The Romeo Error

by Lyall Watson

  This certainty turns a prelucid dream into a lucid one and brings with it another kind of certainty. In the lucid dream state the subject is in no doubt at all about the dream. There seems to be a quality to dreaming that is as specific and as elusive as the reality of being awake. Despite the similarity between the sensory experiences and the intellectual processes that take place in waking and dreaming, there is good reason to assume that the two states are totally distinct and that personality can express itself equally easily in either, but not in both at the same time. When you are awake, you can remember how wonderful it felt to launch your body from a dream window and to soar effortlessly over the tiled roofs of the village below. When you are dreaming lucidly, you can remember how terrible it felt to cut your finger on a sharp razor -- and perhaps even try the experiment of doing it deliberately in the dream to compare the two sensations. Personality growth probably depends on both kinds of experience. In waking life we are exposed to forces that shape our bodies and the minds they bear; in dream life, as in play, we have the opportunity to act out the effect of these forces in a variety of circumstances, to relate them to our other experience, and to build a comprehensive and functional attitude to life.

  The fact that babies spend 80 per cent of their sleep time in dreaming and that this proportion declines to less than 15 per cent in aged people supports this idea that the dream state is important for the integration of experience. It seems that almost all the content of dreams derives from sensations collected while awake. Helen Keller, who was deprived of sight, sound, and smell by an attack of scarlet fever soon after birth, dreamed a great deal. At first these were purely physical and undeveloped experiences such as having something heavy fall on her. Later, when she was put in the hands of a skilled tutor who began to describe the world to her in detail, she started to dream in new dimensions, but all these were firmly grounded in her only reliable sensation, that of touch. "Once in my dream I held in my hand a pearl. I have no memory vision of a real pearl. The one I saw in my dream must, therefore, have been a creation of my imagination. It was a smooth exquisitely moulded crystal . . . dew and fire, the velvety green of moss, the soft whiteness of lilies." [145]

  The congenitally blind dream without vision or the rapid eye movements so characteristic of the dream state in sighted people. [19] One blind and deaf patient had never heard of the concept of a dream when questioned by an interpreter, but remembered once waking in inconsolable sorrow having re-experienced the shock of reaching into a pet bird's cage and finding its lifeless body. [209] This relationship of waking sensation with dream experience is elegantly demonstrated by an observation made on a sleeping deaf and mute man who normally communicated by sign language with his hands. [180] When he dreamed of talking normally with other people, an electromyograph attached to his sleeping body showed strong action currents being produced not in his larynx, but in his fingers.

  The dependence of dreams on the information acquired while awake is enormous, but it is not total. In 1965 an Australian study showed that it was possible for people sleeping under heavy sedation to learn to discriminate between two tones, one of which was accompanied by an electric shock. [16] When the same two tones were played to the subjects after they awoke, an electroencephalograph showed that their brains responded to the shock tone and not to the neutral sound. This conditioning falls a long way short of the claims made for sleep-learning by those who sell the necessary apparatus. Most studies indicate that learning is largely confined to those periods when the potential student is drowsy and on the verge of sleep, but there does seem to be a difference in responsiveness between the different kinds of sleep. [250]

  As we fall asleep, we pass through four recognizable stages of orthodox sleep in which we become progressively more difficult to awaken. Then, when rapid eye movements begin and we go into paradoxical dream sleep, there is a sudden quantitative change. Muscle tone falls rapidly and the body becomes limp; spinal reflexes disappear and even snoring ceases. As brain activity increases, receptivity decreases. [49] The most complete physical withdrawal seems to occur in dreams that become lucid. The lucid dreamer is almost impossible to arouse, and there is not a single record of a lucid dream that incorporates external stimuli in the way that nonlucid dreams often will. It seems that when you know you are dreaming, you have achieved an almost total withdrawal from the confines of the body.

  There are countless anecdotes of dreams in which the subjects seem to have been able to acquire information otherwise not available to them. At the Maimonides Dream Laboratory in New York, Montague Ullman and Stanley Krippner have been trying to analyze this possibility objectively. [97] They attach their subjects to the usual electroencephalographic apparatus and after each period of rapid eye movement, wake them and ask about the dream they have just had. While this is going on, a third person in a room at the other end of the building concentrates all night on a painting chosen at random from a large collection. In the morning the dreamer is shown a selection of pictures and asked which one most closely matches his dreams. There have been many striking correlations On one night the target painting was "Zapatistas" by Orozco, showing a group of Mexican revolutionaries on the move against a dark background of swirling clouds and mountains. The subject dreamed of "New Mexico," "heavy clouds and mountains," and "a colossal film production" Even when the relationship between dream and painting is less obvious, a panel of independent judges seldom have any difficulty in choosing the correct picture from a series, purely on the basis of the recorded dream reports.

  This success could be construed as evidence of telepathy rather than of a detachment of the dreamer from the site of sleep, but more recent work at the same laboratory sheds a new light on the problem. In 1969 Malcolm Bessent, a young British psychic, joined the group and dreamed of "a bowl of fruit" when the target was Cokovsky's still life "Fruits and Flowers"; and of "shallow pools" and of "making a collage" when the target picture was a collage called "People Soup." [278] What made these hits on the target particularly exciting was that there was nobody in the third room thinking about the paintings and that, on several occasions, the painting was not even selected until the following morning. Bessent seems in his dreams to be able not only to travel to a different place than that occupied by his sleeping body but also to achieve a separation in time. It would be most interesting to know how many of his dreams were lucid, because this dissociation can apparently be controlled at will when you realize that you are dreaming. One of the subjects working with the Oxford Institute of Psychophysical Research reports that in a lucid dream it is possible to move to any environment simply by "closing one's eyes and concentrating imaginatively." [198]

  There is one old but well-documented case that illustrates all the possibilities inherent in this situation. [249] On October 3,1863, the steamship City of Limerick sailed from Liverpool with S. R. Wilmot, a manufacturer from Connecticut, on board on his way home to his wife and family in the United States. On the night of October 13 Wilmot dreamed that his wife came to his cabin clad only in her nightdress, paused at the door when she discovered that there was another occupant, then advanced to his side, stooped down to kiss him, and after a short while, withdrew. In the morning the other occupant of the cabin, who is described as "a sedate and very religious man," was angry with Wilmot for no apparent reason. When pressed for an explanation, William Tait exclaimed, "You're a pretty fellow, to have a lady come and visit you in that way." It transpired that while lying wide awake in his berth, he had witnessed a scene corresponding exactly to what Wilmot had dreamed. When the ship arrived in New York on October 23, one of the first things Wilmot's wife asked him was whether he had received a visit from her ten days previously. Knowing of the stormy conditions in the Atlantic, and having heard reports of the wreck of another ship that left Liverpool at the same time, she had gone to bed on that night feeling very anxious for her husband's safety. During the night she dreamed that she had crossed a wild sea; found a low black steamer; passe
d through it until she came to her husband's cabin; saw a man in the other berth looking straight at her and was for a moment afraid to go in; but did anyway and kissed him on the forehead before leaving. When questioned she was able to describe the unusual layout of the cabin precisely.

  This case was followed up by the officers of the American Society for Psychical Research, and there seems no reason to doubt the testimonies of those involved, but it is impossible to pass judgment on it over a century later. The value of the story now lies in the possibilities it suggests. If everything happened just as reported, then Wilmot and his wife shared a dream experience, but continued in it to maintain their own identities, seeing and feeling what they would have done had they been carrying out the actions in normal waking life. The fascinating part, however, is the fact that Tait, who was wide awake, also took part in the same incident from his point of view. The fact that he seems to have seen, and could later describe, Wilmot's wife suggests that the energy body we postulated earlier might continue to keep a typical and recognizable shape while detached from its physical counterpart.

  And suddenly we are in at the deep end of that murky world of phantasms where science has little chance of keeping its head above the vapor and confusion. I regret this. From what I have seen of the area, I believe that out-of-the-body experiences are an objective reality and could become amenable to analysis, but the quest for information is bedeviled by the nature of the evidence itself, which is necessarily circumstantial.

  I can even add to the confusion myself. While traveling with a safari group in Kenya, my vehicle skidded and overturned on a dusty bush track. It rolled over twice before coming to rest, poised precariously on the edge of a dry storm water gully. I found myself standing outside the small bus, looking at the head and shoulders of a young boy in the party who had been pushed halfway through the canvas roof on the last roll and would be crushed if the vehicle fell any farther -- as it seemed bound to do. Then, without pause, I recovered consciousness in the front seat of the bus, rubbed the red dust out of my eyes, climbed through the window, and went around to help the boy free himself before the battered vehicle settled itself into its final resting position. My memory of the details "seen" while still unconscious is very vivid, and there is no doubt in my own mind that my vantage point at that moment was detached from my body; but even a personal experience of this kind remains remote from any tangible scientific explanation.

  The problem remains to be resolved, and I think that the only hope of a solution lies in reducing the situation to its most basic biological constituents. This helps, but as you will see, it is still a little like trying to reconstruct the jigsaw puzzle of an unknown picture when half the pieces are missing and the ones that you do have either are in dispute or keep changing their shape.

  Chapter Six: DISSOCIATION between body and mind

  Take the fertilized egg of a salamander. Allow it to develop until it begins to look something like a young amphibian, then cut through the jelly layer, remove the embryo, and put it into a saline solution. Within five minutes the complex integrated organism will be reduced to a mound of separate cells.

  An alkaline medium breaks down the cohesion between cells of different shapes and turns them all into identical rounded individuals without a future. If some of these lost cells are put back into normal acidity, they rush together into a heap, all struggling so hard to hold on to each other that they form a sphere. After a while in this state of indiscriminate adhesion, the cells regain something of their old identity and regroup themselves by seeking out those belonging to their own kind of tissue. The success of this resorting and subsequent development depends directly on the number of cells taken from the original mound. If too few are present, or some kinds are missing altogether, the culture suffers an erosion of pattern and eventually loses all its original habits and runs down into anonymity. Only if all the embryonic parts are adequately represented will the cells succeed in getting back into the proper shape and go on to fulfill their collective destiny and become a salamander.

  In theory every individual cell has the genetic information necessary for making a functional adult. Carrot and tobacco plants have been grown from single cells, but in the more advanced animals this blueprint seems to be useless without some extra factor provided by the presence of a number of other cells similarly equipped. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts and the essential additive provided by being communal may well turn out to be the elusive second system.

  The late Harold Burr, of Yale University, believed that this invisible organizer is an electrodynamic field. [34] He used the analogy of a magnet to explain how it might work: "If iron filings are scattered over a card held over a magnet they will arrange themselves in the pattern of the 'lines of force' of the magnet's field. And if the filings are thrown away and fresh ones scattered on the card, the new filings will assume the same pattern as the old." It is entirely possible that something like this could happen in the body of a salamander or a man. The components of even the most complex organism are being continually discarded and replaced with fresh ones drawn from the environment. The existence of a controlling field would go a long way toward resolving one of the oldest biological problems -- that of explaining how it is that the new cells are able to adopt the same functions and arrange themselves in the same pattern as the old ones. A life field would also help explain why it is that we have so far failed to find any reliable way of distinguishing life from death. It is possible that while such a field exists, no matter how weak it may be, clinical death will be reversible and that goth only takes the place of life when the field has disappeared altogether.

  Burr also said that the "traditional modern doctrine, that the chemical elements determine the structure and organization of the organism, fails to explain why a certain structural constancy persists despite continuous metabolism and chemical flux." [34] It was his concern over the lack of adequate explanation for the stability and continuity of life that led him to formulate his theory of an electrodynamic field. This was first described in 1935 as a field "which is in part determined by its atomic physio-chemical components and which in part determines the behaviour and orientation of those components." [36] Up until his death almost forty years later, Burr saw no reason to change this definition, but I think he would have been happier with both the traditional doctrine and his theory if he could have seen the work that has just been published on the behavior of enzymes.

  Enzymes are of vital importance to Burr's theory (of an organizer that orchestrates the arrangement of patterns in living matter without itself being changed), because they are catalysts. One molecule of an enzyme can react with and change up to fifty thousand molecules of a substrate in a single second, and emerge unscathed from this biological whirlpool to start all over again. [129] Enzyme molecules are also highly specific and of such complex shapes that few others will fit them. One of the problems in the unraveling of their undoubtedly complex roles has been understanding how such rigid structures could adapt to keep pace with changing environmental circumstances. This certainly worried Burr, but now the difficulty has been swept away. Daniel Koshland has shown that the enzyme molecule is by no means inflexible but can be induced to fit a range of chemical shapes in the same way that a rubber glove will mold itself to a variety of human hands. [152]

  This is a gross simplification of the process, because the shape of protein molecules is far more complex. A diffuse spider web spread across a tangle of tiny twigs and sprinkled with dewdrops might be more representative of the true shape, but the same principle applies and the whole process is governed by electrical interaction. The two reactors fall into each other's fields and are drawn together by opposite electrical charges on mutually attractive parts of their structures; then the enzyme lock is induced to fit the substrate key by being pulled into the right shape by the distribution of their matching charges. Here, at the most crucial level of the organization of life, is evidence of a controlling field which i
s rigid enough to perpetuate a pattern and yet flexible enough to keep pace with the flux of a living system. Burr was right to call it electrodynamic.

  As soon as he had perfected an apparatus sufficiently sensitive to measure electrical potential even in very small organisms, Burr began a program of research to find out whether these fields were universal and whether or not they could be shown to follow any recognizable pattern. In the forty years that have passed since this research began, Burr and his co-workers have proved beyond reasonable doubt that man, and every other animal and plant ever tested, possesses an electrical field that can be measured even some distance away from the body and that mirrors, and perhaps even controls, changes in that body. [233]

  One of his first subjects was the salamander. Any one of these adult amphibians can be shown to possess an electrical field, complete with a positive and a negative pole, arranged along the longitudinal axis of the body. [32] A young salamander and even an embryo show this polarity, which can be measured in the water a short distance away from the animal's body. This is not really surprising. We would expect a bilaterally symmetrical organism to produce a pattern of the same kind, one with a distinct head and a tail. Burr kept on tracing the development of the field back through the growth of the embryo and found to his astonishment that it existed even in the unfertilized egg. This is the real surprise. When measurements were made on simple spheres of jelly recently laid by a female salamander, the polarity was present. Burr marked the pole where there was a noticeable drop in voltage with a blue dye and found that after the eggs were fertilized and began to grow, the head of the salamander was always opposite this point. In other words, the embryo cells arranged themselves according to the pattern of an electrical field that was there before the individual came into existence.