The Paranormal Part I: Noumena, Cognita, or Dreams?

What is reality?

Towards the end of his long life my father’s sight started to deteriorate. During this degeneration he suffered from Charles Bonnet Syndrome, a hallucinatory condition common to the early stages of blindness. In my father’s case the hallucinations were largely of buildings that weren’t there. I was reminded of my father’s casual interest in architecture and the large number of postcards he had collected of the cities he had visited during wartime. In fact in one of his visions he saw the buildings surrounding his house in a state of destruction. Occasionally he also hallucinated people in and around the house and this rather spooked my mother for whom it was no doubt too reminiscent of a haunting for comfort.

As far as I am aware no one has a good theory on CBS; the best I’ve heard is that deprived of the bright and complex patterns of sensory input the visual cortex becomes sensitive to random perturbations and goes into a kind dream state. A particularly strange feature of CBS is that it often synthesizes its visions into the daily context; for example, illusory people will appear to be interacting with the physical surroundings. When sufferers of CBS report seeing people in their houses one cannot help but think that a more generalized version of CBS may throw light on the nature of ghosts and all sorts of occult events. Moreover, it is possible that CBS analogues may also apply to the sense of sound, smell and touch, not to mention a whole array of internalized intuitions that crop up now and then, such as the sense of somebody being present.

I’ve never got to the bottom of the positivist’s question of whether reality and perception are one and same or whether physical reality goes beyond the sum total of perceiving agents (Which according to Berkley includes God Himself) and is something other than perception, the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. But whatever the answer to that question we do know that as far as the solitary perceiving agent is concerned the world, the cosmos moreover, is effectively only what (s)he is conscious of. From the first person perspective reality is a mode of consciousness and therefore if there are sophisticated hallucinations that occur under an altered state of consciousness, then as far as the first person is concerned those perceptions are reality – of sorts. But having said that it seems that the visions experienced under altered states of conscious don’t usually follow the coherent, rational and strictly systematic logic we associate with the “really real” physical world; as science has shown us the logic of the really real is immaculately coherent, highly synchronized and faultlessly consistent. Without this coherence and consistency there would be no really real world with the touch and feel of physicality and solidity. The physical world passes the physical equivalent of a kind of Turing test for reality in as much as no matter what test you submit to it all but invariably it returns the observations that you would expect if that reality was really there. In contrast, however, the occult fails this test; for as soon as we move into altered states of conscious and the like, things get much less coherent and much more vague and anomalous: If a CBS vision appears, it usually fails to synchronise with the other senses, or if one looks again perhaps it has gone or changed. Like ghostly apparitions these visions lack a coherent integrity and integrateness with one’s wider experience. Both CBS and the occult fail the “Turing test” of reality. Like the actors who have mere bit parts in a play the actors of the occult make a brief appearance, but their character parts are not worked out in sufficient detail to have the multidimensional depth of presence we are used to in the physical world. Ergo, their attenuated reality is that much less instantiated.

I have never been witness to anything one that might call ghostly or paranormal. Even though I spent three years working (cleaning after hours, in fact) in one of England’s premier haunted houses , many times on dark winter evenings, I never heard, smelt or saw anything ghostly. However, from time to time stories and rumors did the rounds, but it always seemed to happen to other people; do people bring their ghosts with them? Sometimes I would stop and listen silently; absolutely nothing on all occasions – even the sense of a spooky ambiance was absent.

Anne Boleyn is, of course, Blickling’s celebrity ghost and there are some famous reports of encounters with female apparitions that are usually assumed to be Anne; although I have to say they are remarkably consonant with the generic grey lady reports that one hears of so often in haunted locations. In particular the stories of two encounters at Blickling are repeated time and again: One involves men delivering the Ditchley portrait of Anne’s’ mother, Elizabeth I, to the long gallery of the Hall. The delivery men were met by an old fashioned looking lady who signed for the portrait. But Blickling’s house steward was confounded when the men told him that the picture had already been signed for by a lady in the long gallery. The puzzled house steward examined the paperwork and found no signature on the dotted line. A search of the house yielded no sign of the spooky recipient of the portrait. Another story of an encounter with the lady of Blickling hall was provided by the butler to Lord Lothian, the last private owner of the hall. The butler approached a women dressed in grey standing by the lake, a lake a few yards far from the walls of the hall. She responded to the butler’s enquiry with “That for which I search is lost forever”. The butler looked away for a moment. He turned back only to find her gone.

Because of the similarities and analogies between the paranormal and the altered states of perception such as we see in Charles Bonnet syndrome and dream states, I have, as a kind of hobby, taken to using a sort of Freudian analysis to interpret ghost stories – looking on them as products of the imagination, and/or the Jungian deep collective mind which encodes meanings into stories, pictures and symbols. However, to call it “Freudian analysis” is really to put a respectable scientific gloss on a folk activity that has a lineage going at least as far back as Joseph’s interpretations of the dreams of Pharaoh ’s butler and baker.

My first foray into this area was with the famous lake-side sighting of Blicking Hall’s “Anne Boleyn”. Whatever the actual ontology behind this report, whether an hallucination or even an invented story, it nevertheless retains some highly symbolic elements that can be interpreted as a subliminal message of a modern malaise. The results of my “analysis” can be found toward the end of this blog post. Unfortunately information about the butler’s state of mind is not available to us, but I suspect if he did have some kind of hallucination it may also have connected with his circumstances in some way. I have a feeling, however, that these grey lady reports would come out of Blickling Hall whether Anne Boleyn’s visits were historical or not: What is crucial is that she is such a subliminally significant figure that even the rumour of her being connected with a place is enough to help trigger reports.

I call it “analysis” but frankly that term makes something which is very evanescent and insubstantial sound as though it is readily tractable to “hard science”. But then perhaps even history as a discipline would not want to make a claim to being analytical in the hard science sense. Equivocation is the name of the game. The past is one of those objects that is starting to pass out of the realm of “Turing testability” for physicality*. History cannot be tested at will, its evidence is often partial, and many of its practitioners have to accept that their theories may ultimately have no high standard of proof. Accordingly, Historians are not just people who can remember lots of facts, but they tap into a very wide experience of the human situation in order to interpret historical data with great feats of their imagination.

To embark on a creative task like interpreting the meaning of ghost reports one needs the free imagination of the artist and mythologist in order to join the dots with a grander imaginative narrative. As with the historian it too requires one to draw on one’s knowledge of the total human situation: history, psychology, religion, art, literature, ascetics, science, philosophy etc. What one ends up with is probably little more than conjecture, conjecture that perhaps shouldn’t be taken too seriously. But if that is all we have to got to go on then we must remember that epistemic beggars can’t be choosers.

However, as we shall see in the next part the quasi-Freudian/Jungian approach to the paranormal is far from original.

...to be continued...


Footnote: * The case of history is an indication that a negative on the "Turing test" for reality may be down to the object simply being epistemically inaccessible rather than it being intrinsically incoherent and fragmentary.