"Doctor, I hear voices..." - Communicating through Consciousness Part 1

How fine is the line between pathological delusion and intuitive perception? This episode explores how we can communicate through consciousness - but with whom are we communicating?

Daniel Caine is the author of the science fiction crime thriller Matter of Time.

For more information visit www.danielcaine.com

Transcript

Speaker 0:01

This episode contains references to suicide.

Speaker 0:13

This is Stranger Than Fiction with Daniel Caine. This episode explores how we can communicate through consciousness. But with whom are we communicating?

Speaker 0:31

Mist rolled eerily over the steep banks from the river's surface and carpeted the floodplain in a low hang. The meadowland had the air of a graveyard without graves, and the occasional snapping twig from unseen nocturnal scurring in the undergrowth all around threatened and harried the darkest depths of the imagination as awareness slowly began to return. Any faint light from the distant row of houses on the estate backing onto the vestige tract of land that clung to the river's suburban meanderings was lost as soon as the dazed man traipsed still mindlessly on across the footbridge, where the only companion left to the senses was a distant orange halo glow filtering through the tree line from the motorway up ahead on the unlit narrow access lane along which the man now found himself slowly walking. He had no idea as to his whereabouts and didn't know what had possessed him to slip out into the night alone and obliviously hike what must have been several kilometres from the comfort of his home. The return to full awareness, though, brought with it a sense of vulnerability in the surrounding darkness. Each of his steps on the gravel underfoot now seemed to echo back at him from behind, and with a sudden chill down his spine, he became sure that someone was following. In sudden terror, he exploded into a sprint equal to the pounding in his chest and covered the next 200 metres of track in a peripheral blur of shadowy gnarled undergrowth, but began tiring and sucking for air. The orange glow of safety at the end of the lane was almost within reach, and he gritted against the burn in his lungs. Seconds later, he burst out onto the tarmac of the roundabout intersection situated beneath the motorway overpass and was blinded by the sweeping headlights of a passing car heading for the on-ramp. With a check over his shoulder, he bent over in exhaustion, unable to run a step further. He stared back at the opening to the dark laneway he had just escaped from. All was quiet and still, except for his own painful laboured gasps for air against the fading sound of high-speed tread on asphalt as the passing car accelerated away. It was then that 35-year-old Isaac McKinnon first heard a voice whispering inside his head. "Sanctuary, Sanctuary, Sanctuary," was all it kept repeating. He truly thought he must be going insane. He just didn't know yet what forces were calling to him, nor did he realise that his presence in the laneway had just disturbed a serial killer before they'd had chance to slice open the throat of another victim that had been dragged unconscious into the undergrowth. It's brave to admit that you hear voices in the way that the character Isaac McKinnon in the book Matter of Time hears voices. It leaves a person wide open to such labels as delusional, psychotic, and insane. But what if those voices guide you and the information received proves to be startlingly correct and of help? How fine is the line between pathological delusion and intuitive perception? That is one of the themes in the book Matter of Time and a question that I've had to ask and answer myself.

Speaker 4:14

I had nothing particular on my mind as I entered the shopping mall and approached the descending escalator leading to the shops on the lower basement level. But as my foot lifted to step onto the staircase, a clear, distinctive voice from nowhere spoke in my ear. "Go to High Street Armadale," it said, in a tone devoid of emotion, giving no clue as to a possible reason why. Unfortunately, at that precise instant, the weight transfer of my forward motion onto the steps had just reached a zero point, and I hung momentarily torn between equal and opposite forces. Both gravity and momentum said "Down!" but the voice and my body's core stabilisers said "Go back!" I was left embarrassingly writhing in midair, before stumbling inelegantly between the landing level and the constantly moving staircase. My foot started to skate off into the splits, and with one almighty and painful effort, I pulled myself upright and hopped back onto the landing, in some vain hope that no one had noticed my clumsy antics, and then self consciously hurried off back through the mall's main entrance and headed for the car park. It seemed that my plans for the morning had just been changed. I'd learnt not to ignore that woman's voice whenever she spoke.

Speaker 5:40

Twenty minutes later, I sat down at a table in some random cafe I'd wandered into on High Street in Armadale. There were countless cafes, bars, and restaurants along the one and a half kilometre stretch of suburban road, and this place seemed as good a choice as any. I had no idea of what I was looking for, but I'd come to accept that such cryptic instructions were simply meant to be acted upon, without question, even if no resolution seemed immediately apparent. And this occasion proved to be no different. After forty minutes, I was still sitting at the table alone, at a loss, and looking as though I'd been stood up for a lunch date, so I decided to pay for the coffee and head home. As I exited the cafe, though, I could not have known that my world was about to collapse like a house of cards. On the sidewalk outside, three tables along, was my then wife engaged in a very intimate conversation with a guy I'd never seen before. I watched on, in breathless shock, as she laughed girlishly with a flick of her hair and playfully stroked the guy's hand. I had no idea, no suspicion in the slightest. But that woman's voice that whispers in my ear wanted me to know. I walked past the table and caught my wife's eye, not even waiting for her reaction. I simply continued to walk. The life I had known had been lost forever.

Speaker 7:22

That woman's voice, usurping my auditory centers, was something that I'd got used to over the years, but there were times that I would in no way be left guessing on being directed to a location. "Go to the public phones in the food court of Forest Hills Shopping Centre," she said. I was actually walking into a bank for an appointment, and the shopping centre was forty minutes' drive away. And without a word, I turned and headed back to my car, leaving me as a no-show at the bank. Fifty minutes later, I was standing at the public phones in the food court, glancing around in case anything of significance struck me. And after a further ten minutes, I skulked over to a free phone, picked it up, and pretended to be on a call, hoping that it would make me less conspicuous as I scanned the space. But after two minutes of feeling utterly ridiculous, I placed down the receiver and turned to walk off, just as the guy on the phone next to me placed his receiver down and turned to walk off too. I was just ahead of him and was more than surprised when I heard him call my name. I turned and looked up at the tall, well-built man, but didn't recognise him in the slightest. And on realising my confusion, he identified himself with just his first name. It took me a few seconds. There was something about the eyes, and something about the voice. Then it dawned. The last time I'd seen the man, he'd been a skinny teenager, the younger brother of a friend of mine that I'd lost contact with years before, not under the best of circumstances. But I'd heard, through a friend of a mutual acquaintance, that she was having a baby, and I'd been wondering if she was okay. I had never stopped caring, and had often wondered how life was treating her. And when I'd recently heard she was pregnant, my concern had only heightened. The brother and I exchanged broad smiles and shook hands. "How's your sister?" He beamed back at me. "I was just on the phone to the hospital," he said. "She's just had the baby, and they're both fine." That woman, who whispers in my ear, had known all about my concerns over that mother and baby, and with perfect timing had guided me to the place I needed to be to let me know that everything was okay and as it should be.

Speaker 10:01

Again, I emphasize that I am not suggesting such experiences prove that some guardian angel follows our every step through life. And equally, I am not discounting that possibility. We just don't know. It's one thing to perceive information, but the information perceived can be processed by us in so many ways to form any number of conclusions and create any number of paradigms. What I am suggesting though is that such experiences unequivocally prove that our awareness can reach out across space and time and gain information that would not be available to us if the source of all information was solely confined to the neural network activity of each individual's isolated and separate brain, as the majority view of science believes. But it's not only science that would consider someone hearing voices as being delusional, psychotic, and insane. Any reasonable individual hearing voices would and should consider that possibility too.

Speaker 11:16

At the conclusion of a visit to a medical office for a routine flu vaccination, the doctor, unrolling my sleeve back down and sliding his chair away, casually asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I was motioning to stand and leave, with every intention of smiling politely and offering a no thank you, when I instead suddenly uttered, "I'm thinking of committing suicide." A silence hung in the space between us, the doctor being as shocked as I was. I had no idea of where those words had come from. Life was good, and I had everything to live for. "I'm thinking of jumping," then spat out of my mouth. The doctor immediately got into gear and picked up the phone to tell the receptionist to reschedule his next patients. And I was left apologetically trying to tell the doctor that there was no need, as I had no idea why I'd said what I'd said. He was intent on calling a crash team and organising my immediate admission into hospital, and it took me at least thirty minutes to de-escalate the situation and convince the man that I did not pose a danger to myself. At the time, I was staying away from home, and I had never met this doctor before, so I understood his concerns. "Still," he said, struggling with the medical legalities, "it's an odd thing for you to just say out of the blue, Daniel, that alone should be investigated." And before he allowed me to leave, he made me promise that I would honour the referral to a psychiatrist that he himself would organise. I left the office and sat down on a bench at a bus stop a little further down the road. I was shell shocked at what had just happened. I'd been through a lot over recent years. My marriage had broken down. I'd survived a life threatening aneurysm with a stark warning from surgeons about the long-term prognosis. My entire life had undergone massive shifts, and not only did I hear voices, those episodes of unconscious writing had only heightened. So, the doctor's pleas for me to investigate why I just uttered those words did make sense. Perhaps my subconscious was troubled without me knowing, though I was not looking forward to telling a psychiatrist, "Doctor, I hear voices."

Speaker 13:57

I did go along. And the psychiatrist's findings did prove interesting: "On examination, I find no evidence of suicidal ideation. Daniel is not thinking about committing suicide. Rather, his thought processes are engaged in thinking about 'committing suicide', i.e., thinking about the subject of 'committing suicide', which is not suicidal ideation, and so is not of concern. Daniel presents in a good state of mental health, and his examination was only noteworthy in that he did not display any of the usual indicators pointing towards personality disorder that even most individuals of good mental health can at times display. As for the voices that he reports hearing, I can only suggest that he seeks out some type of spiritual counseling." That final comment was not what I was expecting from a psychiatrist. If only that had been the end of the episode. A couple of weeks later, I was busy doing some work in my room at my accommodation when a man's voice in my head suddenly shouted, "Now, Now, Now!" I have a memory, a frame by frame slow motion memory, of reacting as soon as I'd heard the first "Now!" I was getting to my feet to head for the door before the second now had even been spoken. Without a thought, I opened the door to sprint along the corridor. Up ahead, I could see someone stood with head bowed and hands held together in prayer, and as I closed in, they stretched out their arms horizontally either side to form the figure of a cross and bodily leant forward to fall into the stairwell. They were already at an angle of around thirty degrees when I managed to catch their still outstretched arm and pull them back to safety. Now I understood. Someone in my vicinity had been thinking of 'suicide' and 'thinking of jumping'. I had been subconsciously prewarned, so when that voice asked me to act with urgency, I did so without thought or hesitation. Full resolution came though, when the suicidal person's doctor was called in. It was the same doctor that I had seen for the flu vaccination. I made myself scarce, at the risk of the man recognising me.

Speaker 16:44

So the line between pathological delusion and intuitive perception is clear. Often in life, we can think that we are looking at the figure of a circle. But if we zoom in and look closer and closer, we will see a small gap in the circumference, and we will realise that it isn't a circle, after all. It is, in fact, a single straight line that has been curved around until both ends of the line appear to almost touch. And if we were to just straighten the line, we'd see that both ends, which had seemed so close, are actually poles apart with, in this case, pathological delusion at one end, and intuitive perception at the far polar opposite end. No fine line between the two exists. The space-time continuum is the framework in which consciousness constructs our perceived reality. So it should be no surprise that we can be guided through consciousness to a location in space with precise timing in time while responding to some need. The opening excerpt of this episode, taken from my book, Matter of Time, is a fictionalised version of actual events that I myself experienced. I had no idea of what possessed me to hike obliviously in the dead of night to end up at that motorway overpass. The following day, another victim of a serial killer was found. It would be some time before I was to make the connection that the killer had driven along the motorway that night and across the roundabout overpass to which I'd been drawn. As the killer hunted his next victim.

Speaker 1 18:50

You've been listening to Stranger Than Fiction with Daniel Caine. Join us in the next episode as we continue to investigate why the reality we perceive truly is Stranger Than Fiction. For more information, visit www.danielcaine.com.