Out of mind?

Oh, to be in England - the magic country of wandering houses and wayward hills and flights across time ...

Just as I thought I had read most of the most interesting "time slip" stories taking place in the United Kingdom, I was reminded of another one - of two, actually. (And yet a third one, for good measure.)

It's a story about a vision purportedly witnessed by Dr E. G. Moon, a supposedly "very down-to-earth" Scottish physician, on a certain day in 1935 when he visited one of his patients, the famous Lord Carson, at his home at Cleve Court (Isle of Thanet).

Now, this particular house is said to be haunted.
But what is said to have happened to Dr Moon doesn't appear to be a "haunting" proper. (And what is a "haunting" - or a "ghost", for that matter - anyway? For a few of my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

I found this story here, and since it is uncommonly well written, I think it would be best to let the author of the original text speak:

In 1935 Dr EG Moon, a very down-to-earth Scots Physician with a practice in Broadstairs, was at Minster in Thanet visiting his patient, Lord Carson, who lived at Cleve Court, a haunted house referred to elsewhere in the section. After talking to Carson, the doctor left his patient and made his way downstairs into the hallway. His mind was very clearly occupied at the time with the instructions he had given the nurse about the prescription he had left for Carson. At the front door Dr Moon hesitated, wondering whether to go back upstairs to have another word with the nurse.

It was at this point that the doctor noted that his car was no longer where he had left it in the driveway. In fact, it had been parked alongside a thick yew hedge and that, too, was missing. Even the drive down which he had driven from the main road was now nothing but a muddy track, and a man was coming towards him.

The newcomer on the scene, only thirty yards from Dr Moon, was rather oddly dressed wearing an old-fashioned coat with several capes around his shoulders. And he wore a top hat of the kind seen in the previous century. As he walked he smacked a switch against his riding boots. Over his shoulder he carried a long-barrelled gun. He stared hard at Moon. And the doctor registered the fact that the man coming towards him might have looked more at home in the 19th century.

Remarkably, Dr Moon seems not at the time to have been either alarmed or even mildly surprised by the changed scenery, by the quite oddly dressed man approaching his or the fact that his car was missing. What preoccupied him was the thought of Lord Carson's prescription. He simply turned away, without any concern, to go back into the house. But he did quite casually take one more look at the scene he was leaving. And now, as if by magic, the car was back where it had been and the yew hedge too. The drive was no longer a muddy track. And the man had also disappeared, back one assumes to the previous century. And it was only now that Dr Moon realised that something odd, something decidedly odd, had occurred.

All of this took seconds and so there is every reason to understand why Dr Moon did not immediately go out into the driveway to see where his missing car was. For the same reason it is understandable why he did not speak to the man dressed like a farm bailiff of the past. Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state. When he came to - for that seems to be the best way of describing his return to his own time - he described to Lady Carson what he thought had occurred. He was anxious, however, that no word of if should come out in his lifetime for fear that his patients would begin to question his judgement. It was only after his death that the story was revealed.**

Now, this is a fascinating story as it is. But it's this little bit what makes it even more interesting, to my eyes:

"Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state".

He seems to have been in some sort of trance, an almost hypnotic state, similar (at least I understand it that way) to the state of mind one often encounters in dreams: the weirdest things seem not only somehow "normal", but often we simply know (during the dream only), why they make sense, why they should be so. This, I believe, is the Theta "state of mind" (actually, a brain wave rhythm).

Salvador Dalí, The Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite of Cnide in a Landscape (1981)

And, luckily for us, we seem to have another story - from the very same region (and found on the same website) - pointing to the very same phenomenon, whatever it is that induces this strange state of receptiveness.

It is the account of a woman called Charlotte Warburton, who is said to have had a "time slip" on June 18, 1968, on Calverley Road, in the English town of Tunbridge Wells (Kent).

You can read the account here. I shall only point out the similarly unquestioning state of mind that she seems to have experienced - because I believe it is the key to such phenomena.

Was it an external factor, something from outside, what caused these experiences?

A third account - not strictly a "time slip" -, about a girl called Naomi Fuller (read it on the same page as the two accounts above) would seem to suggest that there is something about the area itself that, under certain (as yet undetermined) circumstances, switches a susceptible mind into a Theta-like state, which then makes it possible to perceive usually non-observable realities.

But if that were the case, wouldn't there be many more reports of such experiences? After all, timidity or fear of ridicule can only explain so much.

On the other hand, of course, there places, all over the world, where such experiences (be it "hauntings", "ghosts" or whatever one might call them) are reported quite often. Of couse, it is virtually impossible to establish how many reports are genuine, and from those that are, how many were "fed" by self-suggestion, by expectation.

Anyway, such places deserve - and often get - a thorough in situ individual investigation. (However, many seem to show unusually high electromagnetic activity. More on that some other time.)

For those who would fancy having a look at the planetary configuration of Mrs Warburton's purported "time slip", I even made an astrological chart. (Not knowing the exact time of the purported sighting, only that it was "morning", I entered 10 a.m.)

(If you find anything interesting in it, do let me know. ;))

Be it as it may, I think there is little doubt that it is the individual's susceptibility that makes such things happen.

But if you think I am politely alluding to so-called "hallucinations", you couldn't be more wrong. Apparently, there can be shared visions of things normally unseen (this blog is full of such accounts; I would especially recommend reading the entries about Jung, the Andersons and, of course, about the legendary Misses Moberly and Jourdain) - and not all of them can be satisfactorily explained away as either lies or "folie a deux".

So, judging by such accounts, it would be relatively safe to assume that, at certain locations and under certain (undetermined) influences, an external local force (or interplay of forces) is capable of inducing or triggering perception of otherwise unobservable realities external to the observer - and judging by the accounts of odd or uncharacteristic receptivity accompanying these visions, it would be safe to surmise that the mind is perhaps on a Theta-like "wavelength" at the time of the experience.

More on that on a future occasion.



* Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear who the author of the text(s) is. According to the Credits, it could be either W. H. Johnson or John Haverson (or both).

** I have yet to unearth the original source of this account.

We'll always have Paris... or whatever it was

The misses Moberly & Jourdain, about whose "adventure" you read in the last post, were probably the ultimate tourists, Baedeker and all (especially the "all"). Because, let's face it: it's one thing to visit Versailles and listen to stories about the French Revolution, but to visit Versailles during the French Revolution - now, that's a feat!

Still, even during their grand adventure the misses dutifully obeyed the basic law of time-slippage, as deduced from the Minkowski's spacetime equations: travel in time, but don't move.
In other words: if you want to visit the Paris of the 15th century, you'd better be in Paris - not in Iceland or Albania. Or Haiti.

But, wouldn't you know it, there was - or so it seems - another couple who somehow managed to break even that sacrosanct law: the biologist and cryptozoologist (and father of the Globster) Ivan Sanderson and his wife.

According to Jerome Clark's book bearing the alarmingly exclamatory title Unexplained!: 347 Strange Sightings, Incredible Occurrences, and Puzzling Physical Phenomena, the Sandersons were in Haiti doing a biological survey, when one evening their car got stuck on a muddy road, miles away from civilisation (it figures). Luckily, their assistant - appropriately clad in white - was with them at the time, so he went ahead, while the couple walked up the road at a more leisurely pace.

Walking a few steps behind his wife, Sanderson suddenly observed - much to his astonishment - there were houses along both sides of the road. Not cottages, not cabins, not huts: three-storied houses made of stone, varied in style.

And there was more.

In Sanderson's own words:


"These houses hung out over the road, which suddenly appeared to be muddy with large cobblestones. The houses were of (I would say) about the Elizabethan period of England, but for some reason I knew they were in Paris. They had pent roofs, with some dormer windows, gables, timbered porticoes and small windows with tiny leaded panes. Here and there, there were dull reddish lights burning behind them, as if from candles. There were iron frame lanterns hanging from timbers jutting from some houses and they were all swaying together as if in a wind, but there was not the faintest movement of the air about us".


Before Sanderson, who at this stage was likely questioning his state of mind (and possibly his menu of that day), could say anything, he bumped into his wife's back. She had stopped all of the sudden. Then, says Sanderson, she took his hand and stood there, "wide-eyed and speechless"; and then, pointing towards the edge of the road, she said:

"How did we get to Paris five hundred years ago?"

So, what do we have here: another case of folie a deux...?

(Even though this is a clearly rhetorical question, it's still worth mentioning that "contagious folly", not being induced by bacteria, virus or any such vermin, spreads exclusively by oral communication... In other words: Sanderson hadn't communicated his "folly" to his wife - and yet she seemed to be sharing his "hallucination", in all its details.)

Sanderson did point out that the feeling of being in Paris was perhaps just that: a feeling, an impression (which is by definition subjective) - perhaps based on architectural similarity. After all, Haiti had been a French colony since 1697.

On the other hand, "impressions" - not being filtered by the rational mind and its hardwired prejudices - are often the most accurate mirror of whatever is happening.
(Which is precisely why psychotherapy places such importance on dream interpretation. Dreams are often full of bizarre "impressions", and it's precisely by way of the latter that we may exhume a deeper meaning of any given dream.)

None of the above matters very much, of course, because, regardless of the "actual" placement of the nonexistent houses - were they in Paris, or were they "just" in the French style? - the houses were still... well, nonexistent. If there ever were any houses, in whichever style, at whatever time, along that road - they had not been there at the time the Sandersons had started their walk along that deserted road through the Haitian countryside.

Besides, an extraordinary, truly unique detail of their adventure leaves little doubt that the Sandersons, even if it were possible, never left the island in any way, shape or form: even as they were walking through the faux Paris, they never lost sight of their assistant, Fred Allsop, in his white shirt, who was walking further down the road - and Fred hadn't seen any "Parisian "sights, anything out of the ordinary; all he ever saw was the dark, muddy road through the Haitian countryside.

How is it possible?

Assuming the account is truthful - and, in all fairness, being a cryptozoologist does not automatically signify that one is a lunatic, predisposed to "hallucinations", nor is there the slightest shred of objective evidence that Sanderson was simply lying - there are several possibilities that could explain their unexpected vision. But one thing is certain: something had caused an anomaly, a disturbance, a temporary shift in the pattern of the perceived local reality; and since only two of the three voyagers walking almost - but not quite - simultaneously down that muddy road saw that disturbance, or its effects, that something would have had to been localised : a small "field" of... what?

Reenter Miss Moberly with her novel theory regarding the possible cause of her own "slip": sudden access to Marie-Antoinette's memory field. (I don't really remember Miss Moberly using the word "field" - she might have - but that's how I imagine it, at any rate.)

Is that what it was?

Did the Sandersons unwittingly enter the memory field of somebody who, once upon a time, perhaps on that exact spot, reminisced about a street in Paris on a windy night from many years, decades, centuries before?

I like to think so.
But I don't really know.

Do you?

***

The excerpt - and my erudite interloping regarding the implications of the Minkowski (not "Minowski", Herbie!) equations - were taken from J. H. Brennan's highly entertaining and intelligently written book that you'll often see mentioned here:

(There should be a hyperlinked book cover visible above. If you cannot see it, try switching to a different browser. It seems Firefox is having a lot of trouble in its interaction with Blogger - and I am yet to determine with certainty whose fault is it.
Anyway, I apologise for the inconvenience.)