Encounters, page 19
Years later, Len learned that the Catholic Church started an investigation into the canonization of Fulton Sheen. While he did not and does not consider his experience with Sheen anything resembling a miracle, he felt he “owed it” to someone or something to report it in order to provide more background information on Sheen. He sent letters to the Catholic committee studying Sheen’s potential canonization, and later, he published an essay about it in Busted Halo, a Catholic online periodical. It was this publication that he had sent to me and that got my attention. He prefaced it with the question: “Do you think there is a UFO connection here?” I read his story, found it charming, and sent it to my colleagues who organized the Rice University conference, the Archives of the Impossible. Len quickly acquired the nickname the “Fulton Sheen Guy” among some members of the group. What I thought was unique about Len’s vision, other than the vision itself, was that he refused to conclude as to what it meant. Ultimately, he doesn’t know what it means. Significantly, he credits it with being a foundational shift in his life’s direction and ultimate spiritual journey. He does, however, speculate on possible meanings of the event.
“It seemed to me, if I were to venture a wild guess, that upon his death, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen’s spiritual energy, his consciousness, his soul may have erupted in a glorious shower of cosmic grace that was felt nearby in Manhattan by many people with whom he’d crossed paths. As with his broadcasts, he said goodbye with flair and style.
“How else to explain this? While it may be possible in a spiritual sense that Sheen’s life force responded specifically to my plea for help, gave me comfort when I needed it as he left the material world, I truly think it had nothing to do with me. It’s about the special nature of Sheen, his eccentric benevolence, perhaps the special nature of his God. I merely stumbled, hungover, into the trajectory of his transitioning spiritual essence.”
My colleagues enjoyed Len’s story. One of them asked, “But is this connected with a UFO?”
Many people who experience UFO events report unusual dreams and visions after the event and as ongoing phenomena. Often, they call these dreams visions, waking or lucid dreams, or vivid dreams. Sometimes they feel that their own sighting is like a dream, in that they can’t remember it very well. They often question if the event happened, even when there were multiple witnesses and evidence such as radar reported by local airports. Sometimes they just forget it, and then the memory is activated by later events.
An example of this latter dreamlike characteristic linked to an encounter is illustrated by actor Kurt Russell’s plane flight in 1997, which corresponded with the controversial Arizona UFO flap known as the Phoenix Lights. Unlike Len’s UFO sighting, the Phoenix Lights, witnessed by thousands of people in Arizona, have never been officially proclaimed “unidentified,” except to thousands of civilians who believe they witnessed something from another world. Were they flares, stealth aircraft, or something else? According to Russell, the weirdest part of the incident was the fact that he forgot about it.
Russell, a pilot, describes seeing unidentified lights and reporting them.
“I saw six lights over the airport in absolute uniform, in a V-shape.… I was just looking at them and I was coming in; we were maybe a half mile out. [His son] said, ‘Pa, what are those lights?’ Then I kind of came out of my reverie and I said, ‘I don’t know what they are.’ He said, ‘Are we okay here?’ I said ‘I’m gonna call,’ and I reported it. They said, ‘We don’t show anything.’
“I said, ‘Well, okay, I’m gonna declare it’s unidentified, it’s flying and it’s six objects.’ We landed, I taxied, dropped him off, took off, and went back to L.A.
“I never said a word; he never said a word. I never thought of it. Two years later, [his partner] Goldie [Hawn] is watching a television show when I came home. And the show is on UFOs.… And I’m kind of hearing the TV going. And I stopped and I started watching, and it was on that event. And that was the most viewed UFO event, over twenty thousand people saw that.
“I’m watching this and I’m feeling like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. I go, ‘What—why do I know this?’ And it’s not clear to me. And finally they said a general-aviation pilot reported it on landing.
“I never thought of it since then, and I said, ‘That was me, that was me! Wait a minute, I’ll go to my logbooks.’ So I went to my logbooks and there was that flight, at that time, and I didn’t mention anything about the UFO.
“The fascinating part of that, to me, was that it just went literally out of my head. And [my son] never mentioned it. Had I not seen the show I never would’ve thought of it again. That, to me, was the weird part.”1
Russell experienced a “reverie” during the sighting, and then forgot about it. When he remembered it, he questioned how he could have forgotten it. As strange as it seems, this is a pattern that occurs with many UFO events, sightings, and dreams. Like dreams, these events seem to be difficult to remember.
Experiencers report dreams that are distinctive from their ordinary dreams. Dreams of UFOs, or alleged aliens, or dreams that follow UFO events seem to fall within a similar liminal category of consciousness. Generally, most people make a distinction between ordinary reality and dream reality, and they do not mix these up. However, what happens when dream reality seems to merge with waking reality in ways that seem impossible yet offer evidence of things that cannot be denied, such as dreams of future events or even dreams of meeting others who share the same dreamscape? In most instances, these types of dreams stretch the limits of contemporary Western scientific dream research, although there are notable exceptions. Anthropologist Amira Mittermaier explains that Sigmund Freud, for example, was aware of dreams that defied Western epistemological categories, and the work of science author and anthropologist Eric Wargo explains these dreams through contemporary frameworks of science and physics.2
Some types of dreams, like lucid dreams, have only recently showed up on the radar of current sleep research, whereas some communities, such as non-Western indigenous communities and Western esoteric traditions, have recognized and utilized these liminal states for more than centuries. Psychologist and sleep study researcher Jayne Gackenbach, who pioneered Western studies into lucid dreams, notes, “Whether we should consider it a paradoxical form of sleep or a paradoxical form of waking or something else entirely, it seems too early to tell. Terms like sleep, waking, and dreaming may be too crude to capture usefully the fine structure of consciousness. Our vocabulary for describing certain states of consciousness is still too undeveloped.”3
In a discussion of the central place that dreams have in the history of esotericism, Dr. Aaron French notes, “Modern theosophy and anthroposophy texts state very clearly that the goal of initiation is to bring the realm of dreaming—i.e., unconscious or spirit realm—into one’s waking reality. In other words, to merge waking and dreaming states in one’s ordinary life; that is the goal according to these esoteric texts.”4
French, who specializes in the works of the prominent teacher of esotericism Rudolf Steiner, discussed how Steiner placed important emphasis on dreams as they related to spiritual initiations:
[During initiation] the possibility arises for the individual to go through a certain portion of the night in a conscious condition. His physical body sleeps as usual, but a part of his sleep-condition becomes animated by significant dreams. These are the first heralds of his entrance into the higher worlds. Gradually, he leads his experiences over into his ordinary consciousness. He then sees astral beings in his entire environment, even here in the room between the chairs, or out in the woods and meadows.5
These reflections on the function of dreams within esoteric spiritual initiations shed light on the experiences that many people have after they see or have been in the vicinity of a UFO. Not only are these not ordinary dreams but ordinary people, I presume, would not be comfortable with the appearance of astral beings in their living rooms. This is an experience I would choose to avoid. Time and again people report dreams that they insist are not ordinary. Gray Man, Jose, and Kary Mullis all insist that what they experienced were not dreams but somehow waking visions or something that occurred in waking life. Could Gray Man and Mullis have been experiencing initiations similar to what Steiner discusses? Jose, who sees his experiences within a religious and spiritual worldview, is not vexed at all by these spontaneous appearances. They go with the territory of being awake. Although he doesn’t ignore the appearance of UFOs, he doesn’t really pay extra attention to them, either. Beyond the Western esoteric framework of dream interpretation, many indigenous traditions and certain traditional religions support a link between nonordinary dream states and transformative spiritual experiences.
Gackenbach explored sophisticated dream epistemologies in the centuries-old traditions of indigenous Australian culture called the Alcheringa, roughly translated as the “Dreamtime” or the “Dreaming,” and within some traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.6 In a series of conversations about dreams, Tibetan Buddhist Lama Lhanang Rinpoche and Jayne Gackenbach discussed intersections between Western dream research and Tibetan Buddhist dream yoga. The Western approach, Gackenbach notes, tends to “pathologize these states of consciousness.” Just as current dream science reveals that brain states during sleep correspond to different types of dreams, Lama Rinpoche identified the varieties of dreams within his tradition.
He identified dreams about everyday life, dreams in the early morning that tend to be more significant than ordinary dreams, and dreams in which a person connects with “the spirit world.” He said that these latter types of dreams, which are less frequent than the other types of dreams, can be magical or terrifying. Rinpoche also said that consciousness is a continuum, and that waking reality is another form of a dream. He also likened magical dreams to the state of mind of being an artist. If one is very involved in art, this was akin to the magical dreams of Tibetan dream yoga, he said.
“Through the dreams you can go there, you can go and receive the teachings of the five Buddha families,” he said. “Through art you can contact the Buddha worlds.” He explained that he had a dream when he was a child that he would one day hold the president of the United States’ hand. When he was grown, this dream came true. He described how, after shaking hands with the president, he wondered, Wow, my dream came true.
“How much do you think dreams tell the future?” Gackenbach asked.
“I think some people have cleaned their minds. Their minds are light and they become psychic and they see things that are going to happen,” he said.
The conversation continued to the topic of flying in one’s dream. Experiencers often feel that they levitate, either out of their rooms, into crafts, or to other places altogether. “If you do this you need a teacher,” Rinpoche said.
“Some [people] can go anywhere in the universe and they can learn things from dreams, and they can bring this back. Buddha talked about this 2,500 years ago; there is no distance, everything is connected,” he said.
“If we fly in a plane for five thousand years it is far away, but if you try this in meditation, you get there in one second, so there’s no distance. Today, there’s no distance. You can be going to bed and you see a person [on your phone] and they are just waking up for breakfast. There is no distance.”
Rinpoche’s use of technology as a frame for dreams is significant. In this view, dreams are an interface between worlds. In the Alcheringa, or the Dreamtime concept shared by the great variety of indigenous Australians, the most efficacious of their dreamers travel in dreams or in dreamlike states. In my initial research into the Alcheringa, I read the works of nonindigenous anthropologists, as this is the typical way in which Western people acquire knowledge about indigenous systems and lifeways. What struck me was the prodigious efforts that researchers took to try to translate the term “Alcheringa.” One researcher wrote three pages of etymological research to do justice to the concept. The impression I got was that this was a system that was so complex that anthropologists had a hard time understanding it, and then once they did, their efforts to translate it into writing failed. The system defied reductive forms of language. Of course, the best source for understanding the Alcheringa is an indigenous Australian.
In Tyson Yunkaporta’s book Sand Talk, he explains the Dreaming:
I use many other terms that I don’t particularly like, such as “Dreaming” (which is a mistranslation and misinterpretation), because a lot of the old people I respect, and who have passed knowledge on to me, use these words. It’s not my place to disrespect them by rejecting their vocabulary choices. I know and they know what they mean, so we might as well just use those labels. In any case, it is almost impossible to speak in English without them, unless you want to say, “suprarational interdimensional ontology endogenous to custodial ritual complexes” every five minutes. So “Dreaming” it is.7
Yunkaporta’s explanation, like Lama Rinpoche’s, links dimensions with reference to ontologies of space-time. Mittermaier, in her book about Egyptian Muslim dreaming, also references the “suprarational” aspect of the dreamscape. “I want to call into question the presumption that all dreams are inherently linked to the psyche.”8 The idea that there could possibly be dream states that are independent of human minds is counterintuitive for many people, except for those who study people’s dreams. Mittermaier goes on to cite the work of other scholars who have come to similar conclusions, such as Vincent Crapanzano. “Much of what we in the West call psychological and locate in some sort of internal space (‘in the head,’ ‘in the mind,’ ‘in the brain,’ ‘in consciousness,’ ‘in the psyche’) is understood in many cultures in manifestly nonpsychological terms and located in ‘other spaces.’”9
These other spaces can be uncanny, like in the instance of an indigenous Australian woman who dreamed of her father in a cemetery. In her dream he described how he was disturbed in his place of rest, the cemetery, by her actions during a recent social gathering that involved gambling. The woman’s father wasn’t upset with her about gambling, but he was upset that she utilized his memory as a means to acquire luck during the session. In her dream, she crouched and drew in the sand at the cemetery yard. When she woke up in the morning, she had sand and leaves from the yard on her gown and in her hands.10
An archaeologist I know works closely with one Australian tribe and described how, within the tribe with which he was familiar, there were levels of initiation, somewhat like esoteric societies in the West. He explained that certain people were given or initiated into different lore. What happens in the Dreaming was as important as what happens in daily life and significantly impacts it. Because the Dreaming is passed along through oral tradition, just as is most of Tibetan dream yoga, what can be known to outsiders is limited and limited to sources who have contact with initiates. “We know the difference between [normal dreams and special dreams] but do not tell anyone about the special dreams, except [the] old men.”11
Some initiations involve dream travel, like the example related by Lama Rinpoche about Tibetan Buddhist dreamers who go to places and bring things back. The things they bring back include knowledge, and as for the indigenous Australians, they bring back information that they share with each other and sometimes store in their material art. They place hidden knowledge in the form of code in their art, to be deciphered by people from neighboring tribes or by their youths. On other occasions, they conduct dream meetings with other initiates. Initiates remember what is said in these meetings and carry this into their waking lives.
“The special dreams characteristically were highly salient and realistic and involved many senses,” the archaeologist said. “They were said to be so vivid that the dreamer could ‘see, hear, and feel the rain’ of the dream. Another man explained the difference as being very difficult to differentiate between reality in the everyday world and the reality of the special dream. Some said that they were aware of being in the dream. These dreams fall into the category of lucid dreaming, where one is aware that one is dreaming, and the events are vividly depicted. They are so vivid, in fact, that they seem more real than waking reality,” he said.
“One of the community leaders is a good friend, and she described how her son was going out to participate in ‘Lore time,’ and the night before he went out, he had a dream in which he was flying around the landscape and saw a cave that he already knew of, and the cave was lit up with bright light, so he flew there and entered. He entered the cave and there was art and painted symbols moving on the walls with all the light, and at the back of the cave was an old man with war paint on and he was performing a dance, and this old man was singing in an unknown language and tried to teach the boy how to perform the dance he was doing. And then the very next day, while learning the ceremonial protocols for the Lore, an elder taught all the kids a particular dance, to encourage flying in dreams(!), and it was the exact same dance that the old man in the cave taught him in his dream.
“Most aspects of the Dreaming are forbidden to be revealed to outsiders unless they go through the Lore, so it can be difficult to penetrate, and I learn something new every time I head out into the field. But within some ceremonies known to me, a trancelike state is often sought because of the ceremony, which is often accompanied with a belief that advice can be received by spirits who are attracted to these situations. Tangentially, different behaviors can be considered as protocols. Such as an old man telling me that he will go out to remote locations to be in silence.”12
