He Needs His Sleep
It was the summer of 1949, and I was four years of age. My family was spending a few days visiting my mother’s parents, in Socorro, New Mexico. Reportedly just before midnight, as the adults were standing around in my grandparents’ front yard, someone pointed to the sky. Suddenly everyone saw lights, a formation of brightly illuminated triangular shapes, slowly moving across the heavens above the city. It occurred to all who were present that these objects might be spaceships from another world. One of the grownups suggested waking up little Georgie. “No,” said my mother, “he needs his sleep!” And so, the next morning, I was told about the illuminated shapes, and about the decision not to wake me. My response? Utter shock, and incomprehension, and then a cold, lasting fury. WAKE THE KID UP, PEOPLE! HE CAN CATCH UP ON HIS SLEEP SOME OTHER TIME!
About thirty years later I was driving along a lonely highway, at four thirty in the morning, trying to get in very early for a college class I had to teach.. An extremely bright light appeared in the sky overhead, fixed in space, unmoving for at least ten minutes as I drove along. I looked at the highway, then at the hovering light, then back at the road, then again at the light. It occurred to me that after all these years I was finally witnessing one of the illuminated shapes my parents and grandparents had described so many years before Then the light abruptly vanished. I looked around, saw nothing, and continued driving, but with a growing, excited feeling that I might actually have seen an alien ship from space. A few minutes later I took one last look into the sky, and to my dismay, saw a brown helicopter hovering over the road. Evidently the craft had turned off its searchlight. That was the single ugliest helicopter I have ever seen.
Long after the incident on the highway, I met John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist, who was obsessed with the possibility of alien visitors to the earth. We were attending a conference on post-materialist thought. . Poor John, also a friend of my buddy Robert Stolorow, was run over by a drunk driver in London and killed a few years ago. Oh well, he was seventy-five, and it is as good a way to go as any, once a person has had his life. Anyway, I told John about my early experience of having lost the opportunity to see the UFOs. He listened with interest as the story unfolded, and then suggested another construction of what I had described. He said, “George, your image of what happened in Socorro might actually be a screen memory, a seeming recollection that actually serves to mask something else that is too frightening and traumatic to be recalled.” I asked John what might be hidden beneath the screen of the story. His answer: “It is possible that you did not sleep through the alien visitation, that you were all too present, even that you were taken by the aliens.” So I asked my father, at that point eighty-one years old, about the whole matter, and in particular about his having let me sleep while others watched the UFOs. . He said, “Georgie, I have absolutely no memory of anything like that, and I don’t think it occurred.” Perhaps it was not that the adults were in the front yard as I lay sleeping; maybe they were the ones who had fallen asleep inside and I stood alone before the house as the triangular shapes appeared above. Maybe some seriously scary things happened then. It pleases me to think that John Mack might have been on to something. And maybe I don’t have to be mad anymore about my parents’ not waking me up. .
About thirty years later I was driving along a lonely highway, at four thirty in the morning, trying to get in very early for a college class I had to teach.. An extremely bright light appeared in the sky overhead, fixed in space, unmoving for at least ten minutes as I drove along. I looked at the highway, then at the hovering light, then back at the road, then again at the light. It occurred to me that after all these years I was finally witnessing one of the illuminated shapes my parents and grandparents had described so many years before Then the light abruptly vanished. I looked around, saw nothing, and continued driving, but with a growing, excited feeling that I might actually have seen an alien ship from space. A few minutes later I took one last look into the sky, and to my dismay, saw a brown helicopter hovering over the road. Evidently the craft had turned off its searchlight. That was the single ugliest helicopter I have ever seen.
Long after the incident on the highway, I met John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist, who was obsessed with the possibility of alien visitors to the earth. We were attending a conference on post-materialist thought. . Poor John, also a friend of my buddy Robert Stolorow, was run over by a drunk driver in London and killed a few years ago. Oh well, he was seventy-five, and it is as good a way to go as any, once a person has had his life. Anyway, I told John about my early experience of having lost the opportunity to see the UFOs. He listened with interest as the story unfolded, and then suggested another construction of what I had described. He said, “George, your image of what happened in Socorro might actually be a screen memory, a seeming recollection that actually serves to mask something else that is too frightening and traumatic to be recalled.” I asked John what might be hidden beneath the screen of the story. His answer: “It is possible that you did not sleep through the alien visitation, that you were all too present, even that you were taken by the aliens.” So I asked my father, at that point eighty-one years old, about the whole matter, and in particular about his having let me sleep while others watched the UFOs. . He said, “Georgie, I have absolutely no memory of anything like that, and I don’t think it occurred.” Perhaps it was not that the adults were in the front yard as I lay sleeping; maybe they were the ones who had fallen asleep inside and I stood alone before the house as the triangular shapes appeared above. Maybe some seriously scary things happened then. It pleases me to think that John Mack might have been on to something. And maybe I don’t have to be mad anymore about my parents’ not waking me up. .