Borrowed scenes
It was interesting to read Clive Potter’s thoughts about the origins of Psychic Questing and The Green Stone affair [ FT324:72]. He shows interesting parallels in the plot of a Doctor Who story that ran in the months leading up to the reported psychic messages received by a group of UK paranormal witnesses and researchers in 1979. This led them on quests to find buried artefacts and to collect assorted items such as swords and stones. This period of soothsaying spawned several popular books as the questing movement became something of a cottage industry. It led to claims about the supernatural origins of the great British storm that devastated parts of southern England in 1987. That awful night is infamously recalled for the misfortune of BBC weatherman Michael Fish telling the nation that no hurricane was heading our way – just before one did! Its place at the hub of a reputed battle between dark forces is probably less familiar to the public.
Clive also notes that I wrote about how synchronicity appears to link fact and fiction as they ferment out of the collective subconscious in slightly different ways. I had (happily!) forgotten the rather pompous name I conjured up for it – psychic parallelism. I wonder why that never caught on… But I think there is something to this suggestion that events emerge from our psyche in the form of dreams, visions, real encounters and entirely imaginary stories all distilled from a soup of culturally topical ideas and images. You can see this in the way that Hollywood or TV often conjure up several similarly themed ‘new’ projects that they swear are just coincidentally like others that are being created concurrently. Echoes of Fort’s “steam engine time”.
I have also seen it in the world of the paranormal. Clive mentions how I noted the numerous threads that wove the Stephen Donaldson ‘Thomas Covenant’ novels in the early 1980s with the questing stories – seemingly independently, because they preceded much of his work. And I was fascinated to hear from gifted science fiction writer Ian Watson that when he moved into a certain part of the Midlands and wrote his seminal UFO novel Miracle Visitors, major UFO stories seemed to surround him in real life. In fact, he was in the midst of a veritable wave of some of the strangest UK close encounters just as he was writing his novel about the link between mental images and UFO sightings. I tend to think that this is down to a wider consciousness shared by us all from which we may not be aware that we are taking ideas and moulding and shaping them in some way.
Some of us invent tales or fictionalise these ideas; others find them leaking into their dreams, visions and borderland experiences that hover on the edges of reality. It may be down to the personal psychology or visual creativity of the person involved. Visually creative people are at the heart of all this, which is why creative writing is so prominent.
Alien abduction cases often include story elements that coincide with something from other similar, recent events. It is as if a motif gains currency for a while as it bubbles near the top of this collective pool of images forming the cultural mind-set. You can also see how the form of the aliens being witnessed morphs to follow an accepted norm that alters subtly as the years go by, without anyone really noticing that a huge game of unintentional followthe-leader is taking place.
More interesting, given Clive’s letter, many abductions subconsciously seem to include – without the witnesses realising the fact – bits from then current science fiction TV and films. Blake’s Seven, Buck Rogers etc have all featured and I recall one famous British abduction including an unusual alien entity that the witnesses appeared not to realise was very like a race of aliens that had recently been in Doctor Who. These things are more common when regression hypnosis is employed to ‘uncover’ the abduction lurking behind a screen of amnesia, for too long assumed by ufologists to exist – in my view, disastrously. I feel there is no real memory to uncover, so the subconscious delves into that collective image pool to hone one that will convince. There has even been an abduction in which the witness described imagery that had come straight out of the then popular TV soap Dynasty – even though they seemed unaware of its source. How much – if any – of what emerges from this sea of imagery is ‘real’ is open to question. Jenny Randles Pensarn, Conwy