Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber Read Free Book Online Page B

who had had no previous involvement.
    Hopkins remembered that Dr. Donald Klein of the New York State Psychiatric Institute had expressed interest in the phenomenon and appeared to be open-minded about it. I looked up Dr. Klein's credentials and found them to be superb. If he would take me on, he was the ideal man.
    A few weeks later I was in his office undergoing a searching three-hour pre-interview. I had provided him with a document outlining all my memories. We worked for some time trying to find ways into my mind, but I could recall little more than I already had. At his suggestion, I spent a week trying to do so. When I was not successful — in fact, all I got out of it was dizziness and strange nightmares — we decided on a trial hypnosis session.
    I was dubious about hypnosis. I'd read in Science News of a study that suggested that anybody under hypnosis can be induced to remember a "UFO abduction and experience,"
    complete with little men and all the trimmings. The hypnotist has only to ask the right questions. and the stories apparently just come pouring out.
    It is a flat-out myth that people can't lie under hypnosis. They can and they will — if they think that's what the hypnotist wants them to do, or if they themselves want to do it.
    When I got a more careful look at the study I had read about in Science News , I found that the questions asked were intentionally leading ones, specifically designed to evoke abduction memories. This study had as its purpose to prove that anybody can be induced to relate an abduction experience under hypnosis if he or she is asked questions designed to suggest that the hypnotist wanted him or her to relate such an experience.
    Well, there was no chance at all that Dr. Klein was going to do that. This can easily be confirmed by the reader, as all the transcripts of my hypnosis sessions are verbatim. And I was very much hoping that the process would dispel the whole notion of the visitors and prove that — despite appearances — the experience had been a complicated series of misperceptions.
    Still, the study illustrated a very good point and revealed a fundamental difficulty even with serious and competent efforts to use hypnosis in dealing with this sort of material.
    We just don't know enough about hypnosis to call it a completely trustworthy scientific toot in a situation like this. While Don Klein certainly didn't ask provocative questions, there is always the possibility that I was unconsciously eager to comply with an outcome that I might secretly have longed for. I might wont powerful visitors to appear, to save a world that I'm pretty sure is in serious trouble. I'd spent the past three years working on books about nuclear war and environmental collapse. I knew full well that we are going to have a really rough time in the next fifty years. Maybe the idea of visitors coming along and saving our necks was more appealing to me than I might consciously have wished to admit. Maybe I hid my desperation from myself in order to live and raise a child with anything like a happy heart.
    What I can say in favor of these transcripts is that they represent the response of an honest man to the efforts of a recognized expert in the field of medical hypnosis.
    One of the greatest challenges to science in our age is from morn superstitions such as UFO cults and people who are beginning to take instruction from space brothers. Charlatans ranging from magicians to "psychic healers" have tried to gather money and power for themselves at the expense of science. And this is tragic. When one looks at the vast dollars that go each year to the astrology industry and thinks what that money would have done for us in the hands of astronomers and astrophysicists, it is possible to feel very frustrated. Had the astronomers been awash in these funds, perhaps they would have already solved the problem that I am grappling with now. I respect astrology in its context as an ancient human tradition.