From 1889-1892 the Society for Psychic Research asked a series of 17,000 Britons (of all classes and sexes), whether they had ever had a ‘hallucination’, that is hearing or seeing someone who was not actually there and yet while ‘awake, and not suffering from delirium or insanity or any other morbid condition obviously conducive to hallucinations’. Now a question? How many of the 17,000 answered yes: the number is, at least to this, blogger incredible: c.1900 or over ten percent of the group measured had experienced some form or visual or aural hallucination while awake and not ill. This leads to the suspicion that people seeing or hearing: aliens, angels, demons, fairies, ghosts, zombies and all that merry crowd is rather greater than most of us would think. I have been boggling about this number for a few days. The SPR was, in its heyday, an extraordinarily serious organization and the Census of Hallucinations was written by first-rate minds. Of course, polling methods were not quite at the level of gallup but that ten percent figure is probably as close as we would get to a late nineteenth century ballpark. It would be interesting to know what a comparable study would come up with now: that is not just a one off question, but a series of probing and insistent propositions.
Having now some experience with collecting fairy reports: that is children, men and women who believe they have seen an entity that they would describe as a fairy, I have come away with one important grain of wisdom. Those who see fairies split neatly into two groups: there are the mystics and the Joe Publics. Mystics are individuals who have recurrent visionary events throughout their lives: the lady who is presently cleaning my kitchen has spotted fairies in the Beachcombing garden; she has encountered ghosts and she has ‘feelings’ and ‘instincts’ that she chooses to act upon: in short, she would have been burnt alive in the sixteenth century, whereas today she is pleasantly eccentric company. Joe Publics, on the other hand, are those who have never had these experiences and who have a one off bizarre event in their life. Some will absorb it, some will ignore it, some will eventually discount it. Back in the sixteenth century they were doing the burning, and if they did see aliens with tin-foil helmets descending from the sky they shut the hell up or blamed their neighbour.
I find the second category more interesting than the first, because their experiences seem to me more ‘authentic’, though even writing that I realize how empty that idea really is. More to the point I suspect the first group are far more present in anomalous sightings than we actually realize. For example, in fairy sightings, I suspect seventy percent of people who see fairies are not seeing them for the first time, or at least have a long mystical history. Often though researchers are not aware of this tendency. For example, A UFO researcher who is called in because Mrs Smith has seen Venus/the mother ship will get a full report from Mrs Smith and come to his or her own conclusions. My impression though is that very few researchers will ask, directly or obliquely, the most important question of all: ‘do you often seen these things, Mrs Smith?’ Likewise, my guess would be that if we got the last five hundred sightings of Nessie we would find that a goodly percentage of these sightings were not by paranormal virgins. Even the Joe Bloggs sightings should perhaps be assessed in this light. For example, a sighting of a Yeti does not invite a confession ‘that it all seemed magical’ and yet this is a key question. What about the ‘mystics’? Are they soft-headed or vital to humanity’s survival? Having looked at this question now for a couple of years, though admittedly with lots of personal hang-ups, I would say, ‘both’. What I would really like to know is not percentage of the population gets to see ‘hallucinations’, but how many of that ten percent have the makings of shamans.
Source
No comments:
Post a Comment