The flip-flop effect

JENNY RANDLES explores the multiple realities revealed in dreams, UFO sightings and photographs

This column – not for the first time – was inspired by a dream. I take note of them more than most, as regular readers will know. This one was weird, aiding ideas that I’ve been developing for years about the nature of the close encounter experience – a search for the ‘it’ that turns an anomalous observation into a lifelong memory that will shape how you personally view the Universe.

I will return to my dream, but first consider this 1933 photograph from Loch Ness in Scotland, one of many depicting the fabled monster snaking across the water. Now look at the second photo. It shows the hand of a man who had gone to sleep worrying about the ashes of a family member that had been misplaced during a clean-up. On waking, he was astounded to see etched in dried blood on his wrist were the words “Urn” and “Max”’. He called his brother Max, who, it turned out, had kept the small urn for safekeeping during the works.

This visual evidence of supernatural intervention, there before your eyes, would make it easy to think these were remarkable photographs. Except neither is – at least not in the way I have described them. The second photo is real, but I made up the explanation of what it shows, even though you may see the words “Urn” and “Max” in the scratches. In the case of the Nessie photo, I suspect the person who took it knew very well what it showed, but was intrigued by what it might be thought to show. I don’t think the photo shows a monster, but the blurred image of a dog swimming towards the camera with a stick in its mouth. You can see it once it’s been suggested to you: it is a flip-flop of how your mind was thinking on first seeing it.

The second photograph is a different story. The picture really was submitted by a witness as evidence of something extraordinary – although nothing to do with an urn or a person called Max. If you saw those things in the photo, then you did so purely because of the suggestion I placed in your mind. The “scratched” words were entirely my invention and nothing to do with the witness. In fact, the witness had offered this image of his hand as evidence of a UFO encounter over his West Midlands home. At first, he’d thought it was a vivid dream, until the evidence he found on waking suggested otherwise. A neighbour later independently told of seeing a glowing UFO over the man’s garden that same night. So this ‘dream’ was now made ‘real’ both through visual evidence and a back-up witness, turning into what looks like three letters – UFO – scratched in blood on the man’s hand.

By whom, of course is another question. Possible options are an ET graffiti artist or the man himself, perhaps without realising it. Was it scratched there as a subconscious reminder of a vivid experience (real or dream)? We do odd things during altered states of consciousness. Indeed, a UFO witness once told me they were so scared of not recalling a vivid sighting occurring while in bed at night that they rearranged their room in such a way they could not possibly miss the changes on waking, which would act as a trigger to recall the encounter. Drawing blood as a reminder that you saw a UFO might be taking that principle to extremes. My point is that reality is not as fixed as we think it to be and what looks to be the obvious answer is often not the only possibility. We can experience things in many different ways and sometimes even forget we have experienced them.

As for the dream that led me to write this column, it was a very vivid and strange one, but not of a UFO. It was a lengthy sequence in which I had multiple awakenings. Each time I returned to sleep, the world I went back to was continuous but different in some way from the last one; I accepted them all as being a continuation of the same ‘world’, and the (super)natural manner in which they kept changing form saw everyone else carry on as if nothing had changed at all. In my dreamscape there were some links – like a room that stayed the same, just with slightly different décor – yet the main sense I got from this powerful dream was that the world was changing outside; the sky a different colour – greenish one day, and a shade of mauve the next. And there was always a sense of ominous but unstated menace that I knew was out there.

But the oddest part was my accepting, as I did throughout, that reality was not, as we assume, an external world, the same for each of us when we wake up every morning. Instead, we each were able to reinvent the world every time we rose, but covered up this ‘secret’ via the belief that it was in fact consistent and unchanging. In truth, permanence was an illusion acting as a cloak to hide our own magic trickery.

That is also what I did by changing the story of the mark on the man’s arm, or the man taking the photo of a dog, blurred by the limitations of 1930s technology. Maybe he did, too, when he turned it into a monster that others would see and accept.

How might this relate to the UFO mystery? We live our lives with the presumption that we see what others see and our reality is the same as theirs. Yet if we can manipulate how others perceive the world – just as the great illusionists have always done to make you think you can see the impossible – then perhaps we each are in our own little bubble universe that we only appear to share with billions of other people; in truth, they are part of our perception, and we perhaps part of their, possibly quite different, version of reality.

Seeking to prove what a witness experienced may be a futile exercise. Their reality and ours could be two fleetingly intersecting tracks that cross and then diverge forever. If it is raining in our world and someone says the sun is shining in theirs, both can be true. So why not?

All of this seems absurd. Can our minds actually forge and change reality, or modify our perception of the Universe, without us consciously knowing that we are doing it? I realise this is not a revolutionary idea – it has been expressed in different ways by philosophers and film-makers – but we need a way to understand what we see when investigating the extraordinary that can explain both the absurdity and the profundity of the events experienced. This might be one option, although it would mean there is no such thing as a single reality… other than the one that we forge for ourselves each day. Perhaps the true importance of the paradoxical absurdities that UFO phenomena and fortean events share is to give us a glimpse into the way that the Universe operates...