A New World

by Whitley Strieber

  When I did the sensing exercise on that night, “the sensation was remarkably powerful. I felt as if I could sense much more than my physical body, as if my nerves didn’t end in my skin but extended around me like a living electrical field.” Well, second body does, and not only that, a surrendered inner stance can enable it to enter what in Sanskrit is called maha-mudra, “the clear light of the void.” This is a state outside of place, an absence of being anywhere that is also being everywhere. In physics, this is called superposition, wherein a particle is in all possible states at the same time. Without knowing it, I had entered this state. Since then, I’ve come to it a few times and have learned more about it. When in it, reality makes a new kind of sense. All of the concerns that so weigh you down in ordinary life fall away. You come to understand what Anne means when she says, “Enlightenment is what happens when there is nothing left of us but love.” I wish I could say that I was there all the time, but at least I can taste it.

  I did not imagine that the state I was in had attracted any attention from the visitors, let alone that it had been induced by them as part of a lesson that I didn’t even know that I was receiving.

  It was surpassingly poignant, as if every sweet memory that had ever touched my mind, from a scent of autumn leaves under a boyhood tree to the day I saw my parents’ car crest the hill near our house, bringing my little brother home for the first time, to the moment I looked down at a girl in an office in Manhattan and heard her say, “I’m Anne,” to hundreds and hundreds of other joys, from the tiny to the great, that fill our lives, but which we too often overlook.

  Then I got sleepy. Very sleepy. It was just too much, as if I’d barged into heaven before being called. I went to bed.

  As soon as my head hit the pillow, a completely new gang of visitors came rollicking into my life. I wrote, “The moment I fell asleep, I had a dream that Anne had inexplicably, but out of the kindness of her heart, let a pack of feral dogs into the house…” To this day, I remember how surprised I was when what I interpreted as a pack of small, fast moving black dogs entered the bedroom and went swarming under the bed.

  I leaped up and looked under it. There was nothing there. I now felt that the house was full of people. Instead of grabbing a gun, as I would have done in 1985, and did do in 1989 when I went chasing after the people who’d implanted me, I went quietly and even fairly calmly into the living room to investigate.

  I was “confronted with what was just about the surprise of my life.” The first things I saw as I entered the living room were three large square planters with miniature trees in them. We had nothing like that in our living room. I thought, “Holy God, I’m outside” and immediately turned around to go back into the bedroom—and found myself facing a wall. There was no bedroom anymore. Now I was scared. I feared that I’d gotten lost in some very strange way. Now that I have seen with my own eyes that there is another universe here, I’m not too surprised that I saw that wall. I was in the other version of reality, maybe even the same one that I saw at Pine Ridge. If I was really in a mirror universe, perhaps the door was now behind me.

  Before I go on, I’d like to reflect that our history since the 15 th century has been one of steadily discovering that the physical universe is larger and larger and larger, causing our place in it to feel ever smaller. Before that, we had many different ideas about where we were, but they were all basically Earth-centric. The moon, the sun, the stars all revolved around Earth, and we were her masters. Now we know that there are trillions of stars in trillions of galaxies, and that this is probably only one of an effective infinity of universes…which all probably have an infinity of mirror universes breathing neutrons back and forth between their realities like great, enigmatic hearts. And then there is this little band here on this tiny speck of dust, touched with intelligence and struggling to find our magic as we sail through infinity on the coattails of a wandering star.

  Perhaps the next step is to discover for certain that informed speculations like the mirror universe and the multiverse both actually exist, and that reality is, in fact, infinite. If we are therefore eternal, as we must be if each of us is an infinity of selves in an ever expanding mass of universes, then that might explain why, when I asked one of the visitors back in the late eighties what the universe meant to them, I received such a startling answer.

  When I used to walk in the woods at night in search of meetings with them, I had only very little success. I don’t recall anything like a face-to-face sit-down, although every so often it seemed to me that there was somebody there. One night, during such a moment, I asked aloud, “What does the universe mean to you?” At once, my mind’s eye was filled with the vivid, clear and deeply shocking image of a coffin.

  I realized that if you knew that you were lost in infinity and could never reach either the end of reality or the end of yourself, you might well feel paradoxically claustrophobic. Something you can never leave is a trap, no matter how big it is. But, of course, we don’t feel this way. We don’t know that we’re lost in the stars. Where they see a coffin, we see Star Trek. Maybe it’s not as realistic a state to live in, but I much prefer it, and if they could, I think they would return to it. But when you have opened a door of knowledge in yourself, there is never any turning back.

  The next thing I knew, I was lying in bed again, but not in any sort of comfortable state. Instead, I was dreaming that I was living five different lives at once. Later, I assumed that, if this had been a real event—whatever that means—they were unfolding in parallel lives, if not in parallel universes. One of them was this life, as I was living it then. I continued, “The five of them were distinct, and I was inside five different selves at once. There was no confusion, and I wasn’t on the outside looking in. I was living these lives all at the same time.” My most vivid recollection, looking back, is how normal this fantastic state seemed while it was unfolding.

  I wrote, “In four of these lives, Anne was also present, but not in the fifth, and that was a life I very much wanted to leave. In it, I was walking down a path with a small boy, toward a quay where there were a number of men.” I went on, “In this universe, Anne had died of her stroke, and I was walking with my grandson, who was about three.”

  At the time, I didn’t have a three-year old grandson, and when my oldest grandson was three in 2010, Anne was still fine. When my youngest one will be three in 2021, she will have been on the other side for seven years. So that wasn’t exactly prophetic.

  In the next life, I was still living in my childhood home in San Antonio, which was now worn out and run down. Anne was bravely trying to scrub the kitchen floor. The house has long since been torn down and replaced by another house. It had been in 2007, too. In a third reality, we were living together in an apartment, and the dogs were under the bed. Fingers had grasped my hand and were tugging at it.

  I now know that both the presence of dogs and the tugging on my hand had to do with things that would happen in the future, so I assume that, if these were actual parallel universes and not simply possible alternate lives, that this has to have been the one I’m actually living in. As we shall see.

  The fourth reality was the one where the trees were in the living room. In this one, TV transmissions from another planet were being regularly picked up and rebroadcast by SETI, and this was a decorative motif from the other world, and I have to say that I hope that this actually happens in this universe at some point, but I hasten to add that I am not going to be buying into the idea of having trees in my living room.

  At 4:53 the yanking on my hand grew strong enough to wake me up. Pulling it away, I turned over, saw that there was actually nothing there, and decided—absurdly—to try to get some sleep. The blinds were slightly open, and as I turned over, I saw lights outside the window. The wind was blowing in from the sea and the clouds were racing, but these lights were dead still in the sky and close by. I immediately woke Anne up, and we soon discovered that we could both see the lights, but only when we were
in a certain position in the bed. From any other angle, they were invisible.

  At the time, there was a big sensation about what longtime anomaly researcher Linda Moulton Howe was calling dragonfly drones, which were huge, complicated machines that had either been photographed over isolated areas in northern California or were elaborate hoaxes. So I thought maybe that this thing was a dragonfly drone. After a short time, the lights glided majestically off toward the ocean, moving easily against the wind and not bouncing or struggling in the slightest. Like the objects that had been filmed off the Nimitz in 2004, whatever was holding this object or objects up in the air was not a wing or, say, a balloon. It was not aerodynamic.

  I felt as if I had been, as I put it in the blog, “moving seamlessly” between various universes. I cannot say now that I know what was happening, but there are obviously quite a few other possibilities. I could have been experiencing some sort of mind control or hypnosis, or been drugged, including with substances unknown to us. Some very strange critters were in the apartment. As I have gotten to know them, I have come to understand that they have a stunning mastery of mind and space. Since that day, I don’t think that I have spent much, if any, time with any other sort of entity, not until very recently.

  I don’t know what they are. As far as describing them is concerned, I have only glimpsed them. I can say that they are very small, about the size of a miniature terrier. They are not dogs, but they run in packs and race around at breakneck speed. When they are near you, they are able to plunge you into all sorts of different versions of reality. But what that means—let alone how real the realities are—I have basically no idea.

  As I have gotten to know these entities, I have come to feel the deepest gratitude to them. I have had three different forms as teachers: the grays, the kobolds and now these nameless unknowns. I am not aware of anybody else who has described a striking detail about them that I have observed, so I’m going to leave it out of this text. If anybody else has encountered them, they will know this unmissable detail. In any case, their ability to affect the mind is breathtaking. They created, or induced, my awareness of the different universes with impressive skill. They are also extremely fast. Unlike the others, they run in groups, from as few as two to many. I have never seen one of them alone.

  I think that they are the ones I do the sensing exercise with now. Their intensity, full of desperation, drives me to work harder than ever before, striving to extract the sense from a life that has become so unusual that it is all but impossible to describe in the kind of practical way that seems essential to success.

  Their response has been to provide me with a series of increasingly spectacular and insightful experiences, such as the Contact in the Desert and Pine Ridge experiences that now form such an important part of this book. Like this experience, they concern other universes, meaning that at this point over a period of twelve years, this has been a consistent message.

  There is still another experience, described in Breakthrough, of driving into another world in a Jeep Cherokee with another family’s little boy in the car with me. I was taking him from our country place near Woodstock to a diner on Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey, to be picked up by his father. I took a familiar turn off the divided highway to loop back to the diner where the father was sitting in his pickup waiting for us. To my shock, I found myself on an entirely unfamiliar road. We then spent some minutes driving around in what appeared to be another world. The streets were wide and overspread by lush trees. Set back in lawns were low sandstone colored structures with deep reliefs of serpents on them. Each one had a low arched doorway blocked by a wooden door.

  The boy panicked and tried to jump out of the car. He kept pushing up the automatic lock and I kept pushing it down as I drove through the broad, silent streets looking for a way back. I finally found myself driving across a sort of wasteland and ending up on Route 80 about twenty miles from where we’d left Route 17. By the time we got back to the diner, the father, who had seen us pass by, was standing in the bed of his pickup looking for us.

  The boy, who I was hoping wouldn’t say anything to his very skeptical dad, ran across the parking lot yelling, “Daddy, Daddy, Whitley took me on a ride through the Twilight Zone!” To make it all even stranger, if that is possible, Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling’s home was just a few miles away.

  We never found that eerie neighborhood again.

  I wonder if it is in the same otherworld that I saw in Pine Ridge in 2019 and perhaps wandered through on that wonderfully weird night in 2007.

  Looking back, though, it would seem that movement into other universes has been a consistent feature of my experience. Perhaps somebody has all along been trying to tell me something. Not only, this message goes, are you not alone, you cannot be sure where you are or even, truthfully, what you are, or what powers lie latent in that mysterious human mind of yours.

  Ah, but somebody knows, and they seek to communicate that knowledge to us—not only about who and where we are, but also about who and where they are, and what it will mean for us to finally meet in what that gentle genius I was and am married to called “communion.”

  7

  The Return of the Visitors

  Deep one night in October of 2015, pain—severe—radiated through my left second toe. Anne had passed away just a few months before, and as I had every night since, I had spent my meditation session at 11 calling to her, “Annie, Annie, if you hear me at all, please come, please come to me.”

  I leaped out of bed. I did not connect this with my hand being held back in 2007. In fact, it would take four more years and at least five drafts of this book for me to see the connection.

  I stood gasping, then fumbled to turn on the lamp. But what was it, what just happened? There are no electrical outlets near the bed, no wiring or circuitry at all. I grabbed my phone and looked up symptoms of gout. Not a fit. I sat on the bedside, reached down and rubbed my toes.

  Everything in the apartment seemed normal. I looked at the clock: 3:25. Great, now my night’s sleep was ruined. Next, I looked under the bed, but there was nothing there that could have shocked me. I lifted the foot of the mattress. Nothing there either. Finally, I turned out the light and lay back down. All was quiet, the bed was warm. I drifted into a sort of half-sleep.

  During the day, I thought little about the mystery. I had no idea what happened. But somebody did. They were here in 2007, and now that my situation had changed, they had returned to start a new lesson in the course of study that is my life. Without any idea that this happened, I have crossed a threshold—or rather been zapped across it.

  The next night I felt strong fingers grab my right nipple, pinch it painfully and shake it. This time, I came roaring out of the bed. Once again, I fumbled for the light. I stalked through the small apartment. There was nobody here but me. All the doors and windows were locked. But that was a hand, those were fingers touching me.

  You have every right to wonder, “Why is he being so dense?” The answer is that relationship with the visitors is both so improbable and so hard to grasp. They always seem to show up unexpectedly. But there’s more to it than that. We may say we want to see them. We may even beg them to come. But actual contact is apocalyptic. It means tremendous, overturning change, and that is very threatening to the ego, and it is going to defend itself against what it sees as an unknown threat. This is why so many people can’t take the close encounter experience. It is why we have been fighting the visitors for nearly a century on so many different levels. It’s ego, defending its very existence—and all for nothing. There is no destruction of ego involved, and when you come to see that what you imagined was your “self”—the beginning and end of you—is actually just a social tool with a name attached to it, you realize that you’re not really under any threat at all.

  I sat down in the living room and tried to calm myself. I had finally realized that something extremely strange and yet very familiar was happening to me. There was no question in my mi
nd but that somebody grabbed my nipple. Given the life I have lived, there could be only one explanation: the visitors were back. They had been pretty much in the background ever since Anne’s fatal illness began in 2013. She had been dead now for six weeks, and I was in a state of blackest grief.

  I sensed that this wasn’t just an anonymous “them,” though, and here began a new level of my experience. I cannot say exactly why, but I knew that Anne was involved. Since her passing, I have learned more about how deeply true her insight about the relationship between the dead and our visitors was. We are not just having a close encounter with what appear to be nonhuman beings but also with ourselves.

  If the mirror universe is where what appear to be aliens come from, then maybe it is, just as Homer thought, also where our dead go. After her near-death experience in 2004, Anne felt that there was a sort of breathing between this and another universe, and that when we died here, our consciousness was transferred to another version of ourselves there.

  I sat on my bedside. The feeling that Anne was there was now very strong. It was as if I could almost touch her, and how I longed to! But there’s more. A dissonant note, at least, dissonant to a man enveloped in deepest grief. I sensed that she was laughing at me. In life, she always saw me as entirely too serious.