Cancer healed & other extraordinary experiences

Elizabeth Mayer writes: “The way I found the harp changed how I work as a clinician and psychoanalyst. It changed the nature of the research I pursued. It changed my sense of what’s ordinary and what’s extraordinary. Most of all, it changed my relatively established, relatively contented, relatively secure sense of how the world adds up. If dowser Harold McCoy did what he appeared to have done, I had to face the fact that my notions of space, time, reality, and the nature of the human mind were stunningly inadequate. Disturbing as that recognition was, there was something intriguing, even exciting, about it as well.

“Weeks after I’d published my first tentative foray into exploring mind-matter anomalies, a physician I barely knew came up to me at a professional meeting. He’d read my article and wanted to tell me something. The story poured out. He’d been diagnosed 20 years earlier with fatal bone cancer and had become deeply depressed. As a marathon runner, he’d found relief from despair only while he ran. Early one morning, two hours into his run, he’d been suddenly overcome by what he described as a sensation of light—clear, soft light, as though the light was filling my bones, as though light and air were infusing each bone. I saw it—light penetrating those bones, right through to the marrow.

“The next week his X-rays were clean. I’ve never told another colleague, he said. I told my wife when it happened—no one else. And this part I didn’t tell anyone: I know that’s what cured me. The light crowded out the cancer cells. I don’t know how, but I know it did.

“As word of my new interest spread, my medical and psychoanalytic colleagues began to inundate me with accounts of their own anomalous experiences, personal as well as clinical. As with the physician, the stories they shared with me were often ones they’d never revealed to another professional associate. Their accounts—by email, snail mail, at conferences, and seminars, in hall corridors, or at dinner—made as little sense to me as they did to the colleagues telling me about them. The stories were all about knowing things in bizarrely inexplicable ways:

My patient walked in and I knew her mother had died—no clues—I just knew, instantly.

I woke up in the middle of the night like I heard a shot; the next day I found out it was when my patient took a gun and tried to kill herself.

I suddenly felt that my partner’s son was in trouble. I called my partner; it worried him enough that he tracked down his son. His son had been in a bad car accident and my partner got there just in time to make a decision about surgery that probably saved his life.

“I was particularly fascinated by how eagerly my colleagues shared even the most weirdly personal stories with me. Their eagerness puzzled me, until I realized how badly people wanted to reintegrate corners of experience they’d walled off from their public lives for fear of being disbelieved.

I was on a bus and all of a sudden found myself smelling the perfume my brother’s ex-wife used to wear. When the bus stopped, she got on. I hadn’t smelled that perfume or seen her in thirty years.

My husband and I fell in love with a house in London on our honeymoon—very distinctive, across from a park. Fourteen years later, living in Boston, I woke up one day, and thought, maybe we could buy it. I tracked down a realtor in London, asked if she could figure out the address and find out if it was for sale. Crazy! But she did. The man who’d been living there had just died; the For Sale sign wasn’t even up yet. We bought it the next week.

“I was somewhat stalled with one deeply troubled patient, Mayer writes, “a woman who was isolated and very frightened of the world. For years she’d insisted she couldn’t remember any of her dreams, and indeed she’d reported almost none to me through our work together. Then, during one session, she told me that the night before she’d dreamed of my going to Arizona. I had indeed been planning a trip to Arizona that week, but I’d told none of my colleagues or patients about it.

“I asked her, why Arizona? She had no idea, no associations. I told her that I was in fact going to Arizona and wondered if she somehow picked that up. For a moment, she was quiet. Then she hesitantly told me that she often had dreams in which she knew where people were going, and it turned out she was right.

“She couldn’t begin to explain it. She’d learned not to tell people; it was too weird. She had had dreams like that as a child and her parents had raged at her and called her crazy. They would sometimes beat her until she said she’d made it all up. So she’d learned to shut up and started pretending that she didn’t have dreams, that a lot of things she experienced weren’t real. Pretending to others, and to herself, had made her feel safe, but it had also made her feel she wasn’t real.

“That exchange with my patient was a turning point in her psychotherapy. It was also a turning point for me. My evident curiosity about her dream had liberated a flood of experiences. As my patient started believing that I could believe her—and considered her neither crazy nor dangerous—a new world opened up between us. She began for the first time telling me about other bizarrely intuitive experiences, and about how they terrified her. Bit by bit, her comfort in the world took new root. Her life changed in profoundly positive ways. She told me that she started feeling she could be real.

“My patient’s fear—of being unable to credit the evidence before her eyes, of being thought crazy, of losing the comfort of being believed—began to take on an enormous resonance for me. I still wanted to make sense of my own experience with the harp. But I also wanted to understand more about why our culture is so fearful about anomalous experiences.

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007).