Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber Page A

acknowledged expert and, even after this hypnosis session, he told me that he thought I was sane.
    But how could anybody not be psychotic and yet have these spectacular delusions?
    As I walked I considered the problem. What should I tell my wife? And how about my son? To what degree were they involved? Never in my life had I felt as I felt then: trapped in a mysterious cavern of a life that had once seemed so clear and understandable.
    How could it be that this went back into my childhood? How could it be ? And if that wasn't true, and my mind had chosen to do this to itself, then what was it doing, and why?
    Much later I listened to the tapes of other people's memories and hypnosis sessions (with their permission) and read Budd Hopkins's book, Missing Time . I then participated in a colloquy with other people who remember being taken. There I found that multiple-episode memories are quite commonplace. Many people who report being taken report a lifetime pattern much like the one I had discovered.
    I wrestled with the notion that something might have been happening in my life — real encounters — that were having a tremendous, hitherto unconscious effect on me. Certainly I had acted as if this were true before any conscious memories had emerged. The conscious memories didn't really come before the first week in January 1986. Yet, as early as the summer of 1985 I had become nervous about "people in the house," even to the point of buying expensive burglar alarms and, in October, a shotgun.
    I even tried to move — back to central Texas, where I grew up. It is interesting to note that I was, if anything, even more fearful in Texas than I was in New York. Did this mean that I unconsciously recalled even more frightening things happening there?
    When I finally got home to my apartment it was to a bright, warm household with dinner waiting. Ten minutes later I really felt as if I had left the shadows behind.
    But then my son went to bed, and soon after Anne turned in. When the lights were low my home seemed no more sheltering than a place of air.
    When it was time to be alone in the night, what I now had to take with the was a corpus of staring owllike faces, a shockingly revised personal history, and a great deal of fear.
    That night I wished to God that I could somehow shed myself and step out fresh in the world. The visitors persisted in my mind like glowing coals. I could see those limitless, eternal eyes glaring right into the center of me. Visitors seemed to inhabit every shadow, to move in the course of the sky.
    I went out again and walked some more, going down through SoHo and into the empty streets of TriBeCa.
    When I finally went back to the apartment the cats came up to me and started to twist and turn around my ankles — and then went bounding away. My cats. I shut myself in my office and sat cross-legged on the floor, trying to collect myself.
    As soon as I relaxed, it was as if I had opened a hatch into another world. They swarmed at me, climbing up out of my unconscious, grasping at me. This was not memory, it only worked trough the medium of memory. It was meeting me on even level, caressing me as well as capturing me. This emergence was like a kind of internal birth, but what was being born was no bubbling infant. What came out into my conscious mind was a living, aware force. And I had a relationship with it-not a fluttering new one, but something rich and mature that ranged across the whole scale of emotions and included all of my time. I had to face it: Whatever this was, it had been involved with me for years I really squirmed.
    What might be hidden in the dark part of my mind? I thought then that I was dancing on the thinnest edge of my soul. Below me were vast spaces. totally unknown. Not psychiatry, not religion, not biology could penetrate that depth. None of them had any real idea of what lives within. They only knew what little it had chosen to reveal of itself.
    Were human beings what we seemed to