Sitting in front of my fire, though, I found that I could not concentrate on hypotheses. My mind kept returning to memory. Intellectually, I was unsure about what the visitors were. But my emotional self did not share that indecision. My emotional response was to real people, albeit nonhuman ones.
Hypnosis had made the memories very vivid. When I rose out of the woods under hypnosis, I actually felt the sensation of rushing upward, just as if I were in an extremely fast elevator. I saw the trees below me, standing in the night, glowing faintly with a covering of snow. I can remember seeing them between my knees, getting rapidly smaller.
The space I entered smelled like warm Cheddar cheese with a hint of sulfur. This sulfur odor has been reported by others. There was a discarded coverall lying partly on the bench, partly on the floor. I had the strong impression that I was in a living room of some sort. For the most part, people feel that they are in an examination room.
Sitting before me was the most astonishing being I have ever seen in my life, made the more astonishing by the fact that I knew her. I say her, but I don't know why. To me this is a woman, perhaps because her movements are so graceful, perhaps because she has created states of sexual arousal in me, or maybe it is simply the memory of her hand touching the side of my chest one time, so lightly and yet with such firmness.
In subsequent months I found that people who have had the experience often felt that they were familiar with one of the visitors, and usually perceived this person to be of the opposite sex. People generally appeared for help with a single memory, maybe two. When they discovered a continuity of experience they were usually as stunned as I was. I also noticed that the fact that people report multiple-visitor experiences over the course of their lives had been published very minimally, even in the UFO literature. I was virtually certain that my own hypnosis was the first time I had encountered what seemed to me to be a fantastically improbable notion.
It was interesting to me that the idea of multiple experiences would be shared by so many people, given that there has been so little cultural reinforcement of it. Published accounts generally avoided this aspect, because a single experience with the visitors stretches credibility so much that an assertion like this seems impossible to maintain.
That night at the cabin, I found myself thinking about the one I knew, turning her presence over and over in my mind. She had those amazing, electrifying eyes . . . the huge, staring eyes of the old gods .... They were featureless, in the sense that I could see neither pupil nor iris. She was seated across from me, her legs drawn up, her hands on her knees. Her hands were wide when placed flat, narrow and long when dangling at her sides. There was a structure, perhaps of bones, faintly visible under the skin. And yet other parts of her body seemed almost like a sort of exoskeleton, like an insect would have.
She was undeniably appealing to me. In some sense I thought I might love this being — almost as much as I might my own anima. I bore toward her the same feelings of terror and fascination that I might toward someone I saw staring back at me from the depths of my unconscious.
There was in her gaze an element that is so absolutely implacable that I had other feelings about her, too. In her presence I had no personal freedom at all. I could not speak, could not move as I wished.
I wondered, before the fire, if that wasn't a sort of relief. I had reported that I had been terrified in her presence. Certainly I remember fear. But was that an accurate portrayal of my actual state? If I could give up my autonomy to another. I might experience not only fear but also a deep sense of rest. It would be a little like dying to really give oneself up in that way, and being with her was also a little like dying.
When they held me in their arms, I had been as helpless as a baby, crying like a baby, as frightened as a baby.
I realized that the extraordinarily powerful states I was examining could lead me in two undesirable directions. First, the sheer helplessness that they evoked created awe, which could lead to a desire to comply . . . and then to love. Second, the fear caused such confusion that one could not be sure how to feel.
Her gaze seemed capable of entering me deeply, and it was when I had looked directly into her eyes that I felt my first taste of profound unease. It was as if every vulnerable detail of my self were known to this being. Nobody in the world could know another human soul so well, nor could one man look into the eyes of another so deeply, and to such exact effect. I could actually feel the presence of that ocher person within me — which was as disturbing as it was curiously sensual. Their eyes are often described as "limitless," "haunting,"' and "baring the soul." Can anything other than a part of oneself know one so well? It's possible, certainly. To an intelligence of sufficiently greater power, it may be that we would seem as obvious as animals seem to us — and we might feel as exposed as do some dogs when their masters stare into their eyes.
The realization that something was actually occurring within me because this person was looking at me — that she could apparently look into me — filled me with the deepest longing I can ever remember feeling . . . and with the deepest suspicion.
I wondered that night in the cabin if it was the sheer impact of the experience that had fixed the image of this being so vividly in my mind, or had communion somehow come alive within me? And was she still here in some sense . . . watching even as I sat before my fire?
As I remembered her I found myself filling with a formless question. Groping for what it was that perplexed me, I recalled an exchange that now came to seem very important. I'd had a very distinct impression of her, that she was old. Not just aged, like an elderly person, but really old. Why had I felt this? I could not be sure.
I still remember her voice, soft, coming from I know not where, answering me: "Yes, I'm old." When she spoke in my head, there was a lilting quality to it. But when she used her voice, it was startlingly deep to be coming from so slight a creature. It was more than a bass: It sounded like it was booming out from the depths of a cave.
I remembered my protest to her when she reassured me about the operation not hurting me. The sense of helplessness was an awful thing to contemplate. "You have no right," I had said.
"We do have a right." Five enormous words. Stunning words. We do have a right. Who gave it to them? By what progress of ethics had they arrived at that conclusion? I wondered if it required debate, or seemed so obvious to them that they never questioned it.
The fire before me sputtered. I opened the vent on the stove and it obediently flared up again.
Maybe their right came from a different direction than one might think. If they were a part of us, it might be that we granted them the right they assert.
Listening to the crackle of the fire mingle with the ticking of the clock, I thought that perhaps I might welcome voices of instruction. After finishing Nature's End with James Kunetka, I began to feel strongly that the present world situation was unsustainable. I did not think that the world was actually ending, but I could easily have been persuaded that the biosphere would soon change so catastrophically that an immense amount of human life would be lost.
I wondered if a mind, contemplating terrors such as this, might provide itself with gods, if only to ease the burden of being alone with the fear.
If they were real visitors, though, I wanted to know the ethics behind their assertion of their "right." Of course, we ourselves barely question our rights over the other species on earth. How odd it was to find oneself suddenly under the very power that one so easily assumes over the animals.
I thought of some lowing cows, their bells tinkling on a long-ago Texas evening, or of my cat asleep on my lap back in the city. trusting its little self utterly to an affection that to me was casual, but to Sadie was the center of the universe.