of dreams, apparently trifling or incidental elements are often the most significant. When we follow the associative trail from some ‘unimportant’ dream item, it often leads us quite quickly to the heart of the real problem or significance. Such might be the case also with psychic experiences. In general psychiatry, also, it is frequently the trivial or chance remark or behaviour which reveals the true position.

Charles Berg, the psychiatrist, reports the following incident. A young man had been referred to him by a doctor, and for an hour Berg and the young man talked about every subject under the sun, without the psychiatrist noticing anything wrong. Then, right at the end of the interview, when Berg had decided there must have been an administrative mistake, the young man remarked that the bus conductress had felt his arm as he got off the bus. ‘Why did she do that?’ asked Berg. ‘To see if I had been masturbating.’

This single, casually delivered remark demonstrated that the young man was in fact undergoing a severe psychotic breakdown.

So we have two points. One, that the objectively trivial may nevertheless be subjectively important. Two, that a trillion rational events or statements do not wipe out the significance of one that is not. And in the last context we touch on the most important aspect of all.

In one of the programmes in a British TV series, ‘Leap in the Dark’, a report was made on a man — Lord Kilbracken in fact — who for a time as a student dreamt the winners of horse races. Fortunately in some cases he confided his foreknowledge to independent witnesses. The day after the programme a reviewer in one of the national newspapers asked what did it matter if someone did dream the winners of horse races? Surely the programme should have been concerned with something important.

Here we see the obtuseness of the vast majority of the allegedly intelligent and thinking population in respect of the paranormal. The reviewer, like so many others, could not grasp that what one foresees is the least important aspect. It is the fact that a person can paranormally foresee any future event of any kind whatsoever that is of supreme and final importance. A person dreams that a man with a red tie sneezes five times in a restaurant. The next day that essentially meaningless event actually occurs. This one tiny pebble then suffices, alone and all by itself, to slay the mighty Goliath of Einsteinian-Newtonian physics. All the armour and edifice of science is of no avail against it. With this one stroke the materialistic universe, as a total explanation of events, lies in ruins.

The point here cannot be made too strongly. It is a completely different one from the otherwise valid point that the actual content or information of the paranormal event often has little significance at all in intellectual and objective terms.

These lines of reasoning, then, form part of the backdrop to the subject matter of this chapter. It deals, as I said earlier, with the ‘shallower’ end of psychic experience: the paranormal as it affects the day-to-day lives of psychic individuals. It could perhaps be called ‘an everyday story of psychic folk’.

In the late summer of 1974 I walked one morning down to St. John’s Wood in northwest London from Swiss Cottage, to collect a small sum of money due to me. I walked partly to save the 5p fare, because I was broke, a common enough experience even for the ‘successful’ writer. I duly got my sum of money and the main thought in my head was to get speedily back to Swiss Cottage to buy myself a celebration breakfast. However, at the back of my mind I had the slight feeling of tension that I have learned to attend to.

From where I was standing there was a direct, short walk of less than a hundred yards to St John’s Wood Underground station. Yielding, however, to the impulse that was directing me away from the station, I set out on a much longer, circular walk via side streets that actually at first led away from the Underground. It took me some ten minutes to reach the station by this route. I have to emphasize that I did not ‘feel like a walk’ — I had had my morning‘s walk.

When I reached the top of the station escalator a train was just pulling out. Had I gone direct to the station I would have been on that train. I was mildly irritated, knowing that I might have to wait some time for the next one. When I boarded the next train, after a wait of ten or fifteen minutes, I found myself facing an acquaintance I had not seen for well over a year, a freelance picture researcher, Susan Pincus. We had a ‘how’s business’ conversation about this and that.

A few days later Susan rang me to ask if I was interested in doing some proof-reading for a few days. She was too busy to handle it herself — and it was very urgent, starting that same afternoon — and probably well paid. The ‘few days’ work turned into two months’ work and it was very well paid. It was proof-reading a national leisure guide. This work was a life-saver, the first real money I had earned for months.

The sequence of events did not stop there. Towards Christmas of the same year a publisher was looking for an author to write a book on animals and ESP. He asked Susan if she knew of anyone. She put him in touch with me. As a result I was in fact commissioned to write the book. For two months I was able to devote myself full-time to paid research, during which work some of my ideas on the paranormal were further clarified. Then, alas, like so many other people, the publisher ran into increasing financial difficulties.

None the less, from my point of view the two months had been a complete bonus. Part of this present book is indebted to the thinking and research of that period.

A further incident concerns Roy Grant, a business and sports journalist whom I have known for many years. He does not consider himself in the least psychic, though he has a fairly strong interest in the subject, mainly perhaps on account of his sister. She occasionally has psychic premonitions, many of which have the stamp of apparent authenticity.

Roy’s only claim to a psychic experience of his own was having a dream in which he saw the interior of the Edinburgh Royal High School, which he has never visited, although himself from Glasgow. A week or so later he was watching a TV programme when a shot of the interior of the school was shown — it is to become the Scottish Assembly. He now recognized many details from his dream. Certainly Roy himself would be the first to admit that he might at some time have seen pictures of the interior of the High School. But he does not remember ever having seen any.

One evening Roy and I went to see Claude Lelouch’s film La Bonne Année. That day and the previous day I had been working on an article about ESP, and I needed a good example of the general inconsequentiality of many psychic experiences. I could not precisely recall an example of what I needed — that is, not in the kind of detail that is required if one is going to write about it — and so was resigned to making a trip to one of the paranormal library collections to refresh my memory.

Towards the end of the Lelouch film, which is set in a French city and is as French as any film could be, there is an unexpected shot of a man reading the Guardian newspaper. For a British audience this was especially amusing, but in any case a brilliant film director was reminding us suddenly that other frames of reference still coexist within (or without) any frame of reference we happen to be involved in at a particular moment.

After the film, Roy embarrassedly ‘confessed’ to me, in a more than usually gruff version of his generally gruff manner, that at the beginning of the film the absurd idea had entered his head that before the end of the film someone in it would be reading the Guardian. Here was the example I had been in need of! I had been consciously in pursuit of such an example (though Roy did not know that) and I do happen to be a reasonably-endowed psychic. Probably, therefore, I triggered the experience.

But the incident is consequential also from a quite different angle. As it happens, Roy is a journalist and the occurrence involved a newspaper. The associational point raised here will be raised again later on in a wider context. The point is that very often a paranormal event also has some reasonable, that is, associational connection with the person who experiences it. What we see in this and many other examples are actually the entirely acceptable functions of associative psychology at work.

Such normal aspects of the paranormal situation cast, so to speak, a ray of validity on the occurrence as a whole. In a similar way, we saw in Chapter Two, especially in the Méry incident, the normal functions of standard dream-work operating alongside the paranormal element of a dream. The paranormal is found embedded in the normal, in the way the miraculous pearl is found in the commonplace oyster.

The next incident comes as near to an experiment as one can get in respect of psychic phenomena, and as near as I would in any case let myself get to one. It also illustrates what is possible in these areas when genuinely psychic individuals are involved.

One afternoon I was at the house of Simmona de Serdici in London. I had not known beforehand, but now she told me that she was expecting a visitor, a male visitor, whom she thought I would be interested to meet. Then, on impulse, and in a teasing way, she asked me if I could tell her what he looked like.

I closed my eyes and described the person I saw. Short, thick-set, with straight fair hair. ‘What colour eyes does he have?’ asked Simmona. I replied that I could not say, because he had his eyes shut. However, as we spoke, I was becoming more and more impressed with the man’s muscularity. I said as much to Simmona, namely that I thought he was quite a powerful person. I could see his muscles standing out under the black fisherman’s polo-necked sweater he was wearing.

Then, as I still watched, the muscles began to bulge rather grotesquely and oddly, and suddenly I now saw before me a figure very like the Michelin man in the Michelin tyre advertisements. This man was wearing just such a pneumatic outfit. However, I did not say this to Simmona, because I thought my ‘vision’ was now breaking up and drifting off on some associational track of its own. How wrong I was.

The visitor who was coming was Jan Merta, the well-known psychic (though I must add that at that time the name meant nothing to me). Those who know Jan will appreciate the accuracy of my description of him. Probably the first thing that strikes one is his powerful bright blue eyes — and it is interesting that in my picture of him the eyes were closed, a kind of ‘negative’ view of this aspect. In case I sound as if I am trying to make my vices into virtues, or my misses into hits, let me finish the story. I did not know, and could in no way have guessed given a hundred normal tries, that Jan was currently working as a diver for a North Sea oil company. Hence the ‘fisherman’s sweater’ and then the more explicit ‘Michelin man’ — which of course was Jan in a diving suit.

The examples I have given so far have all had at least some kind of positive aspect or direction. Now an instance of a negative or counter-productive influence.

Some years ago I had a protracted involvement with a girl (whom I shall call Miriam) which lasted for two or three years. Apart from an initially happy few months, from my point of view the affair had gone from bad to worse, until finally we broke up completely. During the affair, and because of it, I made a number of important decisions which materially affected the course of my life. So it was no trivial business. At the time of the incident described below I had heard little about Miriam since, except that she was now married.

For the purpose of this story it is important also to know that I was born and raised in London. Apart from one or two spells abroad and the period in Coventry I have never lived anywhere else. I know the inner stations of the London Underground railway as well as I know my own front garden. I could probably find my way around them blindfold.

On a particular late afternoon about a year and a half ago, I was travelling by Underground train from Swiss Cottage to Knightsbridge. I was reading a book. I often do read in the train, but even without paying attention have little difficulty sensing where we are — any regular traveller on any fixed route does the same. However, I looked up from my reading and saw that we were at Piccadilly Circus, where I had to change trains. I got out. Now we begin to have a measure of the experience that was starting, for I had walked some way down the platform, and the train I had been on was moving out, before I realized that this was not Piccadilly Circus, but Oxford Circus.

A trifle nettled at my error, I decided to turn the mistake to some possible advantage. Instead of waiting for the next train to take me to Piccadilly Circus (there to change to the Piccadilly Line) I would go down to the Victoria Line and go on to Green Park instead. About four minutes later, however, I emerged on to the eastbound Central Line platform. I was too surprised to be irritated. Marvelling at my ineptitude, I set off once more to the Victoria Line. Several minutes later I emerged onto the other platform of the Central Line. Such a thing, of course, could not happen to me. I set out yet again, as calmly as my growing annoyance would allow. Three minutes of walking now deposited me smack on the Bakerloo Line platform where I had originally left the train by mistake.

I was now feeling extremely disoriented. But more than that I realized that I was in the grip of a psychic episode. I was not scared — I am never disturbed by the paranormal — but I was now warily expectant. A trifle grimly, therefore, I headed once more for the Victoria Line, pig-headedly determined not to be thwarted in my intentions.

I was quite numbed to emerge at the other end (which made a change) of the eastbound Central Line platform. I now stood for a while leaning against the wall, wondering what I should do next. Only then did it occur to me that I might not be being led to somewhere or something but from something. Vague ideas of a train crash went through my mind. Heartened by this positive view of events, I set off down the platform — and ran straight into Miriam.

We stood looking at each other more or less speechless. She then asked how I was. In desperation for something to say I asked if she had any children yet. This comment touched some raw area — because she flared out at me that there was plenty of time for having children — why was I asking that? We stared at each other for a moment longer, and then each walked on.

I had no further difficulty finding the Victoria Line.

It is probably impossible to convey the feeling of this incident, in words, on paper. Though I rate it as one of my most vivid and impressive psychic adventures, nothing whatever came of the incident. It was without consequence.

The only other time I ever mistook or, more probably, hallucinated aspects of a station in a lifetime of travelling by Underground was also fairly certainly a psychic incident. This time I alighted at St John’s Wood, one stop before my own home station of Swiss Cottage. I was not reading a book or even a newspaper. Near the top of the escalator an elderly man in front of me lost his balance and fell back. I was two steps below him and easily able to catch him as he fell. There were only one or two of us on the escalator and the next person was several steps lower down. Had I not been where I was, the man would necessarily have taken a nasty fall. Only when the incident was over did I then realize that I was at the wrong station.

If the Miriam incident is, to me, one of my most striking psychic experiences, the most striking of all, ranking first equal with the Neanderthal vision in Coventry, concerns Marcel Vogel. Marcel Vogel is Senior Chemist at IBM in California, a powerful psychic and a devout Catholic. He is the only person so far who appears able to duplicate Cleve Backster’s results with plants, and has taken this work considerably further. Vogel, however, believes that the plant registers the states and moods of the individual relating to it, rather than possessing these in any true sense of itself, as Backster believes.

I first saw Marcel Vogel in 1974 at the first series of May Lectures in London, where he was one of the speakers. I had been hired by a publisher to attend the series to consider if these were worth publishing in book form. Simultaneously I was hired by the organizers of the series to edit the rough lectures into some kind of shape for possible book publication. Neither of these two principals objected to my working for the other.

In the course of his lecture, Vogel gave us an astonishing demonstration of his psychic powers. My comments on this demonstration were eventually included in the published form of the lectures, and I reproduce them here as they appeared in that book.

Some ten minutes after the start of his lecture. Marcel Vogel announced that he was going to give us, the audience, proof of the tangible reality of thought by projecting a thought image into our minds. My instant reaction was: ‘No, don’t — don’t attempt that.’ For although no stranger to telepathy, I had never yet met anyone who could produce results to order. I felt Vogel was putting his head on the block quite unnecessarily. He then asked us to close our eyes. More in sorrow than in anger — that is to say, very half-heartedly — I did so.

Vogel then announced that he was beginning the transmission of the image. In my mind’s eye (and apparently somewhere around the middle of my forehead) I ‘saw’ at that point a triangle, on which seemed to be superimposed a rather less clear circle. I opted for the triangle. Vogel then said he was giving the image a colour. At first it seemed to me that the triangle was blue — then it became red — and I opted definitely for red. Vogel said we should now open our eyes. He asked how many of us had had an image. Some fifty people or so raised their hands. I must confess that I did not bother to raise mine. Vogel pointed to one of the volunteers — ‘You, sir, what did you get?’ His answer — a triangle.

At this point I almost literally fell off my seat. Further shock was however already on its way. Vogel told us that he had projected the image of a triangle enclosed in a circle. First he had coloured it yellow, but then after a moment had switched the colour to red. I spent the rest of that lecture in what I can only describe as a state of joy. At the close the audience clapped enthusiastically. But why did they only clap? We should have stamped and shouted and broken the chairs in honour of this world-beater.

Marcel Vogel is clearly out of the ordinary, even for a psychic. He appears to have made the remarkable step of acquiring a degree of control over his gifts. I have not had the opportunity to speak to Vogel, so I do not know whether he reserves his demonstrations for occasions when he is among sympathizers (as he was at the May Lectures) and other psychics, or whether he attempts them also before audiences of sceptics. (I do not say that he should. There is, as we know, a prevalent type of sceptic who claims victory when a psychic fails, or, if he or she succeeds, at once sets about finding out how the ‘trick’ was done. It is better in my opinion simply to avoid confrontation with such individuals.)

From the possibly sublime to the more mundane. I have recently discovered a name for an ability I have always possessed — the ability to generate unearned income when life becomes really desperate. Richard Kirby tells me this is known as ‘ready-money karma’. Because the discussion of this phenomenon is protracted and takes us into areas a little away from the main drift of the book, I have placed it separately in Appendix I.

While the paranormal undoubtedly exercises a pervasive and continual influence in the life of the psychic individual, it is continual, but not continuous. That is, it comes and departs as it deems fit. In the words of the sage, the paranormal is a spirit that bloweth where it listeth. One rarely knows where it will strike next or in what context.

A week or two ago from the time of writing the following incident occurred. I knew that Colin Wilson was working on a new book called Mysteries, a sequel to his previous book, The Occult. One afternoon it came into my head to wonder if he was going to include in it discussion of Robert Temple’s The Sirius Mystery. It suddenly seemed urgent to me that he he should. I also simultaneously realized how well Colin and Robert would get along together — and that they ought to meet. So I sat down immediately and wrote to Colin, urging on him The Sirius Mystery and enclosing Robert’s address. That same afternoon (it is impossible to say whether it was the same moment) Colin, in far-off Cornwall, was sitting down writing to Robert, care of his publisher.

Robert Temple is himself a generator of paranormal events. He has dreams in which he is specifically instructed or invited to take precise courses of action, often ones which he has been considering consciously. In the early part of 1975 he had a dream in which a voice told him to go and ask to review books for Time Out, the London leisure magazine. Robert himself lives in Warwickshire. Accordingly he went without preamble to Time Out (this was long before the publication of The Sirius Mystery, incidentally) and offered himself as a reviewer.

Matt Hoffman received the request affably, went over to a large cupboard, unlocked it, and asked Robert to select any books from it he would like to review. After a while Robert came up with two books, both of them mine (Total Man and Personality and Evolution). Apparently Hoffman said that these were the two he had hoped Robert would pick.

Occasionally the psychic individual finds himself playing the role of the Ancient Mariner. That is, he feels impelled to give a particular individual what the Spiritualists call a ‘message’. About six weeks ago I found myself giving the following ‘message’ to a young lady I had just met, who was in the company of a male friend of mine. I said that she stood at a crisis point in her life, and that the choice for her was between being extremely happy or extremely unhappy. I said that she was at the end of a stage, which had already gone on long enough, and that she should be planning the next stage as a matter of some urgency. She said she could understand what I meant, and pressed me for details how she could make the choice. But I was unable to help her on this.

I later learned that the girl in question, Mary, was twenty-seven years of age — I had thought her to be twenty-three or -four — and that she was in the habit of going around with her younger sister of twenty-two and her set. Mary was (and is) able to get away with this behaviour. Yet — as she subsequently admitted to me — she realizes that she ought to be thinking, for example, about a more settled career. She is now a little worried, too, that none of her relationships has so far resulted in marriage. She was about to go off on holiday, by herself, and though she was looking forward to the break (to ‘getting away’, as she put it — with, I think, the appropriate double meaning of somehow cheating) she could not see much that was positive ahead of her after that. She thought perhaps she ought to live abroad again — and so on.

The kind of profile presented by this young woman is a common enough one, as far as the psychological counsellor is concerned. The point is that I had only just met this girl, knew nothing about her, and assumed her to be significantly younger than she actually was. ‘Significantly’, because I think it is fair to say that there is a good deal of difference for a single girl between the early twenties and the late twenties. My initial impression was of a genuinely happy-go-lucky girl, not in any special difficulty. So my impulse was really purely psychic.

From the objective standpoint then, paranormal occurrences, even for the psychic individual, are rather rare, on the whole trivial and usually inconsequential. This statement is not a devaluation or criticism of the paranormal. It is simply a description of its nature, from an objective point of view. This just happens to be how manifestations of the paranormal are. As Freud remarked to a critic in another not dissimilar context: ‘As to the indistinctness of dreams, that is a characteristic like any other. We cannot dictate to things their characteristics.’

The statement on rarity, and triviality for that matter, applies even to the output of the full-time, practising medium. Most of the content produced during a mediumistic sitting is ‘filler’ or padding. It is as if we would wrap up a small or cheap present in an elaborate or expensive wrapping paper. (But the medium’s urge is not any form of cheating — it is only the work of the unconscious mind, as I will show.) Most mediumistic material consists of vague, rambling, generalized statements — good wishes and so forth ‘from the beyond’ — and other such-like matters. The percentage of genuinely paranormal content is very tiny. Sometimes there is none at all.

The rarity of the truly paranormal, both in mediumistic communication and generally (say, in dreams), resembles that of the element radium, discovered by Pierre and Marie Curie. The very richest ores of this element produce only a quarter of a gramme of radium per ton of ore. Some produce only one three-hundredth of a gramme per ton. Yet a small piece of this ore suffices to make an impression on an ordinary photographic plate. In a similar way the paranormal penetrates and impresses itself upon the fabric of our normal universe. Its general rarity (as with radium) is no argument whatsoever against its existence. But like radium, the paranormal is easily overlooked.

I have been trying as we have gone along to emphasize certain points about the paranormal. These points include its rarity, its brief life when it does occasionally appear, its frequent irrelevance to the aspects of life that we consciously and logically think are important. None of these, of course, at all recommends it either to the scientist or the materialist. There is one further very important aspect — that of subjectivity. It seems that the paranormal is closely interwoven with purely personal aspects of our lives, the workings of our own unconscious minds in particular, with existence in the subjective sense of being, and with relationships.

In brief, I believe that ESP is a subjective experience or state that can in no way be approached by the detached, cold, objective, controlling methods of science. On the contrary, I believe that all the scientific approach can do is to take us away from the paranormal. The experience and ‘control’ of the paranormal is a quite different one. It is, on the contrary, a yielding and a willingness to accept paranormal events on their own terms, as they arise — much in the same way as a surf rider can only ride a wave if and when it appears, and must adapt his strategy to the wave, and never expect the wave to accept his strategy.

None of this at all means, however, that we have to abandon either our common sense or our grip on reality.

Stan Gooch 1978, 2003

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