Dreaming apparatus

The Hierophant’s Apprentice writes [FT378:61]: “Asked how many missile tubes it carried, they ran into a common RV [remote viewing] problem: letters, numbers, and counting broke viewers out of their ‘zone’, and images would dissolve. (Try reading a paper or a label in a dream, and you’ll probably get the same result.)”

When I was younger, this held true for me. As a child, I might dream about, say, a comic book, but when I tried to open it up and look at its contents, it would be blank, or I couldn’t open it at all. The dream wouldn’t dissolve, though – it just went on. In later years I’ve found I can open up books, magazines and such in dreams and actually see, or even read, their contents. It may not always make sense, but this need not concern us. The interesting thing is that my dreaming apparatus seems to have been improved, or strengthened, or whatever you may call it. This might indicate that remote viewers, given the appropriate time and training, might also improve their skills to include letters and numbers. Always assuming RV is real, of course.

However, there’s a wider context to this. In FT352:75 I wrote about my difficulties of “dreaming a new pair of shoes” and instead getting “strange, rubbery things that were somehow part of my legs – clearly a parallel to the accounts of aliens and little people whose hats, clothes or footwear seem to be part of their bodies”. A further parallel is the Swedish folk belief that the Little People are somehow ‘hollow’: if you can get behind them, you can see that they are only facades. (This may not be an exclusively Swedish belief, but I have only seen references to it in Swedish texts.) The general concept of ‘glamour’, which seems to be universal, may be an example of the same thing. So, we have at least four different planes – RV, dreams, aliens and Little People, where ‘something’ generates images for us (real or imaginary), but seems to lack the requisite depth, or resolution, or knowledge, to give a satisfactorily detailed result. (Actually, this may be taken as an argument for the reality of RV, at least as a phenomenon. If these guys were just bluffing, they could answer that the subs carried, say, four missile tubes, and be done with it.) In an even wider context, we can link this to claims that poltergeist phenomena show some kind of ‘rudimentary’, or ‘child-like’, or ‘autistic’ intelligence. Again this concept that ‘something’ is generating something – in this case sounds and apports – but not completely succeeding. Voices may speak gibberish, or stones may hit you without causing physical harm. I’ve seen several writers lately (such as Peter McCue, FT376:30) arguing for treating separate fortean phenomena as manifestations of an overarching ‘trickster phenomenon’. I can only say this seems a commendable approach.

• Steve Hulford [FT378:74] comments on McCue’s article and links it to the fashionable notion that “we are all just part of a computer simulation”. His point that fortean phenomena may be in-game purchases deployed by bored teenagers for fun is perceptive, but only if you buy the ‘computer simulation’ narrative, which I don’t. Let us ask Mr Occam politely if we can borrow his razor again, and look closer at this claim. If our reality were a computer simulation, it follows that it must run on a machine in a higher ‘real’ reality. It doesn’t matter if the simulation idea is factual, or even plausible – the fact that there must be a ‘real’ reality somewhere simply renders it uninteresting. This holds even if the simulation runs on a simulation in another simulation – in which case it would only be a variant of the good old ‘turtles all the way down’ scenario. Alternatively, our Reality A may be a simulation running on a machine in Reality B, which may be running on a simulation in our Reality A again (sometime in the future, one presumes – we have suspended enough logic already to make this acceptable). I believe this circular idea has been exploited in SF as our Universe being an atom in another universe, which in its turn is an atom in our Universe. Plus ca change...

By all means let people believe we’re a computer simulation if they absolutely must, but I regard it as implausible at best. Anyway, it’s not getting us anywhere, is it?

• We are told [FT378:64] that the Patterson Bigfoot costume was “crafty with saggy mammaries”. Maybe, but I suspect the intended word was ‘crafted’. Autocorrection strikes again?

Nils Erik Grande

Oslo, Norway