Communion: A True Story by Whitley Strieber

Still, I wish the astronomers could share royalties from the astrology books.
    I did not believe in UFOs at all before this happened. And I would have laughed in the face of anybody who claimed contact. Period. I am not a candidate for conversion to any new religion that involves belief in benevolent space brothers, or in unidentified flying objects as the craft of intergalactic saints — or sinners.
    And yet my experience happened to me, and much of it is recorded not in an unconscious context but in ordinary memory. If we are dealing with a new system of beliefs on its way to becoming fixed into religious dogma, the way the religion is in my case emerging, right into the middle of a mind with no obvious allegiance to it at all, suggests that real belief could be a totally misunderstood biological process capable of occasionally issuing forth from some extraordinary and unsuspected structure of the brain far more concrete than Jung's collective unconscious. Thus, even if visitor experiences are an essentially mental phenomenon, to laugh at them or dismiss them as some known form of abnormal behavior when they obviously are not is in effect to be silent before the presence of the new. Science should bring its best efforts to this, which means good studies that proceed from open and skillfully drawn hypotheses.
    If mine is a real experience of visitors, it is among the deepest and most extensive as yet recorded, and I hope it will be of value if they emerge. If it is an experience of something else, then I warn you: This "something else" is a power within us, maybe some central power of the soul, and we had best try to understand it before it overcomes objective efforts to control it.
    What follows here are two transcripts of hypnotic regressions, covering my buried memories of October 4 and December 26, 1985. That these are buried memories and not imaginations worked out in the doctor's office seems hard to dispute. The mechanism that buried them is no different from that which places any particularly terrifying experience behind a wall of amnesia. Beginning with Freud, the process of screen memory has been extensively documented.
    The hypnosis used on me was not qualitatively different from that used on police witnesses. And the same caveats that apply to police cases apply to this case — those and no others. It should be remembered, though, that — even given my earnest effort — I am describing what I perceived, which may or may not have been what was actually there. We really do not have enough experience with our reaction to extreme strangeness to know how we alter such memories.
    Donald Klein met me in his subdued gray office on East Seventy-ninth Street in Manhattan. He is a tall man with curly hair and a quiet demeanor. Two things were immediately apparent to me about him as a hypnotist. First, I sensed command; he was confident of his skills. Second, he was a thorough, careful man with a very acute mind.
    I had never been hypnotized before, and I was apprehensive about it. As it turned out, my apprehension was for the wrong reasons. I was afraid of relinquishing control over myself, which seemed deeply disturbing. Control, as may be imagined, was a central issue in a life such as the one I had been leading.
    I found, though, that I trusted Don Klein when he told me that even under hypnosis people cannot be readily compelled to say things they do not want to say. I would not be out of control, not really.
    The process of becoming hypnotized was pleasant. I sat in a comfortable chair. Dr. Klein stood before me and asked me to look up at his finger, which was placed so that I had almost to roll my eyes into my head to see it. He moved it from side to side and suggested that I relax. No more than half a minute lacer, it seemed, I was unable to hold my eyes open. Then he began saying that my eyelids were getting heavy, and they did indeed get heavy. The next thing I knew, my eyes were closed.
    At that point I felt