Tucker's study of the "third James"

When James Leininger was two years old he “began having terrible nightmares about a plane crash. By the time he was three, he had told his parent that before he was born, he was a pilot who flew from a boat. His plane was shot in the engine by the Japanese and crashed in the water.”

Two years later ABC interviewed James and his parents, who said on the air that they had confirmed much of what their son had told them. “He said he had been a pilot named James on the boat Natoma, he had been shot down and killed at Iwo Jima, and he had a friend named Jack Larsen. His father had discovered that a James Huston from the USS Natoma Bay had been shot down in the Iwo Jima operation. Another pilot on the Natoma Bay was named Jack Larsen.”

“Soon after his third birthday, James began drawing pictures. He drew battle scenes with ships and planes over and over again—his parents report he drew hundreds of them. James began signing the pictures, James 3. When his parents asked him about it, he said, ‘I’m the third James. I’m James 3.’ What it may refer to is that James Huston was a junior. That would make James Leininger the third James.

“When James turned three, he got his first G.I. Joe and named it Billy (or Billie, as it turned out). When he received his second one that Christmas, he named it Leon. Two Christmases later, when he was five and a half, he received his third, which he named Walter. These G.I. Joes were his buddies, and he took them everywhere. He played with them in the tub and slept with them at night. When his parents asked about the names Leon and Walter, he told them that was who met him when he got to heaven.

“Ten men from Huston’s squadron aboard Natoma Bay were killed before he was. The names of three of them were Billie, Leon, and Walter. The day after James’s comment about meeting them, his mother brought up the topic again and asked James if there was really a heaven. When he said yes, she asked where it was, and he spread out his arms and said, ‘It’s right here.’ She asked what it looked like, and he said it was the most beautiful place in the world.

“She asked him if there is really a God, and James said yes. She then asked if God is a man or a woman. James’s answer was that God is not a man or a woman; he is whoever you need him to be at the time. When his mother asked him if everyone comes back, James said no, that you get to choose. You don’t have to come back. You can, but if you don’t want to, you don’t have to.” James also told his parents that he had picked them to be his family, after he found them in Hawaii eating dinner on the beach. His parents had been in Hawaii about a year before James was born, and on their last night there they had dinner on the beach.”

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013).

Patrick remembers his prior life as Kevin

Jim B. Tucker is Bonner-Lowry Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia, and Director of the UVA Division of Perceptual Studies. Tucker has spent more than a decade continuing the research of Ian Stevenson into past lives. In his previous book Life Before Life, Tucker provides an overview of fifty years of research, mostly supervised by Stevenson. Return to Life focuses on a few cases, and explains why quantum mechanics supports the conclusion that consciousness is not simply the product of brain activity. This new way of understanding consciousness also offers a possible explanation of the past life memories that Tucker and Stevenson have documented.

Tucker’s explanation of both the theory and experimental evidence that support quantum mechanics is remarkably clear, and his use of dreams as a useful analogy for living other lives is unique and evocative. Tucker’s book is not directly about NDEs, but explores one form of extraordinary knowing. Return to Life considers comments from children about their experiences in the “afterlife” of a previous life before they were reborn—which Tucker refers to an as an “intermission experience.”

Tucker begins his book with a quote from Voltaire: “It is not more surprising to be born twice than once; everything in nature is resurrection.”

Patrick told his mother, Lisa, that he had a prior life as Kevin, her first child who had died due to a metastatic neuroblastoma when he was about two years old. Patrick was born twenty years later. After Patrick’s birth, Lisa: “soon noticed a white opacity covering Patrick’s left eye. The doctors diagnosed it as a corneal leukoma. Patrick was seen by an ophthalmologist and examined periodically. The opacity shrunk after several weeks but did not completely disappear. While his vision was hard to assess with any precision when he was very young, Patrick was essentially blind in his left eye—just as Kevin had been blind in that eye at the end of his life.

“Lisa also felt a lump on Patrick’s head above his right ear at the same location where Kevin’s tumor had been biopsied. When we [Tucker and Ian Stevenson] examined Patrick [at age five], we felt the nodule above his ear. It had migrated slightly behind his ear by the time he was five, but Lisa said it was directly above the ear when he was born. It was hard, elevated, and more or less round. But it was not tender at all.

“Patrick was also born with an unusual mark on his neck. A dark slanted line that was about four millimeters long when we met him; it looked like a small cut. It was on the front of his neck on the right side. This was the area where Kevin’s central surgical line had been inserted.

“When Patrick was four years old, he began talking about Kevin’s life. Lisa was getting ready for work one day when Patrick asked if she remembered when he had surgery. After she told him he had never had surgery, he said, ‘Sure I did, right here on my ear’ and pointed to the spot above his right ear where Kevin’s tumor was biopsied.

“Another time, Patrick became excited when he saw a picture of Kevin. He had never seen it before because Lisa didn’t keep pictures of Kevin up in the house. His hands shaking, Patrick said, ‘Here is my picture. I’ve been looking for that.’ He was definite as he said, ‘That’s me.’ He also talked once about the small, brown puppy that stayed with the family. Lisa and Kevin had indeed kept a dog like that, one belonging to Lisa’s mother when she moved into an apartment complex that didn’t allow pets.

“One of the most inexplicable features of the case was that Patrick limped once he got old enough to walk. He had an unusual gait in which he would swing out his left leg. This matched the way Kevin had walked, since he had to wear a brace after breaking his leg. We asked Patrick to walk across the room several times and he was still limping slightly at age five, even though he seemed to have no medical reason to do so.

“Two years later, we visited Patrick and Lisa again. Patrick had continued to say unusual things. He had talked about a life prior to the one as Kevin, this one in Hawaii. He talked about his family there and a son who died. He mentioned a statute that melted due to a volcano and how the townspeople rebuilt it. From his descriptions, his parents believed he was recalling events from the 1940s.

“Several months before we met this second time, Patrick began talking one night as his mother fixed dinner. He asked, ‘Do you know that you have a relative that no one talks about?’ He said he had met this relative in heaven before being born. He was tall and thin with brown hair and brown eyes. The relative told Patrick that his name was Billy and he was called ‘Billy the Pirate.’ He had been killed by his stepfather, shot point-blank up in the mountains. Patrick said Billy was upset that no one talked about him after his death.

“Lisa knew nothing about any relative named Billy. When she called to ask her mother, she discovered that her mother’s oldest sister had a son named Billy. The details Patrick gave were correct. His stepfather killed Billy three years before Lisa was born. The murder was never talked about in the family. When Lisa asked about the nickname ‘Billy the Pirate,’ her mother laughed. His wildness had led to the nickname, and Lisa’s mother hadn’t heard it since Billy’s death. There seemed to be no way Patrick could have ever heard about Billy or his nickname before.

The considerable number of cases involving coincidences and memories of a previous life are not proof of reincarnation, but verify that the human experience is not uncommon. More of the cases occur in India and other countries where Hindu and Buddhist beliefs in reincarnation are deeply embedded in the culture, but there are also examples in the West.

Jim B. Tucker, Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives (St. Martin’s Press, 2013), 63-87.

Consciousness remains a mystery

Dr. Sam Parnia writes: “For millennia, defining death was easy and straightforward. Nobody needed to worry about what was life and what was death. It was quite clear and obvious: when a person’s heart stopped, he or she was dead. It was known that people would die for two main reasons—either their hearts stopped or they stopped breathing. Whichever stopped first (the heart or the lungs) would cause the other organ to also stop quickly, and then the brain would also stop working almost immediately afterward; therefore, we could say someone was dead.

“Scientists were not aware of a period of time after death in which the organs and cells in the body remained viable and had not yet become irreparably damaged, and hence death could be reversed. We were also not aware of the fairly long time that existed between these two states. The other way that death could happen was if someone has severe trauma to the brain; in that case, the brain would swell up and then start to press on the brain stem, which is where the reflexes are located that regulate the heartbeat and breathing. If the brain stem is compressed, all the nerves there stop working and the person immediately stops breathing and the heart immediately stops beating.

“But now the advances in medicine indicated that for the first time in history, death had to be defined in some other completely different way. This would enable the definition of death to also include the point in time where there is irreversible brain damage irrespective of whether the heart is still beating—brain death—to accommodate the growing number of people who could now be kept alive artificially (by maintaining their heartbeats and breathing) even after they had developed permanent brain death.

“Anything that impacts the ability of brain cells to be active will cause the brain to stop functioning. This includes when someone’s blood sugar has dropped to very low levels, or if the temperature in the body is very low. Certain drugs, particularly those given for sedation and anesthesia, will also stop brain activity if given in high enough doses.

“There are case reports of people who had appeared to be brain dead (and had met all the brain death testing criteria) after being examined many hours and days after being warmed up to a normal temperature following hypothermia treatment for cardiac arrest. Only to show signs of brain recovery up to seven days later.

Consciousness, Parnia asserts, remains a mystery. “It is not like understanding the science of cell functions, or for that matter any other entity we have studied in the physical sciences in the past. Though it is a pure mystery, we know it exists and defines who we are. Nonetheless, nobody has been able to explain how human consciousness comes to be.

“As a consequence of the progress in resuscitation science that started in earnest almost half a century ago and has been evolving since, over the past forty years there has been growing recognition that people who have had a close brush with death or have gone beyond the threshold of death and entered the gray zone that exists between death and permanent irreversible brain damage have provided consistent mental recollections that correspond with that period. 

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 264-284.

NDEs cannot be explained as brain activity

“Anyone who dies,” Dr. Parnia explains, “loses consciousness with the immediacy of a hammer blow, and electrical activity in the brain ceases in about ten seconds. Scientifically speaking, people who lose consciousness under these circumstances, by definition, should not be able to report highly lucid, details, and chronologically accurate memories and accounts of the experience. And in fact, the vast majority of patients who undergo any brain injury don’t remember anything immediately preceding or following the incident. Yet somehow people who claim these conscious mental processes during the period of clinical death enjoy an inexplicable ability to recall details of which they should be wholly unaware.”

“Because brain function is so complex, scientists investigating NDEs looked for further chemicals that could be involved in the dying brain theory—that is, the theory that a chemical change in some part or parts of the brain involved with human experiences, sensations, and feelings could be causing the experience to occur as a type of hallucination. Drugs administered at the time of death seemed like an obvious explanation, but an examination of the medical literature doesn’t support this possibility. Studies show that many NDEs took place without any medications even being administered or that people with and without the experiences had had the same medications.

“The bottom line is that no brain-based chemical change can define whether a sensation or feeling is real or not. The brain regions involved with any feeling or emotion may not distinguish how they have become active, just that something has activated them.

“Dr. Karl Jansen, a New Zealand brain researcher with expertise in the effects of drugs on the brain, studied the effects of ketamine and suggested that NDEs might be occurring as a hallucination through activation of the same areas of the brain when people are critically ill and deprived of oxygen. Testing this theory was another matter. Its major limitation is the same as the oxygen theory.

“Not only would identifying a specific receptor or chemical not determine the reality or otherwise of the experience, the receptor being discussed (the NMDA) receptor) is very widely found in the brain and is involved in many other experiences and activities, such as memory recall, without causing hallucinations. Therefore, it would not be sufficient to assume that simply by virtue of it being active, an experience is a hallucination or real.

“Another impediment to testing this theory, as with all chemical-based theories, is that after death has taken place, the brain has shut down and these cells are not in their usual state but are in fact undergoing their own process of death. They are severely abnormal and not in a state to mediate thought processes, whereas when someone has taken drugs and hallucinates, the brain is functioning and the cells are not dying, which is why he or she can experience these visions.

“The other problem with the theory was that the hallucinations described by people who used drugs were not like the visions described by those who had NDEs."

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 225-227.

MD calls the NDE an "Actual Death Experience"

Dr. Sam Parnia presents several striking NDE accounts, but also discusses possible medical explanations due to lack of oxygen, chemicals present in the body, and psychological hypotheses. Noting that contemporary medical care in hospitals has extended the time a patient can be without heart or brain function, and yet be resuscitated, Parnia suggests the phrase Actual Death Experience (ADE) is often more accurate than Near-Death Experience (NDE).

One of Parnia’s patients shared with him this life review during his NDE: I wasn’t just watching the events. I was reliving the experience from their point of view and at the same time (and I don’t know how this works) I was also experiencing it from a higher reality; the truth of the matter. I saw my own lies and my own self-deception, which I had used to convince myself that doing certain things was okay because people had deserved it.

Then I was experiencing the emotional impact it had on other people. I felt their pain. I felt the shock on them. But then at the same time I also saw that they have their own lies and self-deceptions and so the net result was that I felt like I was a failure as a person and I wasn’t the person I had thought I was. I felt really dreadful and it was completely humbling.

The NDE survivor clearly affirmed: the judgment came all from myself. It was not from an outside source, but then this being that was with me was also sending me comforting messages—thank goodness!—and one of them was it was alright as I was only human.

Parnia writes of a case involving a three-and-a-half-year-old boy named Andrew who had open-heart surgery. Two weeks after the surgery, Andrew asked his parents when he could go back to the sunny place with all the flowers and animals. His mother said, yes, they’d go to the park again.

No, I don’t mean the park, he said. I mean the sunny place I went to with the lady. When she asked what lady, he replied, The lady that floats.

“His mother told him she didn’t understand what he meant.

You didn’t take me there. The lady came and got me. She held my hand and we floated up. You were outside when I was having my heart mended. It was okay, the lady looked after me, the lady loves me. It wasn’t scary. Everything was bright and colorful [but] I wanted to come back to see you.

Later, in an unrelated situation, Andrew’s mother showed him a photo of her own mother, who had passed away. Andrew said, That’s her. That’s the lady. The lady he was referring to was his deceased grandmother.”

Sam Parnia, Erasing Death: The Science That is Rewriting the Boundaries Between Life and Death (HarperOne, 2013), 133-138.

NDE enables "remote-viewing" in Army research

When Elizabeth Mayer learned that the CIA funded research in the 1970s and 1980s into what is often called “remote-viewing,” she talked with Harold Puthoff, a physicist from Stanford who was hired by the CIA to coordinate the project. Puthoff told her about one of the remote viewers who was extremely successful:

“Joe McMoneagle passed his first remote-viewing tests with flying colors. At that point, he was asked to volunteer as remote reviewer #001 for the top-secret army project Grill Flame, eventually renamed Star Gate. McMoneagle remained associated with the project for the full eighteen years of the Army-initiated involvement, the only remote viewer to do so. In 1984, he was awarded the Legion of Merit by the US government for ‘distinguishing himself by exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services during his Army career.’

McMoneagle, Puthoff says, would produce: “masses of data that were really hot and totally inexplicable by ordinary means. One example that had particular impact on me was when Joe identified that the Russians were building a new form of submarine. We gave Joe the geographic coordinates, and nothing else. His immediate response was that they identified a very cold wasteland with an extremely large industrial looking building that had enormous smokestacks, not far from the sea that was covered with a thick cap of ice. Since that first impression corresponded very closely to the photograph, we showed Joe the picture and asked what might be going on inside it. Here is McMoneagle’s own retrospective account of the viewing:

I spent some time relaxing and emptying my mind. Then with my eyes closed, I imagined myself drifting down into the building, passing downward through its roof. What I found was mind-blowing. The building was easily the size of two or three huge shopping centers, all under a single roof.

In giant bays were what looked like cigars of different sizes, sitting in gigantic racks. Thick mazes of scaffolding and interlocking steel pipes were everywhere. Within these were what appeared to be two large cylinders being welded side to side, and I had an overwhelming sense that this was a submarine, a really big one, with twin hulls.

What I didn’t know was that my session was reported back to the NSC and created some dissension. The almost unanimous belief at the time, by all the intelligence-collection agencies investigating the building, was that the Soviets were constructing a brand-new type of assault ship—a troop carrier, and possibly one with the helicopter capability. A submarine was out of the question.

On my second visit, I got up very close. Hovering beside it, I guessed it to be about twice the length of an American football field and nearly seventy feet in width, and at least six or seven floors high (if it were sitting next to a standard apartment building). It was clearly constructed of two huge elongated tubes running side-by-side for almost their entire length. (I didn’t think this was possible with submarines.) I moved up over the deck and was surprised to see that it had slanted missile tubes running side by side. This was critically important because this indicated that it had the capacity to fire while on the move rather than having to stand still in the water, which made it a very dangerous type of submarine.

After the session, I did a very detailed drawing of the submarine, adding dimensions, as well as noting the slanted tubes, indicating eighteen to twenty in all. This material, along with the typed transcript of my session was forwarded to the NSC. We soon received a follow-on request to return to the target and to try to provide an estimated time of completion. I revisited the site and, based on the speed of construction and the differences in the condition of the submarine from one session to the next, I guessed that it would be ready for launch about four months later—that would be sometime in the month of January—a singularly crazy time of year to launch a submarine from a building not connected to water, near a sea frozen over with ice yards thick. I reported that very soon a crew of bulldozers and other types of heavy equipment would arrive to cut a channel leading to the sea.

McMoneagle’s intuitive analysis was correct. In the words of Puthoff, “McMoneagle was one of our very few subjects whose ability to perceive places thousands of miles away was so reliable we could document it consistently and unequivocally.” [1]

Mayer didn’t know, or knew but didn’t mention in her book, that McMoneagle attributed his remote-viewing abilities to near-death experiences. In a book entitled Death Makes Life Possible: Revolutionary Insights on Living, Dying, and the Continuation of Consciousness, author Marilyn Schlitz quotes McMoneagle’s accounts of his NDEs:

“His first NDE occurred after McMoneagle became ill while eating in an Austrian restaurant. When I exited through the front door of the restaurant, there was a pop, like someone snapping their fingers, and I found myself standing on a cobblestone road. It was raining, and the rain was passing through my palms. I thought, ‘This is very peculiar.’ I looked over, and a body was half in and half out of this swinging door of the restaurant.

I noticed that it looked very much like my body. My friend who had brought my wife to the restaurant had come outside and pulled the body into his lap. He was striking the body on the chest with his fist; they didn’t know what CPR was in 1970. I found out later that I had gone into convulsions, collapsed, and had swallowed my tongue. His solution was to keep hitting me on the chest with his fist.

They loaded the body into a car and rushed me to a hospital in Passau, Germany. That took quite a while since it was about sixty kilometers away. By the time they got me to the hospital, I had not breathed for a while, and my heart had stopped. And I was watching them—I floated alongside the car. I watched them cut the clothing off in the emergency room and stick needles in my chest. I had drifted up to the ceiling in the out-of-body state. I felt heat on the back of my neck and thought it was those bright lights near the ceiling. I turned to look at the lights and fell over backwards into a tunnel, accelerated through the tunnel, and when I came out at the end, I was enveloped in this very warm, bright light.

Instantly, I knew all the answers to the universe. I knew that I was in the presence of God because that’s what it had to be. I was overwhelmed with love and peace. Then a voice said, ‘You can’t stay. You have to go back.’ I argued with it and said, ‘Nah, I’m not going anywhere.’ And then there was another pop. I sat up, and saw I was under a sheet naked.

I looked around, and there was a German lying in the bed next to me. I had been comatose about twenty-five hours. I was very excited and started telling him, ‘God’s a white light. You can’t die.’ He ran out and got the doctor who came in and sedated me.

I woke up a little later, and they were taking me to Munich to put me in a rest home where they would start doing brain studies. They were sure that I was crazy and that I’d suffered brain damage from the lack of oxygen. Over a two-week period, they were able to figure out that I’d not suffered any brain damage. However, I was unable to reconcile the events. I was having out-of-body experiences. I was hearing conversations going on four rooms away. I was reading people’s minds that were walking into the room. I was psychically scattered. And I’d totally lost my fear of death.

Eventually they let me out of the rest home, and I got to spend seven more years overseas doing some very strange jobs because I had no fear of death. For a long time, until 1985, I believe the white light is God, and that you can’t die, that you survive death.”

In 1985, after a massive heart attack, McMoneagle had a second NDE.  In the dying process, I was able to see the light, but not go to it. For some interesting reason, I can’t explain why, I was just not allowed to do it. But I could see the light, and I could see the light had edges. That created a huge philosophical problem for me because my definition of God is that God is an unlimited being, and an unlimited being can’t have edges.

After more than a year, McMoneagle concluded the light is what we are when we cease to be physical. I think we become, in a sense, an almost pure form of energy. And in this pure state of energy, we coalesce into all of the knowledge that we’ve collected in all of our forms, many of the lives that we’ve lived.

I believe in multiple lives, not recurrent lives. I don’t believe that we are born into lives in a linear format, but I think we live multiple lives simultaneously. So when we cease to be physical, all of those lives coalesce together; all of the knowledge comes together at one time. And the reason we assume the light to be God is because all of the knowledge coming together is so overwhelming we just assume that this must be what God is.

It’s the initial threshold of something that we call life after death, but it’s the leading edge of the loss of identity. The reason that we return from the near-death experience is a survival mechanism that says we can’t quite lose our identity. True life after death is a loss of identity. It’s a reintroduction into whatever the purest form of energy is, that all of creation or matter is made from.

My consciousness, McMoneagle continues, is scattered across space-time because space-time is an illusion. When I cease to be physical, when I die physically, I cease to be physical in all of those manifestations. All of that experience comes together simultaneously. Now, the reason for being physical is to collect knowledge, or to collect experience. If that’s true, you and I are having an experience now. Well, if that’s true, then the experience I’m having over here and you’re having there is pretty poor because I’m only getting half of it and you’re getting the other half. But what if in actuality, we’re both the same? Then we’re getting all of it. But we don’t know that until we cease to be physical.

In the physical sense, we don’t understand that, but we have to have the experience by playing out our roles. In other words, we’re incarnated in multiple lives in the physical. Through the death process, or the leaving of the physical, all physical reality ceases to be. All the manifestations cease to be simultaneously, and it’s all brought together into an understanding of the universe.

It’s important to understand that what I do to you, particularly in this moment, I’m doing to myself. That’s the critical understanding of it. So real karma is everything you do, you do to yourself. That’s the truest form of understanding. Everything I do to every living thing, I do to myself. [2]

1 Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007), 110-117. 

2 In Marilyn Schlitz, Death Makes Life Possible: Revolutionary Insights on Living, Dying, and the Continuation of Consciousness (Sounds True, 2015), 52-55.

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A woman with "impossible" intuitive knowledge

Elizabeth Mayer writes of a prospective patient who asked for a consultation. “She was a statistician contemplating a move to the Bay area for a new job. She was planning to accept the job offer, but wanted to discuss her decision. When she arrived at my office, a tall, elegant woman in her mid 50s, she greeted me cordially but moved right to the point: she was in a bind, a familiar one. She’d run away whenever it had arisen in the past. If she made this move, it might mean she was running away again. The fact was, she moved to keep people from getting to know her too well.

“For years she’d avoided getting psychological help out of fear that she’d be diagnosed as crazy. It began with something that happened in graduate school. It traumatized me. I’m scared to think about it even now. Versions of the same thing have been happening ever since. I keep running away, but that’s no solution. I need a different way to live with who I am.

“She explained that she knew things in ways that were real—she was defensive as she said it: ‘real’—but they were real in ways her colleagues called impossible. Could they right? Was I open to the idea that people might know things in ways that seems impossible and crazy?

I know things and it mystifies me how I know them. Sometimes it terrifies me. It starts with getting a good read on things. I’m intuitive. But lots of people are intuitive. It didn’t get really scary until I was in graduate school. I was in my third year of Ph.D. work. I had a good fellowship. My professors thought well of me.

I had an idea for dissertation that built on the work of one professor, someone I liked a lot, very smart but gruff. He was teaching a seminar. One day he’d given us a problem to work out—very complicated. I took it down like everyone else. Then I said the answer. Just said it—the right answer. To four decimal places. It just came to me. It seemed natural to say it. It was a disaster. The professor swore I must have stolen his notes.

After that, he wouldn’t work with me anymore. The other students stopped trusting me. It got so bad I had to find another university where I could do my dissertation research. I’ve been moving ever since. I get afraid people might start attacking me for things they think I shouldn’t know. Now I move before things blow up.

What happens is I will suddenly know something. Like, I’ll know when the experiment won’t work. Or I’ll know some data analysis is faulty. The more I let on what I know, the more obvious it gets that I don’t have any basis for knowing. It’s just an idea that comes to me. But I know—I can’t tell you how powerful the sensation is. Maybe you know what it’s like. It’s spooky. It scares me. I want to be normal.

“I gradually became convinced,” Mayer writes, that “Grace did have unusual and remarkable intuitive capacities. But the depth and extent of her virulent fear impressed me at least as much. As a psychoanalyst, I’m used to seeing fear. But Grace’s fear was unusual. She didn’t just fear for her mental stability. She feared for the stability of the world around her—the existence of a world she could count on, reliably constrained by boundaries of space, time, and individual identity.

Grace traced her intuition back to her childhood experience of protecting herself and her younger sister from her drunken father.

During the late afternoons, I’d start listening for him. It was a funny kind of listening. It was like listening with my whole body, not in my ears. I don’t know how to describe it except to say I was tuned in, vigilant with every part of me. Suddenly I know—know he was 15 minutes away and driving home drunk. Then I’d hustle my sister and me into the closet. I couldn’t afford to wait and hear him at the door. He’d crash in and grab whoever was in sight, then hit. He grabbed my mother a lot—she just stood there. So I had to be the one to protect my sister and me—I had to learn how. Somehow I just started knowing when he was headed home and when he’d be dangerous. I knew. It was like this spooky knowing with my professor; but it was different because I had to know, I had no choice.

My dad didn’t drink all the time. So there was no predicting. I had to stay tuned in every day, be ready and never trust any pattern. We’d go for weeks and be safe. But I couldn’t get lulled into thinking that’s how it would stay because suddenly he’d drink again and we’d have to hide. I’d have to know way before he pulled up at the house. As soon as I knew, I’d start getting ready—turn off the lights in the bedroom, get water for my sister, bring in her blanket, and settle us with pillows to make it cozy. How did I know when he was on his way and drunk? As a child I accepted it, I thought I just knew because I had to. But now that isn’t good enough. I keep wondering, am I crazy? If I’m crazy, how come I kept being right? It scares me to death.

 

Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and the Inexplicable Powers of the Human Mind (Bantam Books, 2007) 97-100, 97-100.

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