Free Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber Page B
Authors: Whitley Strieber
name, and had gone to him and said, "Karl? Karl, wake up." He was lying still and silent .... It was as easy as that.
How was it that she would suddenly retell this story again, after all these years, at the very moment I needed to hear it? The combination of the memory of that terrifying night and this story, told in my mother's calm, sure voice, led me into the most enriching of insights about my buried fears and quilts. I blamed myself for the lack of intimacy in my relationship with my father. He reached out more than he withdrew. Even though I loved him, I moved away. I grew up and left him to age and die without the comfort of his oldest son.
Also, though, I had to make my own life. Beyond its moral sense, the word conscience has always meant to me an active knowledge of one's inner truth, an acceptance of all the sacrifice on the part of others that has been required for one's own development. The prime sacrifice is that of the parents. One can preserve the guilt one feels for it — as I now see that I had done — or one can temper it with acceptance and use it as a building block in the edifice of maturity. In a moment that night, beneath the feather-pounding of the silver wand, I was given a potential that could greatly enrich my life.
If this was a real visitor, giving me a real blessing from some other reality, then why was it hidden in amnesia where I could not gain access to it? Maybe my experiences were only a side effect of some sort of study. Or maybe it was known even then that this rich treasure would eventually be open to me, because the whole experience had been designed in detail by insightful minds engaged in a slow process of acclimatizing humanity to their presence.
Maybe, though, there was another truth here. Perhaps the hypnosis revealed not just the possible presence of visitors but the action of a hidden and tremendously therapeutic potential which, if correctly marshaled, could be of great value.
While there is a long tradition in the fairy literature of the Middle Ages of the use of wands to grant insight, and the angel in the Book of Revelation is said to strike the elect thrice between the eyes and cause them great suffering, modern accounts of visitors contain only one oblique reference to this process. A woman who had an enigmatic visitor encounter in the fifties slowly became insane thereafter. As she did so she would claw at the center of her forehead in the same place where I was struck with the wand, to the point that she gouged herself almost to the bone.
It would be easy to say that the material revealed here is the work of a mind making opportunistic use of some nocturnal disturbances to gain contact with fears that it needed to explore. The glaring difficulty with this supposition is that the whole transaction remained hidden in amnesia until many months later. There is the additional problem of the witnesses, and the "clap of thunder" coming before the "lightning."
The easy route would be to dismiss this material as entirely psychological. That would also be a mistake, at least until the physical effects are explained completely, in detail, and satisfactorily.
A terrifying thing happened to me. Perhaps it involved visitors from somewhere-maybe even from inside the human unconscious. For me, though, the most important thing about it was its essentially human effect. I was a human being, and my part of things involved having a human experience. Even if there was a visitor, it seemed clear that concentration on the human part of the encounter was the key to understanding what meaning it may have for me.
And if the visitor was no more than wind in the eaves or the moon lighting the fog . . . then it was a key to what I mean to myself.
Events of December 26, 1985
SESSION DATE: March 5. 1986
SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber
PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Klein, MD
We met again a few days later. I had occupied myself with other things during the previous four days. but it was hard. It was a
How was it that she would suddenly retell this story again, after all these years, at the very moment I needed to hear it? The combination of the memory of that terrifying night and this story, told in my mother's calm, sure voice, led me into the most enriching of insights about my buried fears and quilts. I blamed myself for the lack of intimacy in my relationship with my father. He reached out more than he withdrew. Even though I loved him, I moved away. I grew up and left him to age and die without the comfort of his oldest son.
Also, though, I had to make my own life. Beyond its moral sense, the word conscience has always meant to me an active knowledge of one's inner truth, an acceptance of all the sacrifice on the part of others that has been required for one's own development. The prime sacrifice is that of the parents. One can preserve the guilt one feels for it — as I now see that I had done — or one can temper it with acceptance and use it as a building block in the edifice of maturity. In a moment that night, beneath the feather-pounding of the silver wand, I was given a potential that could greatly enrich my life.
If this was a real visitor, giving me a real blessing from some other reality, then why was it hidden in amnesia where I could not gain access to it? Maybe my experiences were only a side effect of some sort of study. Or maybe it was known even then that this rich treasure would eventually be open to me, because the whole experience had been designed in detail by insightful minds engaged in a slow process of acclimatizing humanity to their presence.
Maybe, though, there was another truth here. Perhaps the hypnosis revealed not just the possible presence of visitors but the action of a hidden and tremendously therapeutic potential which, if correctly marshaled, could be of great value.
While there is a long tradition in the fairy literature of the Middle Ages of the use of wands to grant insight, and the angel in the Book of Revelation is said to strike the elect thrice between the eyes and cause them great suffering, modern accounts of visitors contain only one oblique reference to this process. A woman who had an enigmatic visitor encounter in the fifties slowly became insane thereafter. As she did so she would claw at the center of her forehead in the same place where I was struck with the wand, to the point that she gouged herself almost to the bone.
It would be easy to say that the material revealed here is the work of a mind making opportunistic use of some nocturnal disturbances to gain contact with fears that it needed to explore. The glaring difficulty with this supposition is that the whole transaction remained hidden in amnesia until many months later. There is the additional problem of the witnesses, and the "clap of thunder" coming before the "lightning."
The easy route would be to dismiss this material as entirely psychological. That would also be a mistake, at least until the physical effects are explained completely, in detail, and satisfactorily.
A terrifying thing happened to me. Perhaps it involved visitors from somewhere-maybe even from inside the human unconscious. For me, though, the most important thing about it was its essentially human effect. I was a human being, and my part of things involved having a human experience. Even if there was a visitor, it seemed clear that concentration on the human part of the encounter was the key to understanding what meaning it may have for me.
And if the visitor was no more than wind in the eaves or the moon lighting the fog . . . then it was a key to what I mean to myself.
Events of December 26, 1985
SESSION DATE: March 5. 1986
SUBJECT: Whitley Strieber
PSYCHIATRIST: Donald Klein, MD
We met again a few days later. I had occupied myself with other things during the previous four days. but it was hard. It was a
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