'"who, sent, the Dream?"'

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

'But how is it that we are each visited as individuals, each by exactly and 
only what he needs?  Doesn't that imply a switching-path of some kind? a 
bureaucracy?'

As we know thanks to books screaming at us from airport bookstands (by such 
as the good doctor John Mack @ Harvard), hundreds of thousands of Yanks 
claim to have seen or been abducted by aliens.  We at the BBC recently made 
a 50-minute telly documentary about the alien abduction craze in which it 
was argued that the aliens these people are claiming to see are merely 
phantasmagoria produced by the mind in response to sleep paralysis (a 
condition which affects perhaps 20% of the population).  The mind tells the 
body to move... that it is moving... but the body is temporarily paralysed 
and cannot move... and as panic creeps in, so our mind conjures up these 
frightening images...  A couple of centuries ago, people were visited by 
incubi and succubi.  Now, popular culture is such that we are visited by 
aliens.

Whilst I think this is an interesting argument, it does kinda beg the 
question.  Because these people ALL SEE THE SAME ALIEN - who's gray, with a 
strangely curved head, and big eyes.  Now, I'd like to know where in popular 
culture is this ubiquitous gray alien?  I suspect if you asked people on the 
street to imagine an alien, you'd get a range of different descriptions. 
 The first alien I see is a green Venusian fishboy.

Unless, instead of IG Farben, maybe Stephen Spielberg and John Mack have 
been attending a few seances recently and engaging in a bit of collaboration 
with the bureaucracy of the Other Side...

jan

jan.klimkowski at bbc.co.uk