Consciousness

• seCtIon FIVe: BoRDeRLAnDs
  physically present. Kirlian photography, which is sometimes claimed
  to record auras, actually measures the corona discharge from charged
  surfaces, and Kirlian photographs do not resemble seers’ descriptions
  of auras. And no one has ever passed the ‘doorway test’ designed to
  find out whether psychic claimants can see an aura sticking out from
  behind a wall (Tart, 1972b; Blackmore, 2017).
  Seeing auras may seem trivial, but the lessons learned from other-
  world experiences should perhaps not so lightly be dismissed. Those
  who are experienced in the use of hallucinogenic drugs learn things
  that no novice has any inkling of. They learn to look calmly into their
  very worst fears, face up to death, confront or lose themselves, and
  many other lessons. Special skills are needed for exploring the worlds
  revealed this way, and those who acquire this kind of wisdom recog-
  nise it in others. Understanding all these phenomena is not helped by
  trying to find a sharp line between reality and imagination.
  Some kind of distinction is needed, however, otherwise we would
  not be able to make judgements about the reliability of eyewitness
  evidence after a crime, or reassure someone who hallucinates a
  threatening figure that they need not be afraid. But when we say
  things like ‘it’s all in the mind’ to mean that the realm of the imagina-
  tion, or of the mind more generally, is unreal, we go too far, because body, mind,
  and environment are always linked. Going too far has wide-ranging and serious
  consequences, from denying that mental illness is really real (Chapter  13) to
  dismissing a whole spectrum of forms of consciousness as irrelevant to the
  investigation of ‘consciousness itself ’ – whatever that is.
  You may object, however, that we have chosen only the exceptional experiences of
  shamans, adepts, and drug users; so here is something that can happen to anyone.

I was lying on my back in bed and drifting off to sleep, when I found

I couldn’t move. There was a horrible buzzing, vibrating noise, and

I was sure there was something – or someone – in the room with me.

I tried desperately to see who it was but I couldn’t move anything

but my eyes. Then a hideous dark shape with an evil smell loomed

up over the end of my bed and lurched towards me. I tried to scream

but no noise came out. The dark shape came closer and closer and

forced itself on my chest, pressing down so I could hardly breathe. It

seemed to be speaking to me but I couldn’t make out the words. Then

it dragged on my arms and legs and began pulling me out of bed.

Imagine that this experience happened to you. What would you think as you

struggled to cope? What would you think once your heart stopped pounding and

the smell of the creature left your nostrils? Would you comfort yourself with the

thought that the menacing black figure wasn’t real at all and was only imagined?

Or might you decide that it was an alien come to abduct you, or perhaps the

ghost of someone who had died? Either way, you face a problem. If the creature

was real, why did the door remain closed and the bed covers undisturbed? Why

did no one else see the creature coming through the house? Obviously it wasn’t

real in that public sense. On the other hand, if it was only imagined, how could it

have such a powerful effect on you, and make your heart pound and your hands

FIGURE 14.11

sweat? Obviously something happened to you, and the experience itself was real

enough, wasn’t it?

In the next chapter, we will explore sleep, dreams, and some further weird expe-

riences that haunt the borderlands of sleep, including the example of sleep

paralysis just described. As with many of the ‘altered states’ that we considered

in the previous chapter, exploring these borderlands suggests that many of the

other distinctions we are so familiar with start to melt away – not just reality ver-

sus imagination, but body versus mind, self versus other, and conscious versus

unconscious.

‘there’s nothing odd

about the sense in which

subjective phenomena

can be objective facts

[. . .] pain is real!’

(Strawson, 2011, p. 265)