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Mind Scanner: Beams Of Light And Telepathic Control

It’s very common that we encounter deep in the forest psychic forces which easily comb through our brain. They already know about our deepest fears and read any memory. What is happening in many stories reflects a lot of real accounts of close encounters both in UFO-sightings as in supernatural encounters. In the darkest places, there is not only telepathic reading of the mind, the strange entities are creating lively scenarios taken from the individual’s memories and driving the victim into madness.

Mind control and “cockpit” intrusion is a theme running through many books and films by Stephen King. The most elaborate description could be found in “Dreamcatcher” (Duddits). The individual human mind becomes the battleground and there is even a strategy to create a safe place where to store secrets in order to protect them from the alien entity.

King develops an interesting concept where we can see our mind as a non-material universe along the normal world. It’s like a building with storerooms with images of the past.

The “rooms” with the memories are always an interesting playground for evil entities. Another very good example is “IT”. Pennywise, the monster, has obviously the same abilities as an experienced psycho-analyst. He finds the weak spots. These dark entities skip through our memories like the files on a hard disk. When the psychotherapist needs years to bring back hidden or suppressed memories they act like a data reader. In a quick scan, they find what’s useful for them.

They have the ability to let these memories overwhelm the victim and they put you on a ride to the darkest corners of your life. They provoke reactions when the memories, for example, lead to a discussion and a fight inside a group of friends. The alien entities create also some sort of “fake news” or “fake memories” they mix with the real memory. They want to activate strong emotions like shame, guilt, and anger. In the end, there is violence and panic.

It can happen in a way that present reality mixes with images from the past. Places, situations, and people enter the reality like ghosts. A new virtual reality is created.

An excellent example is Adam Nevill’s recent successful forest horror novel and film “The Ritual” where the past overwhelms the group of friends in the middle of the forest. Somebody seems to know exactly about their backstories.

The concept appears also in prominent ghost house movies and books. Here is the house or the ghosts inhabiting the house are the mind scanners and creators of tormenting visions of the past.

In “The Shining”, the hotel knows everything about Jack Torrance and what he did to his son and his family. In the “Awakening”, written by Stephen Volk, the hero becomes overwhelmed by her past in a tragic way.

Is this just as convenient concept for any writer? Of course, it is a way which makes it easier to reveal backstories and there is also in my project an element where the forest triggers memories.

This comes not surprisingly since horror is always a road back into our childhood. Horror works best if the creator puts us back into the state of a child. Therefore we see in some stories these journeys back into the childhood but not necessarily. Also, traumatic experiences of adults are often the motive which comes up.

However, this is not something which came with fiction, fiction borrowed from reality. Alien entities that can read our minds are a very common experience.


It is a universal and archetypical experience with a long tradition. We see also similar images and stories which run straight through religious accounts, visionary experience, and modern Ufo-lore. A typical description is the grey aliens with their black impenetrable eyes looking directly into the human soul.

A very prominent motive is the light beam scanning the mind. The light beam originally often appears in a religious context and can be seen in many paintings in churches and illustration. Light beams are a central element in close encounters but interestingly also in visionary experience as out of body experiences. Light Beams scanning an observer are an element in records about dangerous lights in the forest.

Jacques Vallee found an example (in “Dimensions”) in Robert Monroe’s book “Out Of The Body”: “I suddenly felt bathed in and transfixed by a very powerful beam that seemed to come from the North, above 30 degrees above the horizon. I was completely powerless, with no will on my own, I felt as if I were in the presence of a very strong force, in personal contact with it. It had intelligence of a form beyond my comprehension, and it came directly (down the beam) into my head, and seemed to be searching every memory in my mind. I was truly frightened because I was powerless to do anything about this intrusion”.

Here we have all the key elements of this kind of paranormal experience of getting “scanned” by an unknown entity, which also happens in Ufo encounters a lot. There is often the mention of a cold intelligence, not benevolent but also not hostile in a common way. There is something very “technical” about this. Its as if the scanner is sort of a machine hiding behind different masks. Another good example is the Whitley Strieber experience in his book “Communion”, one of the most frightening books I ever read.

We see it also in the near-death experience. The traveler is often scrutinized and a “vivisection” of his character does happen.

Perhaps sometimes cultural knowledge and interpretation of anomalous experiences mix. The “reading of the past” of a person, of the sin or the guilt, is part of the Christian Beyond. When we are dying we will have to face last judgment. Thus, it is questionable what was there in the first place.

As Carol Zaleskis says in “Otherworld Journeys” the experience is often influenced by education. A Christian education with its rich world of images certainly had an influence on the interpretation of visionary experience, particularly in medieval times.

But one thing is for sure. The possibility that some “things” or entities have the abilities to look straight into our mind, data reading our innermost fears, is one of the terrifying aspects when the other world enters our world. Our very concept of survival lasts on the assumption that we can protect our thoughts and our memories. What if we can’t? What if there is right now some supernatural hacker sitting somewhere in a dimension close to our dimension and reading our thoughts like a remote controller? And even more, what if we are not any longer in control of our thoughts and our memories?

In the forest, there are places where a demonic twisting of the thoughts we already have can happen. In Algernon Blackwood’s masterpiece “The Willows” it’s not the physical assault which puts the forlorn heroes in deadly dangers. It is the intrusion into their minds because they stopped in the wrong place, where the veil between the dimensions is thinner. And sometimes there is somebody – the elder gods – sitting on the other side, waiting and listening, looking to find a victim.

There are more disturbing possibilities: What if “knowing somebody’s soul” is meaning more then scanning the mind? Could it mean there is someone out there even knowing about the souls’ past lives experiences and individual character? Sometimes we feel we meet the hidden screenwriter or director of our lives at certain points who doesn’t need a big scan of the mind since he already knows.

The Local Gods

Walter Evan-Wentz, a student of folklore, developed some very interesting ideas about the ancient gods, religion and paranormal phenomena. Among the famous “Tibetan Book Of The Dead”, he is also well-known for his book “The Masked Gods” in his time. It’s common knowledge now that the ancient gods are continued to live under different names.

However, Jaques Valleé speaks in his book “Dimension” about an even more interesting discovery by Evan-Wentz: “Could it be, he asked, that every land has its own psychic and telluric forces, contributing to the appearance of certain spirit entities, regarded by human beings as gods and goddesses? (Jacques Vallee, “Dimensions”)”

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As I said in The Summoning I think that rituals and secret practices are often the expressions of the hidden forces at a certain place. It is an interesting thought that these gods are an expression of a psychic and telluric force rather than universal beings, which are usually imagined as celestial beings. However, if we look at ancient and even Christian tradition it makes sense. There are many saints which are special and have some sort of “local identity”.

The most interesting thought by Evan-Wentz is that not only the locals but the visitors, the new settlers, the intruder comes under influence of these gods.

Evan-Wentz writes in Masked Gods: “They had confronted here that great psychic entity which was the spirit-of-place, the heart of a new continent. It shattered them completely. But each succumbed in a different way”.

I believe that is what often also folk horror stories are about. It’s not only a potential confrontation with the locals but the visitor comes under influence of the landscape and its psychic forces. These forces find expression in paranormal phenomena but not necessarily.

Evan-Wentz reported that he heard about “shining beings”, which appeared to the Indians in California on sacred mountains which were very similar like the encounter the founder of the “Church Of Latter-Day”, Joseph Smith, had. It seems that in the new world resides a powerful psychic force, which triggers people to change in a certain way. It tends to create its own kind of belief-system. The otherworldliness of the new world is a different one as in Europe or Asia.

Sometimes it is all about atmosphere and a sort of hidden influence felt by visitors or by inhabitants. Often we can’t lay our finger on it. It’s difficult to describe what it exactly is, but we know it is there. Imagining these psychic forces as gods is a logical way to give these forces some face. In stories, it’s a challenge because if you want to stick true to otherworldy realities you might not have a Bigfoot-like monster or an ax-swinging madman as an antagonist. Therefore it’s sometimes difficult to explain the story.

Often we deal with’s what left of paranormal events a long time ago. Some supernatural-god-like force left its footprint on the landscape and the local population. Wonders and unexplainable mind-shattering events lead to weird belief-systems. Maybe the spiritual entity is already gone for a long time. But what happened is alive in a tribal memory.



If we look deeper into this, we are confronted with more mind-boggling questions: How could it be the place, the landscape? Why does it happen? My opinion is it even we not necessarily find a paranormal element either in a true story or legend or a fictional story it always tells us that there must be some sort of otherworld. It means there is an otherworld even more powerful than we think: our literal world, the landscapes, the forests, the mountains are more or less the surface on a windows-screen. The real world lies beneath. The otherworld carries our world.

And why? Maybe there is a spiritual control system. One favorite theory of Valleé and other ufologists is that men are the object of a control system engaged by invisible gods.

In the same chapter in “Dimensions” Jacques Valleé mentions a former Jesuit priest who implied in conversations with Vallee that “the “phenomenon originates with entities that manipulate our reality and our destiny for their own purposes”(Dimensions).

But what do we know? We can only develop our models or speculate what’s going on but the enormous impact both of real stories and fiction dealing with “the local gods” make us sure of the underlying truth.

Under The Spell

The offender always returns to the place of the crime.
It seems the same applies to supernatural writers, researchers in search of the unknown and people who had encounters with strange phenomena. We can’t explain our passion but we know we need to do this, there isn’t much choise. We’re under the spell.

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Writers and film makers taking the supernatural seriously get often asked why they pursue difficult projects rather than doing something where you could make money more easily. Even it’s true that genre stuff is supposed to be “profitable” which usually means that it is something which could be done for low budget but has a potential for high revenues. This might be the case for some horror pics with easy-to-grasp concepts however many artists who have a real interest in the otherworld (or simply asking questions about our view of reality) suffer. They choose the hard way. But these are the most committed people, they are prepared to work hard for a long time without knowing about their chance for success.

The same applies to researchers, philosophers and scientists. A profound interest in the otherworld is certainly not the best choice to make a career. We should think that the investigation of phenomena we don’t yet understand is science at its best, but the researcher is often being caught in the middle. They aren’t trusted any longer by the “serious scientific community” and they make often many enemies among the “believers”. They get in trouble with the powerful, become blacklisted by politicians and sinister organizations. The work of a researcher like Jacques Vallée who kept a diary for over 40 years and continuosly published interesting insights about the unexplained couldn’t be praised enough. There aren’t many of them but those who are interested in the otherworld are highly committed people.

If somebody had a weird experience in the woods, had a strange encounter or was somehow involved in strange events we would expect that this person would leave the place where it happened, move into a big city or even another country. But we know that people who had encounters with the otherworld are changed. They return either to the place or become reseachers, lecturers or help other people with similar experiences. They are obsessed in their own way.

Once touched by the otherworld we’re under the spell. Its a bit like becoming involved with the demonic principle. In the same breath we are drown towards the unknown as we wan’t to escape the otherworld. But the artist is dedicated to paint that picture. It might look for outsiders that the artist of the supernatural seems to paint the same picture again and again.

This is not the case. The researcher and the artist or writer and film-maker are sitting in the same boat; it is their quest for the unknown. And like a Tibetan monk repeating the same rituals the researcher studies similar cases again and again, and the storyteller is writing many stories but the stories are all about the same theme. People who had visionary experiences return to places or remember things at certain times every year. However this isn’t about repeating the same thing, it is always about progress, about deepening our understanding, even sometimes in very small steps.

There is an interesting question how much freedom people do really have if they take the challenge seriously. However the creative process itself can be an act of freedom. It’s a chance to redeem the demons. And it can be step forward to understand. The people drawn towards the otherworld or towards the fundamental questions about our reality were always a minority. It’s astonishing that a lot of people can watch endless hours of stuff about zombies, vampires, witches and never ask for one second what’s really going on.




We can’t explain why we are into a deeper reality. Perhaps this is something which couldn’t be explained. It is indeed like the demonic principle, something which works beyond our understanding. And if we look at people who had experiences with the paranormal or some encounters we can’t tell why they were chosen. Human history is full of people who had a very different background and then become changed through visionary experience. The only thing we know is that there are no simple answers, but it appears there must kind of a link between certain artists, researchers and visionaries. It’s like they had at some point in their lives seen, felt or heard the same thing, some sort of hidden reality and they got a call to tell the world.

Magical Realism As An Expression Of A Deeper Reality

The Question is not, “is it real” or is it magic”, it is about finding magic in the mundane.

Magical realism can call on folk-lore and myth to question the true nature of reality. Forest-horror-stories are often stories of this type of magical realism, and this is also what I am aiming for in my own work.

The magical elements are as natural as the everyday world in this genre. The term was originally coined by Franz Roh for an exhibition called “Neue Sachlichkeit” in the 1920ties.

Magical Realism is often connected with South-American literature and describes books or movies with magical elements or a dreamlike-landscape.

Sometimes magical realism is used as toolbox by romantic comedy writers to set up a story – like the lightning stroke making the main character capable to understand what women think – but that’s not what magical realism is really about.

 
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The mother of all magical realism stories on TV is “Twin Peaks” with its credo “The Owls Are Not What They Seem”. Here the magical reality becomes a form of hyper realism: it feels for some folks more real as our limited everyday reality experience. “Twin Peaks” and other great series/movies/books abandon our model of physical reality. However they don’t reveal the mechanics of an alternative model of physical reality like the 5th dimension in “Interstellar”.

“Twin Peaks” interacts with the viewer in a much deeper sense. It reminds us about a daimonic reality where strong hidden forces rule our lives behind the curtain of ordinary reality. We do know about this daimonic reality but is something which became suppressed in our times.

In the best of all cases the magical elements in a magical realism story doesn’t appear like some writer’s invention or something with is kind of an appendix. Magical Realism can reveal what we usually don’t see, something which we are not supposed to see.

I had always a weird comparison in mind: Our reality is perhaps like the layers in the photoshop software: Normally we can only see the surface (the image on top of a pile of images and layers) but with certain techniques the surface (or the picture on top) becomes transparent and you can see what is beyond. If you work with layers in photoshop software you can reveal something which is normally not visible. David Lynch is doing this in his films: He scratches on the surface layer and reveals for a glimpse what lies beneath.

Unraveling the myth behind our reality is more about revelation rather than an invention of fictional ideas or mere fantasies.




I don’t think we need necessarily alternative models of physical reality to get to the hidden layers in our plane of reality. It is what a good story can do. It also happens in real life. The many cases of unexplained phenomena discussed earlier could be also sudden appearances of hidden layers.

Usually we can’t see what’s really going on. Our models are always inconsistent or tend to driven either by anthropocentric biases or scientific assumptions. Nobody can tell us the truth, but we can try to create something which feels right. Even we don’t admit it we often quietly accept a different idea of reality where our destinies are driven by mythical forces when we watch certain series or movies; there are often three levels in series like “Game Of Thrones” or “Twin Peaks”: action and relationship development, everyday events, then there is politics and undercurrents in society affecting characters and deep down there are powerful myths at work.

Perhaps we need to re-discover the magical dimension of our lives not only in TV-series but also in real life.

Indeed the most fascinating thing is that magical realism or fantastic realism has its roots not in fiction but in reality. Long before the first official UFO-sightings Charles Hoy Fort wrote his “Book Of The Damned”. Fort is quite simple the “Father Of X-Files”: he was a collector of “damned data”, of events or things which were excluded by official science: “A procession of the damned. By the damned, I mean the excluded. We shall have a procession of data that Science has excluded.” (Charles Ford, Book Of The Damned). He was motivated by criticism of the mainstream science. He saw the problem of reductionism in science very early, and his “damned data” are kind of a provocation, like the rat on the table in a clean house.

His book is a ride into a rich world full of weird phenomena. It tells us stories about raining frogs and mysterious disappearances, thunder-stones and much more. Fort didn’t invent these reports. He was looking through weather reports and piles of newspaper articles. He worked for years but wasn’t a simple believer in the fantastic. He is basically a sceptic. He simply demanded open-mindedness. Often he expresses a certain irony about the weirdness of a phenomenon and the even weirder explanations.

There may be a good reason for keeping his distance: investigating phenomena of “high strangeness” is like crawling through quicksand. It’s terribly difficult to find out what exactly has happened and the search for the truth becomes more and more complicated. This is perhaps because this phenomena happen in the realm of “magical realism”. It’s hard to say how much phenomena of “high strangeness” depend on the witness, but they seem to be strongly connected to a certain atmosphere and character (remember the fish in the coffee-filter in the legendary Twin Peaks Pilot?).

However most of all, Charles Ford wasn’t after the proof for the existence of a ghost or the “shower of jellyfish”, which happened in Bath near the Main Station on April 1871 for example. He didn’t believe in any theories or models about our physical reality. His damned data are supposed to say think twice before you believe in anything.

There seems only one idea running through his work expressed by John Michell that our whole existence is an organism. The universe is a living organism. If we think of the Universe as an organism we would indeed live in a world of magical realism.

The forest is a good place for getting a feeling for this idea, both in a literal sense and in a metaphorical sense. It is like one big organism. It is not possible to reveal that organism in a simple model of physical reality. It remains a mystery like a forest dark with an endless number of secrets. That’s what for example “Twin Peaks” is about and what make it a true “forest story”. The idea of a living universe full of consciousness as a background of the mystical aspects of our life is also rooted in ancient mythology and philosophy.

If we open our eyes and ears we may find the magical reality which the forest actually is. There is a surface, and at certain times a window open up showing us what’s behind the curtain.