'"who, sent, the Dream?"'??????????????????????

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

On Wed, 18 Jan 1995, Basileios Drolias wrote:

>
> In Castaneda's "The teaching's of Don Juan' Mescalito is always (from
>person to person) the same person, with the same glow in his eyes. Yet you
>surely must agree that it is just the drug (peyote) that creates this
>image in a persons mind... I cannot say it with certainty but in the case
>of the abductions it may be that the state of mind is such that creates
>the grey aliens...

Perhaps, and perhaps not.  Certain drugs and certain objects (eg the tattwas 
of the Golden Dawn) are used by various cultures/traditions as doors into 
particular psychic spaces.  When a person takes such a drug or concentrates 
on such an object in a ritual setting, it is expected that they will enter 
very specific (and often mapped) spaces and encounter particular beings. 
 And this is so whether the culture/tradition has provided them with a map 
or not.

I agree that once the alien abduction craze received mass media attention, 
the type of alien seen is likely to be largely determined by that 
promulgated by the various books/TV programmes.  But right at the beginning? 
 When there are no particular guides?  And until shrinks and hypnotists 
turned up at the bedsides of those who'd seen/were "encouraged to see" these 
aliens, there was nothing ritual about sleep paralysis.

The argument of the Beeb's programme was that sleep paralysis leads the mind 
into creating phantasmagoria: in the Middle Ages they were incubi and 
succubi; now they are gray aliens.  For this to be true, we would have to 
argue that the same state of mind (panic during sleep paralysis) has created 
different phantasmagoria in different generations.  Fine for the cultural 
relativists out there.  But if you phrase it another way: the same state of 
mind has provided access to different psychic spaces in different 
generations, but those psychic spaces seem to have a large degree of 
consistency for each generation.  Now this, to me, is far more interesting. 
 And hence my roping of the unfortunate TP into this one, with his wonderful 
notion of a "switching-path".

jan