Unexplained Experiences

. . . from a memoir I'm writing

One time in the 1970’s when I was in my 20’s, I was driving from Spokane to Seattle at night. It was raining, there was no moon or stars, and there was only an occasional car on the road. Just after I crossed the long bridge over the Columbia River near Vantage and started up the hill on the other side, I pulled over to the side of the road to pee. This area is stark and barren with large basalt rock outcrops, sagebrush, and sparsely scattered trees. When I got out of the car I saw that I was parked near a high hollowed out area in the basalt rock face alongside the road. As soon as I got out of the car, I had this eerie feeling that I wasn’t alone and it got stronger the longer I stood there. As quickly as possible, I got back in the car and drove off. It took several miles before this heightened sense of the uncanny started to dissolve.

I knew from reading Freud that I’d experience a feeling of anxiety that can arise when something repressed in the mind, like childhood fears or beliefs, is suddenly brought back into awareness, making the familiar seem strangely unsettling. While this does somewhat explain the feeling I experienced, it doesn’t explain the powerful overwhelming nature of this once in a lifetime experience. I have never experienced anything like it before or since. Jung experienced the uncanny as being in the presence of spirits. According to German psychiatrist Ernst Jentsch in 1906, “the uncanny is a psychological experience where something is unsettling but feels oddly familiar,” which seemed accurate to me in this case.

Another experience I can’t explain happened at a Catholic church in Wilton, Conneticut in the late 1990’s. I was at a healing service with a bunch of friends from the AA group I was in then. The priest was known for his healing powers much like an Oral Roberts or a Pentecostal preacher where people talk in tongues and have strange experiences and visions. I knew about all this from childhood, especially when I went to camp meetings with my mom. After the preacher was done getting everyone stirred up,  the adults and kids lined up in front of the altar to have the preacher lay hands on them so they would be visited by the Holy Spirit, have all their sins forgiven, and become “saved” which meant they were assured of going heaven. As a little kid, this was sort of a scary experience seeing people I knew cry and weep and go through other uncontrolled emotions and sounds. But as I got older, I developed a kind of pride that I had never succumbed to what I silently called “this bullshit.” I had never been baptized and I had never been “saved.” Sometimes I was one the few people who remained seated in the pews while almost everyone else was lined up to get saved.

At the Wilton church, the priest asked for volunteers to be “catchers,” the persons behind the people the priest touched to heal them, which caused them to uncontrollably fall backward where the person behind caught them. I volunteered to be a catcher knowing my own history with this evangelical nonsense.

After everyone had been caught and “healed,” it was time for the catchers to line up, which I hadn’t expected. When it was my turn, the priest touched my forehead and I fell uncontrollably backward into the arms of another catcher. I have never experienced anything like that before or since, but I certainly lost my pride in never having been baptized or “saved.”