Suspicious Minds

Answer me this, I won’t take you to court
Did you go crazy, or did you report
On that day they wounded New York? - Leonard Cohen

Blogger's been giving me serious grief the last few weeks and I haven't been able to publish for days, so since you may not even see this for a while, I won't make it a long post.

I'd had only a Discovery Channel-like familiarity with the work of Rupert Sheldrake when I began considering issues here such as the mysteries of consciousness, DNA and holographic fields, and I've since received much encouragement from readers to get better acquainted. So I'm binging. And I'm thinking how sooner, and wiser, I'd have gotten to where I am now, if I'd done this years ago.

In The Sense of Being Stared At, Sheldrake devotes a chapter to human forebodings and presentiments of disaster. Soon after 9/11, he began gathering dreams and premonitions of the event, 57 in total, many which had been described to friends and family before the attack.

Five nights before 9/11, Manhattan forensic scientist Mike Cherni had "an unusually vivid dream":

I dreamt that I was a passenger on a commercial jet, seated at a window seat on the left-hand side. The cabin was filled with sunlight, and outside visibility was excellent. I don't remember the beginning of the dream, but I remember a pervasive sense of dread. The passengers and I were deeply concerned about the flight path we were taking; we were flying very low over Manhattan's buildings. I have flown into New York City's three major airports many times and am familiar with the normal approach routes, and this approach was quite out of the ordinary. I also love flying and had had no bad experiences as a passenger or any bad dreams about flying. Yet in this dream I was very frightened about how close we were to the buildings. Many of the passengers were very vocal and shared my concern. I recognized buildings as we flew over them, and it was clear that we were flying directly south over the southern tip of the island. Then there was a tremendous impact and I woke up. This dream disturbed me for days afterward, enough that I described the dream to my wife.

On the morning of Sept 11, Steven Brown dreamed he was "in the stairwell of the World Trade Center with a lot of people trying to get out," while Gina Vigo dreamt "Manhattan was hit by an incredible blizzard. People were running for cover from the fierce gusts of snow and everything was white. Later on, when I saw footage of the falling ash, it was strangely reminiscent." Audry Parrish dreamed she was in one of the towers when it caught on fire. She escaped by crawling across a glass bridge halfway up into the second tower, "when it too caught fire and burned."

This isn't the boneyard of Ripley's Believe It or Not. The stories aren't fabulist amusements which have no bearing on where we find ourselves today. They speak to our deeper nature buried beneath generations of fear-bred ignorance, and reveal intuitive capacities we're expected to deny.

Regarding 9/11 synchronicities such as The Lone Gunmen's March, 2001 pilot episode (hijacked, remote-controlled airliners target the World Trade Center to trigger a war for profit), and the Coup's June 2001 cover art, (the towers explode near the floors of impact), I contended the artists were not somehow tipped off to the plot, but rather they tapped into the dark frequencies which soon after began troubling the dreams of so many. I'm beginning to wonder whether it will be by recovering our ability to astonish ourselves that we will save ourselves. If we become fully human, then our executioners are finished. (I mean to explore this more later, when Blogger is more dependable.)

In another case from The Sense of Being Stared At, Amanda Bernsohn didn't dream of crashing planes or a burning World Trade Center: "I was walking down a street that was covered in swastikas that were spray painted on the building walls. The Nazis had invaded New York, but I wasn't able to find any people at all."

Sheldrake notes that Bernsohn's dream was of "horror in Manhattan," though it "was not at all like the WTC disaster."

About that, perhaps, Sheldrake is wrong.