It's that time of year again when I've been encouraged by to bash off a few lines about altered states of consciousness (ASC). Where are we in the scheme of things? In all honesty, I wish I could tell you in a few easy words. It seems to me that altered states are linked to many of the other disciplines in parapsychology. This article is a brief overview of the main topics that interest me, linked in with a few of the many weird things that have happened to me over the years that prompted my own journey in that strange hinterland between science and magic.

Discussion

Many researchers believe that during sleep, and especially when you are dreaming, extra-sensory perception may occur. There are a plethora books and articles about people who have been in contact with the deceased whilst asleep, received some meaningful premonition or recalling a past life. Dreams are complex simply because their meaning depends on your theoretical perspective. Some people think that dreams are the result of random neural firing, or that they are wish fulfilment. Others suggest that during REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep our brains are acting as giant processors, working through problems and storing memories.

Nevertheless, altered states can perhaps be the most accessible of phenomena with anyone who has a little imagination and want to experiment. There are dozens of books on meditation, self-hypnosis and lucid dreaming to assist you in your exploration. These three are examples of ASC, and each has its own distinct physiological and electro-encephalographic changes (EEG). Mediums and clairvoyants seem to be able to access various ASC in order to gain possible information from deep within the collective unconscious. There is good evidence that ESP is increased during deep states of relaxation (Ganzfelt). Also during relaxation you can improve your chances of experiencing an out-of-body experience (OOBE). A near-death experience (NDE) is also a form of altered state and has many parallels with OOBEs. Death itself is the ultimate ASC and depending on your stance this may mean the total shutting down of your personal consciousness or an expansion whereby your individuality is integrated with the cosmos in some way. Under hypnosis, individuals have claimed to have experienced other lifetimes, many of these reports are clearly fantasies whilst for others there is sufficient evidence to be compelling. Experiencers have given scenarios of alien abduction whilst under hypnosis, and often enter ASC as a precursor to abduction whilst others seem to be 'taken' during sleep. This phenomena seems to take place in a way that appears to be outside the normal boundaries of time and space.

My own experiences - a ghost of the living, or ESP explained by ASC?

I recall, when I was in my early teens, that I experienced a phenomenon reminiscent of a crisis apparition or a doppleganger. I arrived home from school and was watching TV. My father came in to the living room and spoke to me "Alright son?". He tapped me on the shoulder and I turned momentarily to see him combing his hair in the mirror above the fireplace. He looked real, solid, corporeal and human. I told him that I would be with him in a few minutes, when the programme had finished. Five minutes later, I got up to search for him. He was nowhere to be found. I asked my mother had she seen him and she hadn't. After a thorough search of the house and garden. I was standing perplexed at the front gate, when I spotted him riding his cycle towards me up the road. I asked him where he had been, but he insisted that this was his first time home that afternoon.

It's not clear to me what this is an example of, or even if classifying makes any difference in terms of understanding. Was it a ghost of the living? ESP? OOBE? Lucid Dreaming? Having seen this wonderful apparition, it tells me just about nothing about its modus operandi. I suspect, but cannot prove it, that we were both in altered states simultaneously - him on his bike cycling home, possibly daydreaming, whilst I was lulled by the cathode ray tube into some deep level of relaxation. Possibly, at some deep level I picked up his desire to get home after a long day's work. I'm not sure if it was a purely mental phenomenon, like a dream scenario, or did some aspect of his consciousness burst through into my reality? I will never know. When I tell this story to others, I get a range of explanations but, in my view, none of them give an adequate explanation.

An OOBE tale as part of ASC?

When I was 18 years-old, still living with my parents at that time, I had a dramatic experience that had a profound effect on me for many years. Basically I was feeling tired and washed out. I had been working as a laboratory assistant in the quality control lab at a local food factory in Worcestershire. It had been a long week. I got home late, and normally would have gone to meet the lads for a beer that night. Instead I told my parents I was off to bed. With few preliminaries, I jumped into bed and fell into a deep sleep. At some point in the night, somewhere around 1.30 am, I became self-aware. I was suspended from the living room ceiling. I never thought about it at the time but, although the lights in the room were off, I could see everything with crystal clarity from an angle I had never seen it before. The embers were smouldering in the open fire. I could see the TV on its stand (interestingly the same TV and room that was involved in the previous incident). I could see the sideboard with a few ornaments, radio and other odds and ends. The dining room table was directly below. I could see the newspaper opened at the crossword page with the puzzle partly filled in, pencil with the stub at its side. Loose change was strewn on the paper. This information must have come to me in a split second, because it was at this point I realised that I was out of my body. How one knows this I'll never know. With this realisation came panic, and I found myself being pulled at fantastic speed through a tunnel of some kind. I woke up shouting and gasping. After a few minutes sitting on the bed, I went downstairs to see the living room and it seemed much the same as I had experienced it in my vision. I'm still not clear in my own mind if this was an OOBE, a Lucid Dream, an example of clairvoyance or even if it matters? The key issue being that I was asleep, experiencing REM or in a novel ASC. Nevertheless the modus operandi still remains obscure.

My ghostly tale and its place as an ASC??

In the early eighties, a colleague of mine had died under rather unpleasant circumstances. I shall not go into this here, as it's not completely relevant to this story. Suffice to say that we did know each other reasonably well. I awoke one morning and in that hypnopompic state (emerging from sleep), I saw my friend at the bottom of the bed. He simply said "Georgie boy, get a book called Theosophy by Rudolph Steiner". I was shocked, and was brought to full waking consciousness. By that time (seconds later) he was gone. It is quite a common hallucination to hear one's name being called out upon waking (hypnopompic), as one is falling to sleep (hypnogogic) or, more rarely but still quite common, in full waking consciousness. However in this instance, although I may have had a vague awareness of Rudolph Steiner and his role in education, I had no awareness of Steiner's involvement in esoteric thought and I had never heard of the book.

That afternoon I was involved in leading a therapy group with some clients of mine at a local psychiatric unit. A new client was telling us a little about himself when he said, by some strange synchronicity, that he had attended a Rudolph Steiner school in his youth. I asked him (without revealing my source) if he had ever heard of a book called "Theosophy". He hadn't, but claimed that the head teacher believed in reincarnation. This was my prompt to find out if the book existed. The next day, I was the first one in the public library, and within twenty minutes the book was in my hands. The most astonishing aspect of this was the content of the book, which basically is about the afterlife, the astral plane and what is on the other side from an esoteric standpoint. Again however it is not clear to me if this is an example of cryptomnesia (forgotten information that often resurfaces during ASC), communication from the afterlife or dramatised information obtained via super ESP? Either way, I was in an ASC when the event occurred and that to me is they key.

Conclusion

To tie things up, it seems to me that ASC could be used as a research tool that could give us a direct access to paranormal phenomena, or to create conditions whereby we think something paranormal is occurring. As you may appreciate from the examples from my own experience, the phenomena seemed to happen spontaneously and largely when I was in an ASC. Therefore it seems reasonable to me for us to:

1) Pay attention to out dreams and write them down on the grounds that they could be telepathic communication, visions from the afterlife, premonitions or a method of tapping into information from the collective unconscious.

2) If possible, have people who are in an ASC during ghost vigils - including dreamers, meditators and individuals who are in a light state of self-hypnosis.

I would be interested in hearing from any of you that have tried anything in this area. There are a number of Parasearch experiments along these lines - go to the ASSAP website and click on 'Brosw Groups'. I would like to debate these topics with you on the ASSAP Altered States discussion group.

I would be keen in seeing your results and exchanging ideas, so email me, join in some of the Parasearch experiments here or chat with me on the ASSAP Members Forum.