If, as Lao Tzu wrote, "without looking out of their window / one can know the ways of heaven" what if the reverse is also true, that without leaving heaven, aliens can look through our windows / and know all things on Earth? Maybe it's true that "the farther one travels / the less one knows." Maybe it's no coincidence that the coming apocalypse of 2012 marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of Communion, Whitley Strieber's groundbreaking true story novel about his own experiences as an alien abductee. 25 years is a long time. It's waaaay before the prevalence of the subject on today's TV cable and internet.
I read this book as soon as it came out in paperback, I think I was a sophomore in college at the time; it spooked me real good. Before Communion there were no such thing as aliens, at least as far as we in 80s suburbia knew, unless we hunted down obscure out of print 70s paperbacks full of dodgy photos and unreliable witnesses and flowery tripper double talk. Strieber brought the reality of alien abduction into the popular consciousness and best of all--since he is a fiction writer first and an abductee second--he brought vivid intensity to the 'fictional' or cover memory aspect of the experience. He made the madness of cover memories-- and the traumatizing glimpses of the alien truth behind them-- so tangible it felt like a Stephen King story was leaking out of the book all over our pants. Was it all really true? Could this shit really be happening? Was this "no dream"?
That's the wrong phrasing of the question; our need to separate reality and dream may be something they evolved past centuries ago. To reckon properly with Strieber's book, our conception of truth, of reality, of conscious vs. unconscious perception, has to change. We need to smarten up, to extract ourselves like a clump of hair from the delusional pool filter of Earth's pedestrian orbit.
While some abductees say that the 'greys' are living breathing beings, Streiber has always felt they were more like robotic, insectoid puppets usually controlled by some taller single being (or even via remote control, like advanced biomorphic version of Martian land rovers). In the 1989 film adaptation ('highly' recommended) these aliens appear as toys, goblins, balloons, masks within masks, to the point it sometimes frustrating and seems like the filmmaker is taking some free-reign liberties with the source material.
As Streiber, Christopher Walken makes Streiber into a man who doesn't believe his own eyes half the time, even as his unconscious starts jerking him around like a puppet. In the process he lets us see the way the 'Walken jive' is itself a cover for his own personal anxiety. The highlight is his triumphant face-to-face/s meeting with the alien intelligence behind all his experiences, a being who chooses to appear to him as both a grey, an alien lizard behind the grey mask, and Walken himself (in black eye liner and tux, so we can tell them apart). Walken really delivers as the alien. He's so terrifying and on-point you feel the immensity of what's going on and understand why the military keeps it all secret, and why the aliens wipe the encounters from our memory, and why both military and liens keep the door to the truth unlocked, while slathering the truth in obfuscation, disinformation, and self-reflexive trickery: we get some information, some truth folded in with cover memory, but we can find more if we dig, but not too much, etc. Hopefully, it's all for a reason, the gradual widening of the human conscious circumference for when the aliens do make themselves known.... in full... undeniably.

Below is a slice of the climactic dialog between Streiber and the alien intelligence, which elaborates on this:
Alien / Walken (to Whitley / Walken ): I'd like to say a few things. First I'd like to season's greetings. Then I'd like to say keep your hands on the table at all times. Heh? Boo!...Boo. I wanna go home. I'd like to go home. You've broken my mind! I'm gonna kill you. Can we talk this over? I can't wake up. I am the dreamer. You are the dream. Look. The only thing that really matters here is what I am about to show you.(The gray alien's face cracks open; it turns out to be a mask with a reptilian face underneath.)
Streiber: (staring at the face) "That's... not it. I didn't come all this way... for you to tell me that's that what it is. Is there something under that, because I don't believe that one... It's like a box, a Chinese box... You open it, there's another one inside and another one inside and another one inside...(pause, realization) You're not gonna let me see you, are you?"
Alien: It is just like a Chinese box and you're not going to be allowed to see. Okay? Just to make that clear.
Streiber: You are not gonna let us see you... That's a good idea.
The thing about the dialogue I'm quoting above is that, on one level, Walken is talking to himself inside a spaceship near his upstate NY vacation home, but the other self is a version wearing eye-liner who presumably is an alien intelligence talking to him in the form of yet another mask, mimicking or repeating all the real Whitley is saying or has said previously or would like to say in the moment ("you've broken my mind!"). It becomes difficult to tell which version of him is really the dreamer and which the dreamed and I think that's no accident of bad editing, but rather a point about aliens that is impossible to make in any 'clearer' way.
The first clear message seems to be that "season's greetings" part, Walken's kinetic hustler delivery bringing out the surrealist edges in all their warped definition. I remember not really liking the film too much when I rented it, drunk, a decade or so ago, but it works much better a second time after I've done a lot more research into the issue, because it reads as a meditation on the trickster nature of the UFO abduction phenomenon rather than a straight horror story like The Fourth Kind (see my 2010 article "Take us to Your Benzos"). It's this trickster / Schrodinger's Cat mythic unknown factor that appeals to me - the importance of having living myths in our culture - conspiracy theories keep humanity sane. We can examine the alien issue all we want, as long as we don't get out hands on some 'smoking gun' piece of evidence - and even then, even if we have such things (and we do, if you care to look), we're spared the terrible certainty of this larger truth. We revolve around the gravitational field of some larger unknown truth the way curious first graders revolve around the issue of the primal scene behind their own conception. They can ask mom all they want about it (as I used to do) and as long as she doesn't tell them the truth, they're safe. Even if they hear it in the cafeteria from another kid, it's allowed to be dubious, we're not compelled to believe it, not yet.
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Before the Pollock: Worlds within worlds, or just a goddamn mess of paint spatters? |
In this way, Communion's use of obvious masks, phoniness and Bugs Bunny-ism is spookily admirable and correct. Instead of a gleaming white light round room, for example, the abductions occur in what looks like an abandoned psych ward hydrotherapy room equipped with that old flood light and fog machine. And why not? If that's what the budget and unconscious of the abductee masking over deeper layers will allow, let it be so. I also think of the opening scene of Kubrick's Lolita, with Sellers as Quilty trying to spin the situation with murderous Mason into something more cartoonish and hip, and slowly giving in to dread as the previous night's liquor wears off and his evasion tactics fail one after the other. In Communion's case though, which Walken is Quilty, and which is Humbert?
Exactly right.
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Genuine menace, or just another left-over party guest eccentric? |
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A shark, dreaming about small alien bipeds. |
Can the alien abduction phenomena be separated from that unconscious, and why would we assume an alien would think our conscious mind was the 'real' mind to visit? Why wouldn't an alien prefer to make unconscious contact rather than the conscious variety. My unconscious is far more literate and witty than my conscious one - I'm sure it's a lot better company. How else could it blow my mind every night with crazy dreams? When I try to get involved with my unconscious mind's creative process, my tongue ties almost instantly. I'm the editor, trying to translate its rantings, clipping the more negative tirades, but I can't control the actual ideas and flow (and the negative tirades are all conscious ego in disguise). Surely that unconscious connection is even more true of Walken, who has a rare gift wherein every line he speaks sounds like it's coming straight from his unconscious rather than a script, and that's true even when he is clearly reading from cue cards (as on his many SNL appearances).
So while his hipster affectations in this film may bug 'serious' UFO scholars, I think Walken is ideally cast. No one else could so gamely tread the edge of a straight razor, like a dosed Marx Brother, to convey the realization that all the things that happened in his childhood didn't 'happen' but are still happening, now, right in the hypnotist's office, that the African figures on the mantle (below) are simultaneously the greys standing in the distance watching him do the herky jerky in the grungy space ship. (Look close in the right quadrant of the second picture down).
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but in my own astral travels I've experienced the 'synchronized' reality effect wherein an alien, if it wishes to appear in your room while you're sleeping, would first sneak into your subconscious and influence you to buy a bunch of primitive statues for your nightstand, so it could, in a sense, materialize through your midnight hallucinations, using the statue as a focus, a stand-in, the way we can use a mirror to comb our hair. You have to ask yourself - why do we want statues of human figures, figurines, representatives of bipedal life forms, scattered around our homes and yards? What purpose do they serve? If the beings work on astral projection and corporeal form invasion, what better way to launch monitoring agents into our reality than inspiring us to make humanoid/android forms compatible with their projected energies, so they can beam their intelligence across space into them, much as NASA does with, say, a Mars rover. If you take our technology for the rover (or say a drone) and mix it with robotic replacement appendage evolution along the lines of Surrogates and there you are, an answer to the extraterrestrial travel argument even Carl Sagan could understand.
It's never spelled out, but there's something not quite right about what that bug eyed bear is doing there, or if it would still be there in the morning or would paralyze him with a nerve wand if he tried to touch it. That's pretty Argento-Phantasm-level stuff. The childhood object you see might in fact be something else in disguise, and signify your death. How else would you know?

This third eye is actually the projected energy of the pineal gland, located in the center of the brain, and it can be felt burning a hole in the middle of your forehead if for example, you drink too much Robitussin or have activated your Kundalini through deep chakra work (or like me, both at the same time). The pineal gland is where the soul allegedly enters the body on the 22nd day after conception.... and it's where I would enter if I was an alien on the outside looking in. Who cares if another soul is already in there? You're just passing through. Your unconscious is probably much more welcoming of these spirits than you 'consciously' know. You could be a galactic ambassador while asleep even if during the day you're just a Bellevue psychiatric ward acid casualty.
Let this idea in and feel the terror of the awful realization of alien immediacy-- its presence beyond real or illusion, its presence in all aspects of our lives, our past, present, future--feel how it brings with it a vivid understanding that everything is connected to everything else on every level--so you can visit the other side of your hand on Mars in 1937 and find your watch inside a Chinese box found on the bottom of the ocean unopened since the Ming Dynasty, and find your grandfather alive in the microscopic villages along the ear hair of your grandson. And the sun is just a reflection of your iris. And without looking out of your door you can know all things on earth and even if you never look farther than your own backyard maybe one day you'll notice that the very farthest reaches of outer space are right at your fingertips and the vacation you will take this summer is being remembered right now in the bathroom you just walked out of twenty years from now.
And the cares of tomorrow / must wait / til this day is done.
But how do you define a day when you have no Earth to spin?
Let the idea of a day as unit of time go....Know that it was only ever just a way to partition the darkness, just a trick to not go insane from the sheer screaming nowness of our psych ward clin.... Shhh, here comes the nurse, I mean muse.
Great post, learned a bit of shit I didn't know! That's what blogging is all about, 4 me atleast. Been revamping my stuff like crazy... I was following your site, but forgot about it till today when i saw it on my dashboard, perfect timing to... My mom and i have been talking about Aliens, she thought she was abducted and implanted and I have so much to unravel for myself there, Thanks for this! Anyways I added you to my side bar, http://mycosmicstardust.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeleteHow cool. I didn't know there was a Communion movie!
ReplyDeleteI read the book many years ago, in a trailer next to a lake in the middle of nowhere. At night.
It caused problems.
I'm probably going to see the movie now, assuming I can find it. Writer Robert Anton Wilson always seemed to think that if the alien phenomena were real, they are on a psychological level rather than actual space travelers.
Thanks Quark, and thanks Katy, I hear you about the late night jitters. I had a job for awhile checking grain-train cars at a Seattle port around the time the sequel to Communion came out, and I would read it on break in the middle of the night and get super creeped out. I think you're half right on the alien phenomena though, they are both psychological / unconscious projections AND genuinely real and actual space travelers.
ReplyDeleteThere's no reason why aliens should have the weird dream-waking split that we do, 16 hours awake and 8 asleep - they might be all awake or always asleep / dreaming ... and from their standpoint our dream world/s may look more collective and concrete, more welcoming to a visitation, than our suspicious, overcrowded, noisy waking life. Once you start examining cover memories and the veiled nature of total consciousness vs. repression it's a pretty slippery slope... right into the gaping maw of Lovecraftian madness!
great post erich.... i was looking for the little blue men from both movies and my ideas about communion was zackly as you wrote in your post.... every word you typed was in my head before it was on this post.... so was i dreaming it or did my dream spread into your dreams....the awake asleep thing just gets better each time i think of it.... now im thinking might m.i.b.s also be an unconscious dream thing.... perhaps?
ReplyDeleteThe problem is management — Wordyard
ReplyDeletethese thoughts are almost exactly my own, except it is precisely what i wanted to explain in words. after seeing UFOs and having a dreamlike encounter with aliens, i have no idea what to believe. whether it's scary or not, i've learned to ease into just about everything i read and hear. this practice of patience with the mind and to not let it wander off into the deeper recesses, rather to live in the presence of God is something that can only be taught by witnessing a higher power. now those life events are typically human, but what about those that are not of this world? how do we reciprocate that to our own species? i think the idea that being comfortable with explaining your thoughts in a rational way while not jumping to conclusions can help you become a better scientist. and perhaps science isn't doing its job in explaining the spirit realm and the third eye. but still, there's tons of work to be done, and to think this will be the only time you see aliens and witness the beauty of God's presence, would be undeniably false. i believe it comes from a sense of urgency that you wish to create a world where there is no limits to what consciousness perceives. this can be due to the human nature of destruction and chaos entering into our lives. what happens when humans are scarier than the aliens themselves? that's why we need to do the spiritual work and build the metaphorical spiritual armor that propels us into a world where we coexist not just as some mystical dream, but something tangible, something able to be understood. the more we question the fabric of our reality, i believe it changes the way physics operates around us. conscious awareness of the micro can influence the macro, and hence can help us be more calm about processes that require tons of forethought. i think the aliens are here for a good cause in order to safeguard our future from ourselves. in essence, we're always so absolute about what we know, but if any history buff explains to us why we're so stuck in our ways, you'd see that we come from a place of lacking, being alone and scared. this film accentuates that druglike state that we sometimes inhibit, although not all the time. but that wraps us up into a psycho burrito, and can cause us to spiral out of control. let nature do its course and try not to rack your brain on the minutia. get to the bottom of why you think the way you do an try and test it. life is to be explored.
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