by Steve Volk
In this dream, I was home alone when a man’s face appeared in the window. He saw me notice him and receded slowly into the dark, his face disappearing like a fish tickling the surface of the water and retreating into the depths. But a moment later, his face emerged from the dark again. Each time I had the dream I was terrified by this point, wondering, Who in the hell is this creepy dude?
The way the dream usually went, he eventually moved away from the window and knocked on my front door. Slowly. Each beat of his hand on the wood was interrupted by long seconds of silence. The dream would always end the same way: after a few minutes of his knocking, I just got pissed. Who is this guy? I’d think. Trying to terrify me like this?
“Come on!” I’d start yelling in my dream. “Come get some of this. You’re gonna kill me? I’m going to kill you. I’m begging you to come in here, so I can murder you. I dare you to come in here!”
I’d had variations on this dream maybe two dozen times or more, and every time, before long, I was double-dog-daring this boogeyman to come into my dream house so I could beat him to death. And each time, he obliged me. Suddenly, he kicked the door open. We flew at each other in a rage. And just as we began to grapple, I woke up throwing punches, my right hand balled into a fist.
Using the MILD technique, I imagined all this repeatedly, only instead of becoming filled with fear or anger at the sight of the man’s face in my window, I imagined myself realizing, This is a dream.
From just this part of the exercise, I quickly realized something startling: I’d had lucid dreams in the past, during nightmares. But in those dreams, when I realized I was dreaming, I used that incredible power … to wake myself up. LaBerge consoled me, saying this is a common reaction. Just not terribly helpful. “When we realize it’s a dream,” said LaBerge, “the appropriate response is to take that seriously. The boogeyman chasing you has no external reality. You don’t have to wake up or fly away. In fact, the best results people get are when they react to whatever’s chasing them with curiosity and compassion.”
And so in the next stage of MILD, I started imagining more fruitful responses than abject fear and murderous rage. And after a few days of meditating on this, maybe twenty minutes per day, I saw the bastard. I was asleep and there he was, at my window, leering. I’ve had this dream before, my dream self thought. And that was all it took to bring me the awareness I needed. For the first time ever, I had real lucidity in a dream.
The walls of my apartment seemed to grow more stable and more vivid. The floor underneath my feet felt solid. Dear God, I thought. This is just like The Matrix. I felt as if I had just appeared, in some alternate reality. I could even feel the pads of my fingertips tickling my palms as I nervously considered balling my hands into fists.
Feeling in control of my fear, I went to my front door—and opened it.
A few seconds later, my tormentor appeared. And to my surprise, he was not particularly malevolent looking. In fact, he looked like any ole guy at all—a generic beer-drinking dude. But he was having none of this new Steve. He filled the doorframe, looking at me quizzically, as if to say, Hey, this isn’t what we do …
But I held my ground. I said nothing.
His face took on a sour cast then, like he was offended that I wouldn’t play along. He reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a gleaming black handgun. He paused for a moment, the gun pointed toward the floor, and regarded me carefully—to see if my reaction changed.
To say that the moment felt real describes nothing and everything. In normal dreams, images retain a kind of washed-out quality. In lucid dreams, conscious awareness can bring out every detail. LaBerge says this is because we’re not just seeing objects, as we do in waking life, but every image we’ve ever seen of the object, every idea we’ve ever had about the object—and all our emotional associations, besides.
I could smell my own sweat, and his, my apartment suddenly musky as a locker room. I could see where the serial number was etched on my mental model of his gun.
I was lucid, but didn’t even think to ask the boogeyman any questions. Like Why are you here? Or What do you want? The kinds of questions LaBerge recommends. The truth is, I was too frightened to think of anything to say. But I held on to the thought that, because this was a dream, no harm would come to me.
He lifted the gun from his side. He pointed it at me. I could almost feel the barrel, somehow, from six feet away, aimed directly at my chest. He paused. He looked right into my eyes. And I had the sense he was giving me one last opportunity to panic, to slip back into my usual reaction.
I felt a sudden upswelling of fear, like bile in my mouth, but steeled myself. This, I said, is a dream.
He’d had enough. He pulled the trigger, the sound enormous. Each explosion filled and colored the room where we stood. But when I looked down at my chest, nothing much was happening. My shirt moved a little, as if blown by the wind. I felt no pain, saw no blood. And I experienced … elation, a thrill that lucid dreaming really works, and that I had just now stood up to my own fear. I had just stood up to bullets.
After the sound of the last gunshot faded, he stood there for a moment, still pointing his smoking gun at me—the only sound now the click of an empty chamber. Then he let his hand drop, suddenly, to his side.
We stood there for a second, in silence. And then he did something I never would have expected. He grinned at me. I let my own tension out with a laugh, and he started laughing, too. Suddenly, we were buds. Amigos. My personal dream terrorist, my friend. He nodded and a wordless communication passed between us: Congratulations, he seemed to say. You got it.
I woke up, feeling like Superman. Feeling like Neo. And spooky dude? He hasn’t been back. No more mornings waking up tense. No more mornings colored, even momentarily, by the natural anxiety associated with a recurring nightmare.
What Hawaii still had in store for me, however, proved even more powerful than that. What I learned in Stephen LaBerge’s lucid dreaming workshop shed a new light on the paranormal—and even set to rest the Family Ghost. But before we come to the close of this tale, there is one more story I need to share.
Chapter 9
After-Death Communication?
How a New Therapy Uses the Dead to Help Patients Live
When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true, till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence enough,—this command, I say, seems to me the queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave.
—William James, The Will to Believe
Tom Lareau broke on a hillside in Dak Do.
A Claymor mine exploded, wounding his best friend. Lareau reached for him and saw that his friend’s legs were almost entirely blown off. Only some tendons and a thighbone bare as rock still descended from his hips.
Lareau picked his friend up, slung him over his shoulder, and started up the hillside, marching toward the area where Evac helicopters had already begun to descend. On the way there, the backs of Lareau’s legs grew increasingly wet and warm. And the wounded man hollered in his ear, “Call my family,” he said. “You tell them what happened. Take care of my family. Don’t let me die.”
“By the time I reached the top of that hill,” Lareau told me, roughly thirty years later, “I had lost my mind.”
By the time Lareau reached the top of that hill, his friend was dead.
Lareau, like so many Vietnam veterans, carried the traumatic events he witnessed in war inside himself for decades. He worked to the exclusion of all else. He wanted no friends, and the world obliged him. He never contacted his friend’s family, because the prospect of facing that hillside again was just too tough. He even tried to kill himself on two occasions. Fi
nally, in 1995, he wound up at a Chicago area Veteran’s Administration medical center. There, he met a doctor by the name of Allan Botkin.
Botkin provided him with an experience Lareau still can’t explain. All he knows is—he is finally content. “I saw my friend. He was sitting on a rock in a clearing in the jungle. He told me he was okay. He was in a beautiful, peaceful place, and he told me it was all right that I never contacted his family. He understood.”
Lareau does not know if he received a communication from his friend or merely enjoyed a vivid, pleasing vision—a fantasy that healed him. Botkin doesn’t claim to understand the experience all that much better. But he does claim he can induce similar experiences in others. In fact, Botkin claims that he and the therapists he has trained have induced the experience in thousands of people already.
I heard Botkin promoting a book about his procedure on the radio and called him shortly thereafter. At this point, my mother was alive, her cancer not diagnosed. But my brother had died more than a decade earlier, and my brother-in-law had passed away just months before. I decided to tell this story here, out of chronological order, because Botkin’s odd therapy draws upon virtually all of the issues raised in this book—issues associated with consciousness, belief, dreamlike states, the relationship between mind and body, recovery from grief, and our current understanding, or misunderstanding of the paranormal. And frankly, I think I understand it better now, after all my subsequent research, than I did at the time.
Botkin had told me, over the phone, that he wasn’t claiming to put people directly in contact with their deceased loved ones. But he wasn’t claiming not to, either. “I don’t know what’s happening, exactly,” he said. “But I do know it’s safe and it’s effective in helping people deal with their grief.”
Botkin and the retired soldiers I ultimately met with were on something of a mission. Thousands of American soldiers, they said, returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, face more danger at home. Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), grief, guilt and loss, addiction and recovery—all lie in wait, roadside bombs threatening the rest of their lives. “I know Dr. Al can help them,” one of Botkin’s soldiers said.
Five years later, I think that Botkin’s therapy might be more complicated than either believers or skeptics would at first admit, and that some concerted effort should be made to understand his strange procedure. But I also know: the only way Botkin will get a wider hearing, is if we reframe our view of the paranormal.
IN PERSON, AL BOTKIN is a big man, well over six feet tall, his hair close cropped and blond, his shoulders broad, his manner matter of fact. A former athlete, Botkin pursued a career in basketball before he blew out a knee. And when I met him, he still carried himself with an athlete’s physical confidence and upright posture. “I’m still surprised that all this happened,” he told me. “I know, everybody says this. But I am the last person I ever thought would start a therapy like this one. I’ve never been, and still am not, a ‘New Age’ guy. But this started happening, and it seemed to be helping people. So I went with it.”
Botkin calls his therapy “induced after-death communication,” or IADC, a moniker he admits is paranormally loaded. He defends his naming decision, pointing out that it is an attention getter and it accurately depicts the way most patients describe it. Personally, I think he may have doomed himself with this name; he took a therapy that might already bear some Paranormal Taint and further lathered it in hoo ha. Certainly, the fact that his therapy has grown in the five years since I met him but has never come close to catching on might be taken as evidence of this.
Whatever the name, certainly, Botkin was always going to face an uphill climb. His therapy originates in an unusual treatment, called “eye movement desensitization and reprocessing,” or EMDR. Like Botkin’s IADC therapy, the discovery of EMDR has a kind of mythic quality, tied up in a single unlikely event. In 1987, Dr. Francine Shapiro, a trained psychotherapist, had physically recovered from a bout with cancer. But as she walked around a small lake, on a spring day, she ruminated on her own anxiety. The sun shone, but her disposition was gray. And then, suddenly, she simply didn’t feel the weight of anxiety anymore. Good feeling had returned to her with a haste she found jarring.
This might sound like a kind of non-happening to most people; certainly, it did at first to me. Mental states pass. That is their very nature. But Shapiro was deeply concerned with this subject—concerned for her life.
In her book, EMDR, Shapiro describes how her doctor had warned that her cancer could come back. How to prevent it? He had no answer. When she discovered that both her own cancer and the colitis that killed her sister had potentially been linked to stress, she resolved to become her own doctor; and so, by the time she found herself near this lakeside, she had spent a lot of time exploring the relationship between mind and body, in hope of helping other people and herself.
She worked as both researcher and subject, continually monitoring her own body for links between mental states and physical effects. And so, having suddenly felt her depression lift, with no explanation she could find, she dwelled on the sudden change as she walked by the lake. What had even been on her mind, previously, that troubled her? Sure enough, she found the source of her negativity again, but incredibly, she discovered, those thoughts had lost their emotional charge.
She was even more intrigued now, and she had the self-awareness necessary to notice that, as she recalled these bleak ideas, she felt her own eyes move spontaneously back and forth. She began experimenting. She riffled through a mental inventory of emotionally charged memories and depressing thoughts. And as she did so, she purposefully moved her eyes side to side.
Over and over, she noticed the same effect. The depressing thoughts took hold, then quickly lost their power.
She spent the next many weeks asking friends and acquaintances to go through the same procedure. And as she heard their reports, she developed a protocol to elicit the best results.
The method she came up with, dubbed EMDR, was both simple and strange seeming—combining both psychology and physiology. In phase one, the therapist and client talk about some traumatic memory and the client is encouraged to reflect on the images, sounds, or emotions associated with it. Then, the physiological component of EMDR is initiated. In this next phase, the therapist asks the patient to follow the movement of some object—strictly with his or her eyes. “Don’t move your head at all,” Botkin told me, when it was my turn.
The idea is to get the patient’s eyes to move, left-right, left-right, as if they are witnessing a Ping-Pong match.
Individual therapists use different objects. Some raise the index and middle fingers of their hands, moving them side to side directly in front of the patient’s face. Others use an electronic gizmo that sends a single pinpoint of light pinging back and forth.
Shapiro began publishing on EMDR in 1989, and a new therapy was born. Or was it? According to Shapiro herself, in an updated edition of her book, though there are some theories under research, the exact mechanism by which EMDR works remains something of a mystery. So I digress, for just a moment, to ask the question: Does this make EMDR paranormal? I ask because EMDR faced a similar level of stigmatization.
Therapists had been working with a variety of treatments for many years, in the wake of natural disasters and wars, to help individual patients get their lives back. But the effectiveness of varying post-traumatic stress therapies has been notor-iously difficult to sort out, and some PTSD cases have simply seemed intractable. So, as might be expected, many in the psychological community were deeply suspicious of Shapiro’s odd origin story—the lady by the lake, suddenly glimpsing this steady, passable bridge between mind and body. But as Shapiro herself puts it, the main criticism seemed to be that EMDR was “too good to be true.”
The debate raged among U.S. psychologists throughout the 1990s; the Wikipedia page on the subject provides a quick view into the assertions and counter-assertions that continue to this day. But for now,
it seems, EMDR is winning: numerous papers demonstrate that the therapy helps patients and has a measurable impact on brain function. And the practice of EMDR is gaining adherents, not losing them. Shapiro’s EMDR Institute estimates that 100,000 practitioners worldwide have been trained in EMDR, which has been endorsed as an effective treatment for PTSD by the American Psychiatric Association, the Department of Veterans Affairs/Department of Defense, and the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
Botkin himself even refers to the time “before EMDR” as “the bad old days.” He spent the 1980s, before Shapiro had published her work, working at the Veteran’s Administration (VA) Hospital in Chicago, where exposure therapy was still the standard treatment. “We had these guys, traumatized war veterans, watching war movies,” he said, laughing darkly. “I mean, we sat them down in a room and turned these films on with scenes of the most awful violence. And we told them, when they wanted to leave, to stay because it would make them better.”
At that point, in his own estimation, Botkin’s career amounted to ten years of failure. “It was rare, in my experience, to see a patient really get better,” he said. “The VA was a depressing place. And we told ourselves that it wasn’t us, or our treatment. It was our clients. They were just so damaged in the war… .”
But for a sense of professional desperation, Botkin was an unlikely practitioner of EMDR. He trained as a behavioral therapist, earning his doctorate in psychology in 1983 from Baylor University, and for a long time he believed in the central tenet of behaviorism: its singular focus on the way we respond to stimuli, its insect creed. “People’s inner lives,” Botkin told me, “their thoughts, seemed entirely irrelevant to me. I thought you just had to look at their behavior.”