Ghost Stories and the Waking Dream

Fuselli's "Nightmare," inspired by 18th century misunderstandings of sleep paralysis

I love the feeling in the air during this time of year.  The crispness and chill after the warmth of summer reminds us of mortality.  With that comes the hopes and fears of life after death, coupled with the limitless imagination of the human mind.  It’s beautiful, frightening, confusing, and a whole lot of fun.

I’m going to tell some ghost stories.  I’m going to tell as many personal anecdotes as I can.  Despite my personal beliefs on their credibility, I believe that it’s important that certain of these kinds of stories repeat in our culture.  There are important things that can sometimes only be conveyed through the personal anecdote of unverifiable paranormal accounts.

So I was watching the first of these ghost story documentaries that they’ll be playing for the rest of the month.  The formula is pretty standard now.  Tape some people sitting in a dark room, throw some dramatic lighting and the optional odd camera angle, and get them to tell ghost stories.  Meanwhile, actors reenact the events, complete with film-student camera cuts and special effects.  Cue creepy music and suggestive text or narration that pretends to act ‘objective.’

Now, there are a lot of standard stories that you hear on these shows.  I propose that they’re always similar because 1) people hear them a lot already, 2) people tend to make judgments and leaps in logic toward those things they already believe in, and 3) there’s something about the values and beliefs of our culture that bears repeating again and again in similarly coded symbolic interpretations of events (as I said above).

My favorite television show ghost stories are ones that involve children waking up in the middle of the night and seeing something at their bedside.  Creepy in the extreme, surely.  These stories are followed by the child (now an adult) insisting to their parents that what they saw was real and not a dream.  This is usually followed by coincidental experiences after the event that seem to support the idea of a ghostly encounter.  The moral of the story is that children are somehow more attuned to things that adults take for granted (as symbolized by the ’spiritual’ world), perhaps due to their perceived innocence (i.e. lack of full cognitive ability and the talent to blissfully ignore social norms that adults are conditioned into), and that adults should really listen to children more often.

I have a kid of my own, who woke up in the middle of the night last month screaming that there was something in her room.  I ran in there, fueled by parental instinct and ignoring the voice of reason telling me that she was mistaken.  Sure enough, there she was, sitting up in bed in terror, pointing at a stuffed monkey sitting on her bed that she had won at the fair.  We shared a good laugh, but she still ended up sleeping in my bed.

In the words of Bill Cosby, I told you that story so I could tell you this one.  My heart sank when I heard her scream, not because I thought there was something there, but because I empathized with her terror.  My childhood was fraught with sleepless nights due to nightly events that would leave me frightened and exhausted.  I spent a lot of time either getting to bed as early as I could, to get as much sleep in as I could before things happened, or staring at the walls, not sleeping at all.  When I would drift off, my eyes would snap open, my heart would pound, and I’d wait for whatever it was to happen.

First, I would wake, but I would be frozen in place.  I would be incredibly drowsy and have a hard time fighting the inevitable return to sleep.  I would be in a panic for seemingly no reason at all.  Worst of all, I was convinced that someone or something was at my bedside, forcing this experience on me.  For some reason, I was trapped, unable to move, while something was there, doing God-knows-what.  Sometimes I was convinced it was a ghost, sometimes a demon, sometimes aliens.

While I was getting used to being used, the events started to take a new turn.  Sometimes I would wake up, not feeling paralyzed, and see things in my room.  I once saw a prison inmate, complete with striped suit and shackled to a ball and chain, crouching in my closet, grinning.  Once, I saw a man in black clothes standing at the foot of my bed, looking at me.  Another time a man and a woman looked at me over their shoulders while I woke up, saw that I had noticed them, and rushed towards me with malicious intent.  Every time I saw these things, they would fade in a few moments.  I started to get so used to seeing them that I would casually discount them.  One night I saw only a floating pair of hands that motioned around like a stage magician, clearly there just to try and scare me.  I yawned and went back to sleep.

I never knew what the hell this all was, but it would happen to me regularly until I was about 22 years old.  I never quite knew if all of this was just in my head, if my soul was in danger, or if I was experiencing some kind of psychic feedback from the alien abductions.  These things weighed on my mind so much through my life that they would of course enter into my dreams.  Nightmares of ghosts, demons, aliens, government experiments, etc. never ended.  Then one night that all changed.

I was sleeping on the lower bunk of my dorm room, alone, after my room mate had dropped out.  I started to wake up, I felt the usual feelings of terror, and I struggled to open my eyes and fight the sensation.  That’s when I saw him walk past my bed:

He walked past my head, looking towards the door.  He stopped, looked down at me for a second, then he moved on.  I woke up as soon as he was out of my field of vision, and I jumped to my feet.  I was alone, of course, except for the big cardboard cut-out of Jason Voorhees that I bought at a video store just two weeks before.  This was the sign from my subconscious that I have been making all of this up myself for years.

When I realized it was just a sleeping disorder, I felt great.  I would still have episodes on occasion (my last one was a few months ago), and the immediate feeling of terror will always come with it, but I started to get a lot more sleep and the problems declined immediately.  I spent the next few weeks looking on the internet for people with similar problems.  Lo and behold, I learned about ’sleep paralysis’ and how it occasionally comes with hallucinations (both visually and audibly – I have had some, but very few, sound hallucinations in this state).

I would encourage anyone who has had childhood imaginings like this (and at least three people I have known have) to look into this.  Alternately, don’t do anything of the kind, and keep spreading ghost stories.  I like to hear them, but please keep them out of science classrooms and academic discourse.  They do not belong there except as examples of contemporary folklore and mythology.  Fascinating!

CNN Monster Reports

…and I’m bowled over by CNN again.  We have a story about four or five teenagers from Panama, who find some creature alive (maybe barely) and kill it with rocks.  They dump the creature in the water and run home.  They come back some time later and take a few pictures of the thing.  Then they destroy the body.  That means, aside from the photographs and the unverifiable story, there is no evidence of what the creature may have been.  I smell a hoax.  How many other stories with as little support for its reliability as this would get airtime on an international news channel?

Chupacabra on CNN

Okay, seriously.  When will they stop ‘reporting’ things like this?  CNN has to stop treating contemporary folklore as though it was factual news.

In other news, the guys with a bigfoot in their freezer stepped up to say that it was a big joke.  I’m of two minds about this.  On the one hand, I hate to see people perpetuate these ideas.  It just gets the crazies in an uproar and validates their belief systems, even if the claimants are obvious hoaxers making a joke or trying to make a buck.  On the other hand, this Andy Kaufman approach to the paranormal is kind of funny.  In the end, I think I’m a little upset with myself that I didn’t assume that they were doing it for a joke.  I still think they were more interested in money than humor, mostly because they didn’t really make it THAT funny.  They were just riding a little joke to see how far it would go and how big their names would get.  Final verdict then, after talking my way through it: they’re still idiots.

An Interim

For your enjoyment and education…

Alien Artists

Just to remind people, the giant jellyfish crop circle is something that is completely within the ability of human beings to create.  As wonderful as it is to think that something out there beyond us creates crop circles or had some hand in the building of ancient tombs, I have to assume the simplest explanation is the most likely.  Human beings enjoy deviant behavior, especially when they get giggles out of watching other people go crazy over it.  People are perfectly capable of making crop circles, so why is it so hard for crop circle junkies to accept that they do?

There is an answer for that.  It’s the same reason that fundamental religions deny the basic tenets of natural laws.  They want desperately not to be alone in this postmodern isolated society so they reach out for something that they hope is there.  When groups of people get together with the same hopes, they convince each other that those hopes are reality, despite what a rational mind might tell them.

As a caveat, let me express that I do not believe that science and religion are mutually exclusive.  It takes compassion and humanity to apply the laws of nature that science has uncovered, for one thing.  For another, people absolutely need religion in their culture.  Individual results may vary, but the truth is that religion helps people abstract and transmit the ideas which that culture values.  These are the Big Ideas of Humanity that are directly approached through art and literature; religion allows them to be accessed intuitively and subconciously.  The beliefs themselves serve only as the dressing, the method of transmission.

The real TRUTHS that people glean from them are the big questions that religious followers have to go to their leaders for: how do I, as a member of this culture, deal with issues like revenge, betrayal, jealousy, economic distress, war, pride, love, etc?  What is the meaning of life?  Holy writ is investigated, studied, while the learner wades through confusing, sometimes contradictory, information in the hopes of finding something solid as an answer they can cope with.  That answer depends on who is investigating, what culture they are from, what the standards are for their particular religious sect.  The answer is almost always, “This is what our culture has come to understand about this issue.  This is what our religous group does to help eachother on this issue.  This is how we go on every day.”  This is helpful.  Religion is helpful and necessary.

BUT NOT AT THE EXPENSE OF LEARNING ABOUT OUR WORLD!  There is no usefulness in ignoring new discoveries or understandings about the world.  Scientific study and rational thought need not be tossed out the window.  Think carefully.  Aliens have no motivation to create crop circles if they are advanced enough to travel AT LEAST 4.5 light-years across the galaxy to deliver us a message.  What the hell kind of message is a picture of a jellyfish?

And there, ladies and gentlemen, is the joke.  The jellyfish is one of the strangest and goofiest things a person can think of, and symbolically is the epitome of oddball meaninglessness.  And there the believers are, out there in some farmer’s field, talking about what revelations can be found in it.  Just beautiful.

Ida know…

Talk of the fossil that was discovered in Germany a little while ago is incredibly important to scientific study, but calling it the ‘missing link’ is just a little unnerving.  The problem is that animals taks so very long to evolve from one distinct form into another, and there are many many many transitional forms between them that we just don’t have.  Because of the odds of finding such pristine preservation, the odds of finding each and every form between stages is astronomically small. I don’t have much of a problem with that, considering the forms we do have are remarkably similar and show the transitions nicely.

Here’s the problem: because so many fossils will not be found, fundamentalist groups that doubt the validity of scientific study, particularly evolution, will never be satisfied with the number of finds.  There are already pseudo-scientific creationists out there attacking the discovery of the century (granted, the century is only 9 years old…) in an effort to promote their agenda of spreading ignorance on behalf of their world view. But, maybe I’m just a pessimist, and the creationist community will understand the findings, and stop working against the rest of the human race.

At any rate, I found a creationist opinion on the find, located here, and I’d like to quote the main opposing points, and offer counter-points to them:

…rather than an apeman-like missing link that some media sources have irresponsibly implied, the real story is quite underwhelming and should in no way faze creationists. Let’s first review the facts:

–The well-preserved fossil (95 percent complete, including fossilized fur and more) is about the size of a raccoon and includes a long tail. It resembles the skeleton of a lemur (a small, tailed, tree-climbing primate). The fossildoes not resemble a human skeleton.

–The fossil was found in two parts by amateur fossil hunters in 1983. It eventually made its way through fossil dealers to the research team.

–Ida has opposable thumbs, which the ABC News article states are “similar to humans’ and unlike those found on other modern mammals” (i.e., implying that opposable thumbs are evidence of evolution). Yet lemurs today have opposable thumbs (like all primates). Likewise, Ida has nails, as do other primates. And the talus bone is described as “the same shape as in humans,” despite the fact that there are other differences in the ankle structure.³

–Unlike today’s lemurs (as far as scientists know), Ida lacks the “grooming claw” and a “toothcomb” (a fused row of teeth) In fact, its teeth are more similar to a monkey’s. These are minor differences easily explained by variation within a kind.

1. The skeleton resembles both a lemur and a human, suggesting that the human race evolved from primates much more like lemurs than monkeys.  A brief overview of skeletal and muscular anatomy would clearly show how human-like the fossil is.  To the uneducated, or the ignorant (not the same thing), the skeleton certainly doesn’t ‘look’ human.

2.  The fossil was found in two parts because they had to keep digging to find the rest of it.  But find it they did, and it fits together perfectly.

3. Humans are the only creatures that have OPPOSABLE thumbs.  Not all thumbs are opposable, though many animals (monkeys, raccoons, lemurs, gorillas) have semi-opposable thumbs.  Touch your thumb to the tip of your pinkie finger.  Now, quickly, touch your thumb to the tip of each finger rapidly.  Right.  Only humans can do that.  Fine manipulation is beyond the ability of any other primate.

4. Similar to a monkey’s and not consistent with the lemur group.  This is how we know animals are transitions between species.  Like the platypus.

More information about the fossil can found here, at the National Geographic website.  And here’s a Youtube video for you to enjoy:

This Week in Paranormal Paranoia

While I was working on the computer last night, the TV was tuned to the National Geographic show “Is It Real?,” this one featuring Bigfoot. It was descent background noise and Nat Geo does fair debunking work on their show. Anyway, I decided to look up the idea of ‘dermal ridges’ found on plaster casts of Bigfoot prints (that is, the tiny lines on our hands and feet that create fingerprints, for example) and I came across a great website run by someone who has, for the most part, completely debunked the idea. Here’s the URL if anyone is interested, but I warn you that his site is screwed up and I wasn’t able to read the text without highlighting it. He’s also unhealthily obsessed with Bigfoot, even as he debunks it (I think he calls himself a ‘Bigfoot Agnostic’).

http://orgoneresearch.com

What was impressive was the amount of documentation of his experiments (recreating Bigfoot casts perfectly) and, in parts of his site, his accounts of confrontation with people in Bigfoot circles (“Bigfootery” he calls it).

http://orgoneresearch.com/sex.htm

In other news, another monster has washed up onto the shores of Suffolk County, New York – another Montauk Monster, if any of you have heard of that. It doesn’t matter if you have; same old crazy bullshit. What was frightening was this youtube clip I found. This dude, after scaring away some girl he was hitting on with his psychotic paranoia, rides his bicycle home while videotaping his ‘theories.’ Who travels around on bike with a video camera? People who expect to find monsters washed up on shore, or find government agents going through their trash. Watch this all the way through, set your speakers to ‘background wind noise while jackass on a bike films himself’, and listen very closely to the last lines of his diatribe. Frightening.

UFO vs. Windmill: CNN’s expert reporting strikes again

Here we go again. CNN doing their damndest to avoid actual reporting in favor of promoting sensationalism, superstition and stupidity.

I found in a blog attached to CNN that a real explanation was given by authorities: the thing just snapped apart. I can’t find this guy’s source, but it sounds like these kinds of things happen all the time. Things break when under stressful conditions. Or, as John Bender would say “Screws fall out all the time. The world is an imperfect place.” But no, people jump to conclusions based on several factors:
1. Lack of reasoning skills, both deductive and inductive
2. Irrational faith in the physical products of mankind
3. Inexperience
4. Beliefs bordering on religious fervor, wanting to believe in ’something else out there’
5. Sheer ignorance

And CNN won’t report “oh, it wasn’t a UFO after all. It was just mechanical failure based on a faulty part and bad weather conditions.” No, they’ll let the UFO story stand and promote ignorance among the population. Thanks, CNN, for making everyone stupider.

Bigfoot, UFOs, Ghosts… on CNN

I could care less if people want to believe in these things.  In fact, I find it remarkable that in this world of scientific discovery, we’ve managed to preserve the cultural trend of living folklore.  I find it even more remarkable that the folklore trend is to mystify and present a de-personalized lore.  Instead of named lore figures, like Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill, our folklore now gives us indistinct shapes and nameless multitudes of creatures.  There are whole colonies of bigfoots and whole starships full of gray aliens, all of whom are impersonal beings that somehow interact with people on a very personal level.

Regardless, the real tragedy is not that people believe the modern (or maybe I should say post-modern) hucksters’ claims of finding a bigfoot body in Georgia, or having been contacted by extra-terrestrial visitors, but that these reports find their way to CNN, of all places.  I will let others chatter relentlessly about the liberal or conservative media (liberal reporters reading reports approved by conservative mega-corporations means you can read either argument into that).  Instead, I will question the validity, the reputation, and the judgment of FOX and CNN by giving even a passing glance toward this rediculous pseudo-science bullshit.

None of these things are news.  They are debunked regularly by reputable scientists.  The most recent bigfoot discovery has been debunked.  DNA evidence came up with human and oppossum DNA, the body the bigfoot hunters had in their freezer looked suspiciously like a particular bigfoot costume one can purchase online, and they failed to produce the body at a press conference they held.  And yet, CNN will continue to report on nonsense like this, now and for days to come.  Even Larry King did a show on UFOs and one on psychics.

Bullshit.  Here are some videos you can watch, and get angry about poor reporting with me:

New Bigfoot “discovery” given more attention than three con men deserve: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOKM7r6fq7M&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4rknzC4XKs

Larry King, senile and useless: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBVoIT3KRYI

Fox News doing its part to make America stupider: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLjTRX-Dv9c

And my personal favorite, expert reporting about a bug crawling on a security camera: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaYnbZmsq0k

Indy 4 is Worst … For Science

Yahoo made a top ten list of the worst science in movies with scientific themes and Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull was number 10 (the worst because they start at number one and count up).  This is mostly based on the atomic bomb scene more than unlikely aliens, but I’m still happy. 

http://movies.yahoo.com/photos/collections/gallery/903/top-10-scientific-inaccurate-movies#photo10

I had a post elsewhere on the web, reprinted here, listing several reasons why I hated that movie.  Hate. Hate. Hate.

THE NEW INDIANA JONES MOVIE WAS THE WORST MOVIE EVER MADE

(originally written Sunday, June 22, 2008)

To anyone reading this: if you enjoyed that movie then I hate you.

Here is a nice list of things in (mostly) chronological order that pissed me off about that movie:

1. CGI groundhogs are stupid and useless. Use real groundhogs.

2. Opening does not fill me with a sense of wonder of exotic places.

3. Cruising teenagers vs. military. Dumb scene and pointless. Why were the kids out there in the first place and where did they go when the atomic bomb went off?

4. Area 51? You’ve got to be kidding me. Lame.

5. Russians make poor substitutes for Nazis.

5. Magnetism doesn’t work that way.

6. So-called homage to Raiders is actually a message that the first three movies should be forgotten. I hate.

7. Where are all the other super refridgerators that can survive atomic bombs?

8. Forced iconic imagery (of Indy and an Atomic Bomb) because the story doesn’t matter, only visual effects.

9. CIA hadn’t been invented yet. Why is an aging archeologist in the CIA anyway?

10. Fuck that kid from Transformers.

11. Exposition never felt like exposition in the other movies.

12. Crystal Skulls, mental telepathy, government conspiracies. Retarded.

13. The commies are after you so you fly to Cuba first? In 1957? Brilliant.

14. Who are the skull mask warriors? Where did they come from and where did they go?

15. Just carve open archeological finds for no reason, especially the body of a Conquistador. Nice field work, Jones. Oh, one was open already?  Woops!  I guess we carved that other one up for no reason!

16. ALIEN FUCKING SKULL!

17. More mind control powers, crystal skulls, and pseudo-science TRUTH bullshit.

18. They blow up the road making machine first. How the hell do they drive through the rainforest now? Wouldn’t it be easier to go on foot?

19. CGI monkeys. See my first note. And monkeys would KILL YOU. This is another dig from the pseudo-scientists against evolution. Because as pseudo-scientists know, science, anthropology, and archeology is always wrong. Thank you for making Indiana Jones’s life work illigitimate again.

20. Tarzan. This is the closest thing we get to Indiana Jones using his bullwhip for the rest of the movie. Sad.

21. Fencing is important to me. I’ll let people enjoy movie-style sword fighting but in light of the other crap I felt inclined to bitch about this too.  Sword fighting involves some footwork, moving around, and would be nigh-impossible on a moving jeep.  Oh, and I’m supposed to believe this drop-out who took a couple of fencing classes can hold his own against a trained sword fighter and seasoned killer?

22. Ancient culture still alive and well in the amazon. That I can deal with. They just didn’t seem as threatening as the warriors at the beginning of Raiders.  And flying rocks and bolos are deadlier than CGI ants.

23. How did the Conquistador thieves leave things the way they were before they got there? Why didn’t they steal gold and artifacts from the alien archeologists? How do you steal a skull from a room that needs a skull to get into it?

24. Fuck space aliens and their granted knowledge. As though early humans couldn’t figure out farming and irrigation. And also thank you for the idea that knowledge can only be gained spiritually. Idiots.

25. Super magnet telepathic skull would pretty much stay where it is when Spaniards yanked on it. Wouldn’t they be able to melt their brains like they did the commie chick with the fluctuating accent?
I also forgot to mention the most important part of suckage in this movie: 13 aliens. Anyone who has heard pseudoscience alien/religion statement can tell you that this refers to the 12 tribes of Israel plus the thirteenth “lost tibe” that would become the Native Americans. A big reoccurring theme among pseudoscientists and an insult to both archeology and religion. In the end, Jesus was an alien. Which also makes the previous THREE MOVIES totally illigitimate, as I suggested with the Arc reference at the beginning of the movie. To remind us all that THAT WAS A RADIO TO TALK TO ALIENS!

26. Ancient civilization still surviving that the aliens helped create is wiped out by the aliens leaving. So the Nazis killed all the warriors. What about women and children? And why would aliens do that if they wanted to give knowledge to humans in the first place?  None of this makes sense.  And let’s not forget the comment about “erasing the fingerprints of the gods” just to hit us with the Grahm Hancock “theory” of aliens establishing human culture. To hell with all of it.

27. Iconic imagery again of Indy and a spaceship. Fuck you, Spielberg. Fuck you, Lucas.

I’m sure I forgot or blocked some things out. Feel free to remind me.

I can’t watch Raiders now without thinking the arc is a radio to talk to crystal skull aliens that melts Nazis with too much knowledge. And no more kids will be inspired to become archeologists by these movies unless they want to find aliens. Science has again suffered a horrible wound.