What happens when we feel that something — or someone — is present to us, and yet we can’t say how? A silent figure. A visitor. An indefinable change in feeling of a room. Something is there, unmistakably so. And try as we might, if someone asks how we know, we cannot explain it. We just know it. We just feel it. This is a felt presence.
Author Ben Alderson-Day is a British research psychologist with an interest in auditory verbal hallucinations; and while the phenomenon of “hearing voices” can be linked to schizophrenia and other pathologies, not all those who have this experience (or who otherwise sense invisible presences) suffer from a diagnosable condition — Alderson-Day simply refers to his core research subjects as “voice-hearers”. Starting with those who report hearing disembodied voices, the author cast his net wider to interview and collect research on those who report seeing or feeling the physical presence of someone who is invisible to others, and this net is cast so widely that Presence: The Strange Science and True Stories of the Unseen Other includes the stories of everyone from epileptics and ultramarathoners to mediums and Bronies; and I was pretty much fascinated by all of it. Sections where Alderson-Day shares other’s research and theory can be a little dry, but this was more than made up for by the sections where the author engagingly reports his own thoughts and conversations. This was not exactly the book that I expected it to be, but I am not a bit disappointed by what it is. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
If you go looking for feelings of presence, the first stories you come across almost always involve snow. Lots and lots of snow. Blank expanses, extreme conditions, the enormity of nature — all seem to combine to conjure silent figures, as if some spaces appear tailor made for feelings of presence.
It was an abiding interest in polar exploration stories that led me to picking up this book, and Alderson-Day does discuss Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous experience of having been led by a mysterious “other” across South Georgia Island in search of rescue for his beleaguered crew (and as that interest had previously led me to reading John Geiger’s The Third Man Factor, I was unsurprised to see that Alderson-Day shares a few stories from that collection). But this isn’t just an amalgam of stories of guardian angels: from the theory that Robin Williams’ suicide could be attributed to hallucinations tied to his Lewy Body Dementia, to sleep paralysis with menacing presences (or Exploding Head Syndrome!) and seeing scary ghosts (or SED: sensory experience of the dead), an encounter with a sensed presence isn’t necessarily benevolent. On the other hand, from meditating monks to tulpamancers to novelists, there are those who are able to use their minds to conjure wanted presences:
At Durham, we have worked with a wide range of remarkable people, reporting some of the most unusual experiences you could put into words. Voices, visions, presences; psychosis, dissociation, trauma; spirits, telepathy, and demons. But we have never had to try to work with data as slippery as what we got from the Edinburgh writers. Appropriately enough, it wasn’t hard to feel like you were being spun a yarn sometimes.
As a researcher, Alderson-Day uses these stories to try and understand the genesis of the broadly defined phenomenon of felt presence, and besides some general theories (it’s a body-based experience [a few different areas of the brain are referenced], it’s influenced by the process of mirroring and “coloured in” by expectation), but the most interesting thing to me was that the research is all so recent. We all get the feeling sometimes that we’re being watched when there’s no one there, we all hear our name whispered on the breeze — indeed, Alderson-Day writes that “we all occupy a space somewhere on a continuum of psychosis and we could in theory move up and down it” — yet we’re mostly uncomfortable admitting to hearing voices or feeling presences. It would seem that researchers are often surprised by how widespread these phenomena are because they tend to ask specific questions instead of allowing research subjects to freely describe their lived experiences; the most fascinating experiences come out when the subjects go off script ("Ooooh, I just left my body and floated above the table") and there’s a new research project, Psychosis Outside the Box, that’s attempting to elicit these types of responses. If nothing else, "felt presences" would seem to represent a common human experience that comes in a wide variety of forms:
In trying to understand felt presence, I have heard about the visceral visitors of psychosis, the harbinger of ill health among Parkinson’s sufferers, the doppelgänger of an intoxicated playwright, and a robot that can conjure a ghost. I have listened to stories of saviors but also pursuers, a stormy voice that only visited in the calm, and fellow travelers who aren’t always expected. I have been told about evil personified, heard of animal confidantes, and even been offered a theory on how to create such presences myself.
Again: I enjoyed the stories more than the theory (and perhaps mostly because Alderson-Day doesn’t have a settled theory to share), but I enjoyed the whole of this and am glad I picked it up.
