Synchronicity: A butterfly Mason?

Sometimes I write something I think is just too bizarre to publish -- and then I usually publish it anyway, and as often as not I soon get an email from some stranger saying, "You too? What an amazing coincidence!"

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Early this afternoon, I was sitting in my living room. We have a large window in the front, but it was a very sunny day and the curtains were drawn. Suddenly, my tomcat Geronimo (a highly accomplished jumper) got between the window and the curtain and started jumping up on the glass again and again like a maniac. My wife said there must be a bird or something outside, so I popped out to take a look.

It wasn't a bird; it was a white cabbage butterfly, steadily beating its wings and flying directly into the windowpane. The glass was of course an impassable barrier, but it wouldn't alter its course in the slightest, and the result was that it just sort of hovered there. Now everyone knows that a normal butterfly's flight path resembles that of a drunken skywriter. Straight lines are simply not in their repertoire; nor is this sort of persistence when confronted with an impassable obstacle. Nevertheless, it persisted.

As I looked at the butterfly, a question suddenly popped into my head out of nowhere: Are you a traveling man? -- quickly followed by the rest of this stock Masonic dialogue: Yes I am. Traveling where? From west to east. (I'm not a Freemason, but one picks up these things.) The feeling that I was somehow having this dialogue with the butterfly -- ridiculous on its face! -- was unmistakable. The whole time, the butterfly kept flying persistently straight into the windowpane, and on the other side of the glass, a highly neurotic tomcat kept bouncing up and down like a superball.

Finally I snapped out of whatever passing trance the butterfly had put me in and gently shooed it away from the window. It immediately resumed normal butterfly behavior, and the cat settled down.

Checking a compass later, I found that it had indeed been flying at a perfect 90-degree azimuth, from west to east.

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The weird feeling that I had been "communicating" (if reciting a stock dialogue can be called that!) with the butterfly made me remember that last year I had experienced a synchronicity in connection with the idea that the spirits of the dead can appear as moths -- I had read about this in Whitley Strieber's Afterlife Revolution and then heard the same thing shortly thereafter from a Taiwanese associate. Well, I thought, this was a cabbage butterfly, not a moth, but it's close anyway.

When I looked up my old post about the moth synchronicity, though, I found something that I had forgotten. The post showed the cover of The Afterlife Revolution -- illustrated with a picture of a white cabbage butterfly!

I ended the post thus:

I wonder how common this association is? I know Aristotle used the same Greek word to refer both to the soul and to the cabbage butterfly. (By coincidence, this same species of non-moth appears to have been chosen by Strieber's entomologically confused cover illustrator.)

I had forgotten that about Aristotle, too, but he does in fact use the word psyche ("soul"), in History of Animals 5.19, as a name for those insects that arise "out of those caterpillars which arise on leaves of green, especially on those of the cabbage-plant."

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Coming back to the ridiculous idea of a butterfly being a Mason, I remembered that Freemasonry's central symbol is the building of the Temple of Solomon, and that in the Rudyard Kipling story "The Butterfly That Stamped," a butterfly stamps its foot and makes King Solomon's palace (close enough!) disappear and then reappear. (It is actually Djinns that do this, but Solomon has arranged for them to make it look as if the butterfly is making it happen.)

Suleiman-bin-Daoud laughed so much that it was several minutes before he found breath enough to whisper to the Butterfly, "Stamp again, little brother. Give me back my Palace, most great magician." . . . So he stamped once more, and that instant the Djinns let down the Palace and the gardens, without even a bump.

Then I thought about the song "Build Me Up Buttercup" by the Foundations.

Building up foundations sounds like a mason's work, does it not? Buttercup is a bit like butterfly, but not quite close enough to be satisfying. Ah, but what's the very first thing Wikipedia has to say about the Foundations? "The Foundations were a British soul band." Soul = psyche = cabbage butterfly.

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Since Whitley Strieber had entered into this synch-stream, I thought of his "nine knocks" incident, documented in Chapter 11 of his book Transformation (a synonym for butterfly-style metamorphosis). Strieber recounts how he was at home, reading an essay by John Gliedman about quantum entanglement, when he noticed that his two cats were beginning to behave strangely, as if they are terrified.

The cats' fear didn't make sense to me at all. I decided there must be some animal outside, perhaps a deer. I returned to Dr. Gleidman's essay.

I read the following sentence: "The mind is not the playwright of reality."

At that moment there came a knocking on the side of the house. This was substantial noise, very regular and sharp. The knocks were so exactly spaced that they sounded like they were being produced by a machine. Both cats were riveted with terror. They stared at the wall. The knocks went on, nine of them in three groups of three, followed by a tenth lighter double-knock that communicated an impression of finality.

In his book A New World, Strieber refers back to this incident and connects it with Freemasonry.

I cannot know if this was intended, but the knocks reflected a tradition in Masonry where when someone is elevated to the 33rd Degree, they knock in this way on the door of the hall before being admitted.

He repeats this assertion in The Super Natural.

Also, when entering the thirty-third degree, a Mason must knock on the door of the lodge nine times in three groups of three.

I know basically nothing about the higher degrees of Masonry, but certainly "three distinct knocks" is a thing, and it wouldn't be surprising if they sometimes did three groups of three. Anyway, the point here is that Strieber, just like me today, (1) saw his cats behaving strangely, (2) assumed it was because of an animal outside, and then instead (3) observed something which he connected with Masonic ritual.

Whitley Strieber and the thing that turned into a bird of paradise

Yet another morphing anecdote in the works of Whitley Strieber.

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Transformation (1988)

Later that day [December 29, 1986] we were driving through a nearby town when a voice told me to stop at the house of a friend, glass artist Gilda Strutz. Another car, driven by a tall and imposing bearded man of about thirty, pulled up at the same time. We all went in to see Gilda together. The man turned out to be another friend of hers, Barry Maddock. Communion hadn't been published and neither of them knew anything at all about it.

We chatted for a while and I soon found myself talking about the owls we had been seeing.

Barry was surprised to hear this because he had had a very unusual dream the night before about an owl. He proceeded to describe what sounded to me like a screen memory for a visitor experience. He had been asleep in a house where he was house-sitting until the new owners moved in. Suddenly he was awakened by what sounded like somebody kicking a baseboard heater. He got up because the house was new and he'd helped build it. He knew that the heating system shouldn't be doing that.

He walked into the living room. The first thing he saw was a pair of huge, dark eyes. When he later saw the cover of Communion he was amazed by the similarity. At the time, he had the bizarre impression that an enormous gray owl with big, black eyes was in the room. The owl took him into a large, vaulted chamber that reminded him of the Sydney Opera House. There it turned into a bird of paradise.

I bet that Maddock said the place was the Sydney Opera House, and "reminded him" is Strieber's own interpretation. 

He remembered sitting beside a small man who seemed to him like a gnome or a gremlin. His impression was that this man was good-natured. He didn't remember anything about the man's appearance, except that he was "dark."

The next morning Barry had what he said was an extremely strange feeling. He seemed "loose" in his body. He was also suffering from "missing time" in that he could remember getting up and going into the living room, then having the vivid dream. The trouble was, he could not recall going back to bed before he had the dream. The sort of confusion that Barry described fitted very well with my own initial conscious reactions to the visitors. He also noticed a small raised mark on his neck. He didn't think to mention it at the time, and I didn't see it, but his description, given later, suggested that it was similar to the one I had found on my own neck on the morning of December 24.

The dream had frightened him badly.

I resolved to get to know him better to find out if anything more would emerge from his mind. On the morning of December 30 we went hiking together deep into the woods and we talked. He turned out to be one of the most fearless people I had ever met. [. . .] The more he spoke about his dream, however, the more he revealed deep fear. It seemed to me that he was aching to say he thought the dream was real, but dared not do so because of its content.

I found that the house at which he was sitting was quite near my own place.

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The Super Natural (2016)

While I was writing Communion, I began questioning people in the immediate area regarding odd things they may have seen. As yet, I was not aware of all the strange sightings across the Hudson in Duchess County, which would become famous as the Hudson Valley UFO sightings. There were many stories, but one told by a carpenter in the process of finishing a house on our private road is particularly relevant to this part of my narrative.

In the Transformation version, the house had already been finished.

This was the first of two incidents that, to me, added up to a sort of communication. I have learned, over the years, to see the actions of our visitors as a sort of illustrative language, communication built out of images and events. For example, a consistent image that witnesses connect with them is that of the owl. It has played an enormous role in my own experience of them, in fact. If you study the habits and capabilities of the owl carefully, you find yourself studying the capabilities of the visitors. They are creatures of the night, they are stealthy, silent, and use surprise. Like owls, which can use their extraordinary ears to hear prey scrambling under snow, they have extraordinary means of detection. Like owls, they are predators. [. . .]

I include the above paragraph in this excerpt because it deals with the theme of owls. In Transformation, the reason Maddock tells Strieber his story is that Strieber had been talking about owls and his own dream had involved an owl -- but in the Super Natural version of the story, there is no owl!

The incident involving the carpenter occurred during the fall of 1986. He had been hurrying to complete construction before winter arrived, and had ended up in a situation where he had no way to take his tools out at nightfall. He didn’t want to leave them in the unlocked house, so he decided to sleep there, on the floor.

Transformation gives the date of this incident as December 28, 1986, well after winter had arrived. The carpenter, Barry Maddock, slept in the house because he was house-sitting for the owners, not because he was unable to take his tools out.

Later, he found himself awake and looking straight at a short man who was standing a few feet away. It was too dark to determine any color, but he was short and squat. The carpenter experienced a wave of intense fear, whereupon the man changed before his eyes into a bird of paradise and then disappeared.

In the Transformation version, he did not see anything immediately after waking up. Rather, he heard a noise, walked into the living room, and there saw an enormous owl, and it was this owl that turned into a bird or paradise. There is no mention of the bird's disappearing. In Transformation, he apparently saw the small man after, or at the same time as, the bird of paradise, and the man was sitting next to him rather than standing a few feet away.

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This is not something Strieber experienced himself, but something that was reported to him by Maddock in 1986. Since Maddock agreed to have his name used in Transformation, we can assume that the account in that book matches what he remembered of his experience at that time. The changes evident in the Super Natural version can only be distortions.

Naturally, it is hardly to be expected that Strieber would remember in clear and accurate detail someone else's dream as it had been reported to him 30 years before. He had written about it before, though, and could easily have looked it up in Transformation or in the notes he used to write that book. That he did not bother to do so can only mean that he was (wrongly) confident that he still remembered the incident clearly. This phenomenon -- inordinate confidence in memories which are in fact seriously distorted -- has obvious implications for Strieber's autobiographical work as a whole, particularly for The Secret School, which was written more than 40 years after the events it recounts.

Whitley Strieber with between two and four giant spiders

This is another of those anecdotes Whitley Strieber has told more than once, in different books. (And another great title for a surrealist painting!) The earliest version is in Breakthrough (1995), and he revisits it 21 years later in The Super Natural (2016) and then again in The Afterlife Revolution (2017).

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Breakthrough (1995)

The background of this episode is that Strieber has been meditating regularly at 11:00 p.m. every night in his guest room. (This is the Gurdjieff-inspired meditation Strieber describes in many of his books, which involves focusing one's attention on various parts of one's body in turn.) Recently, when he is doing this, he will hear seven loud thumps on the roof, followed by a sense of presence, and he has come to believe that he has acquired an invisible meditation partner, or perhaps seven such partners. As this episode opens, Strieber has just been up on the roof to confirm that the thumps he has been hearing are not the work possums, birds, or any other known cause.

I climbed down off the roof and went into the room. [. . .] A moment later there was a terrific lot of noise on the roof, like a crowd jostling for position. I sat down and an instant later felt something come bursting into my mind -- also physically, bursting into me . . . hard to describe . . . like being touched on the inside.

Pictures began to flash in front of my eyes, of everybody I'd ever known, even people I'd met only briefly. [. . .] I shortly began to realize that what I was seeing here were the wrongs I had done these people. [. . .] I was getting frantic, but I couldn't make it stop. On we went, reviewing my life.

We came to a certain face -- one that I really hadn't wanted to see. With this person, I had done wrong.

"With this person" -- not "to." In other words, this person was not (or not only) a victim but an accomplice. To me, this can only mean that the wrong was sexual in nature. If you think about it, it almost goes without saying that a concerted effort would have been made to corrupt someone like Strieber, and that sex would be a natural avenue of attack.

The roof erupted in thuds, like they were stomping with rage. Then they came roaring down around me right through the beams, a crowd of racing shadows, shabby and stinking of sweat. I could see that they looked human, but they were crouching, they backed into corners, they acted like I was the wild wolf. [. . .] Then the visitors all trooped down the stairs, some of them jumping up and down on the runners, others leaping off the landing and dropping with soft thuds.

In one of the bits I have snipped out above, Strieber compares the people who are forcing this sin parade on him to wolves, then later decides they are actually more like angels. Despite Strieber's calling them "visitors" here -- his usual word for the apparent aliens with which his name is most closely associated -- these people were apparently more-or-less human.

Later Strieber, his wife Anne, and their two cats go to bed.

About two hours later I woke up to familiar, machinelike jabs to my shoulder. Once I probably would have leaped out of bed, but no more. This had happened too often, and too often there was nothing there. So I wasn't really expecting to see anybody when I opened my eyes.

I was absolutely stunned.

They were right there, and they were glaring at me. I reacted like I might have to a coiled snake, to see human faces staring at me from a position about three feet above the bed. There was light around them, and I could see that they were all men, small, wearing gray tunics except for one, whose tunic was white. [. . .] Behind them, where the raftered ceiling should have been, there was a black, starless maw. Something about that darkness really frightened me. [. . .] All I knew was that it was oppressive and lonely and big, and where was my familiar ceiling? Reality seemed plastic indeed.

The faces of these people were terrible to see. Their eyes were normally shaped but as dark as lampblack, and their stares were amazingly ferocious. [. . .] It lasted for a moment, then another. [. . .] They left abruptly, rushing away in a crowd.

"Human faces" with "normally shaped" eyes -- not grays. A bed is normally about two feet high, so "three feet above the bed" would make these people about five feet tall -- a bit short, but well within the normal human range.

After this second visitation, Strieber goes back to sleep. He is later awoken again, by sounds he at first thinks are from the cats.

When I opened my eyes, I saw dark shapes against the beams of the ceiling, which seemed to be back to normal. I thought, now what? I turned on my bedside lamp and proceeded to receive the single worst shock of a life that has sustained some fairly severe shocks.

Hanging from the ceiling were four tremendous spiders. Their bodies were gleaming black and striped in irregular bright yellow. Structurally, they were hourglass spiders. The only problem was that they were easily a foot long and their legs spanned perhaps two feet. [. . .]

The term "hourglass spider" typically refers to Cyclocosmia, a genus of extremely strange-looking trapdoor spiders which can't possible be what Strieber has in mind here. Could he be referring to the black widow, with its distinctive hourglass marking? But the name "black widow" is so very familiar that to call that species by any other name seems odd. Perhaps he simply means that the spiders had an hourglass-like shape, with a narrow waist between the cephalothorax and the abdomen? The coloration he describes suggests Argiope (pictured above), but there is nothing hourglass-like about that genus.

The largest known spider species has a leg span of one foot, so Strieber is describing something as extraordinary as a 14-foot-tall man.

The next thing I knew I was out of that bed and on my way as far as I could go barefoot in pajamas. But Anne was still back there and Anne was sound asleep.

I was afraid that they things were going to fall on us. On her. [. . .] Above her, the spiders were working, weaving what I would describe as curved hutches made of silk.

They were, in short, settling in.

"Honey," I whispered. "I think --"

What did I think?

I thought I was being punished is what I thought. Contrition? I begged them to forgive me. I would have howled contrition but I was afraid I'd upset the spiders.

Then they were gone, just like that. I grabbed Anne, I started kissing her, and then I noticed that the cats were still panicked. What was I -- stupid? I'd seen things disappear before. What if they weren't gone?

As far as I know, they're still waiting . . . for the day I die. [. . .]

It's not clear if we are to understand that the spiders disappeared because he begged them to forgive him, or if they just vanished for no apparent reason.

I spent the rest of the night reading the Bible and trying to figure out how one might truly repair a sin. Dawn came, clear and pure, and Anne got up and we had breakfast. I didn't tell her what had happened. [. . .]

I finally said to Anne, "I've seen demons."

She responded, "Here?"

"A nightmare. Mother of all nightmares."

As we shall see below, later tellings of this story don't exactly have Strieber spending the rest of the night reading the Bible!

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The Super Natural (2016)

My relationship with my meditation partners continued to develop. [. . .] So I asked the question: What do I need to do to avoid the wheel of life. I want to ascend.

There is no indication in Breakthrough that he had posed this question to his meditation partners.

The answer was the most powerful moral lesson I have ever received. It began one night with a startling review of my life—the sort of thing that is supposed to happen at the moment of death, I suppose. Image after image from my life appeared before my eyes. I saw a good, honest life, flawed but pretty blameless. But then something appeared that was of interest. I was in a hotel room in Beverly Hills with a beautiful young woman. I wanted to make love to her, but I was hesitating, forcing myself not to, respecting my vow of marriage and my love for Anne.

Still, every detail of the meetings I’d had with this woman came rushing past.

I was left on that night devastated and, quite frankly, confused. I hadn’t violated my vow. I’d been tempted, yes, but no violation.

When I got up to go to bed, I discovered that it was already three. I’d been meditating for four hours. Exhausted, I collapsed into the bed and threw my arms around my beloved wife. Silently, I cried tears of gratitude that I had not broken my vow.

Anne Strieber died in 2015; presumably after her death Strieber felt more free to speak openly about such extramarital temptations than he had when he wrote Breakthrough. Is he really being more honest here, though? As he tells it in The Super Natural, Strieber was tempted but did not yield; so blameless was he that he felt "confused" as to why they were bringing the whole thing up, as he hadn't done anything wrong. In Breakthrough, on the other hand, he says "With this person I had done wrong" -- and the context strongly suggests that he felt more guilty about what had transpired with this person than about anything else he had done in his life.

The Catholic Strieber has written books called Communion and Confirmation, but never Confession. It is hardly reasonable to expect complete candor regarding something of this nature, and I don't want to make too much of an effort to guess what particular sins he may or may not have committed. Nevertheless, I think we must conclude that something happened between him and this woman. He was in a hotel room with her, and he refers in the plural to "meetings I'd had with this woman"; in Breakthrough, he felt great guilt immediately, with none of the confusion he professes in The Super Natural. Perhaps his claim of "no violation" is a simple untruth; more likely, it's some sort of Bill Clinton "define sexual relations" kind of thing. Or, just possibly, he really is so innocent that just wanting to betray his wife is about the worst thing he's ever done.

There is no reference in this version of the story to the people on the roof thumping about in rage, dropping down through the ceiling, and running downstairs.

Later, I woke up. The ceiling was gone, the roof was gone. Overhead was a blackness that I knew at once was the appalling face of infinity. Endless dark. Arrayed around the borders of this opening were seven faces peering down at me. Gentle faces. Angry faces.

Then it ended. I was fully awake. I lay there thinking about it for a time, wondering where it lay on the spectrum of reality. A dream? I thought not. But what, then?

In this version, it sounds as if the faces are up at the level of the roof or ceiling, not three feet above the bed. There is also no reference to their "rushing away in a crowd"; instead, he simply says, "Then it ended."

I went close to Anne and kissed her cheek. She cuddled against me, delighted.

I had almost betrayed her, but I had not done so. I had wanted to, though, so very badly. And it wasn’t like the incident with the gray being. That I could not control. This, I could.

Strieber alludes to a non-consensual sexual encounter with a gray alien, narrated explicitly for the first time in The Super Natural. When he says, "That I could not control. This I could," it implies that he did succumb to temptation in some way, that there was a failure of self-control.

Some time later I woke up and there, hanging over our bed, were the two most terrible creatures I had ever seen. They were spiders, each at least three feet from stem to stern. They had gleaming black abdomens that were crossed by yellow stripes like tigers. Worse, they were not stable on the ceiling, especially the one over Anne.

My impulse was to roll off that bed and run for my life. Then I thought, “Wake up, you fool, this is the mother and the father of the nightmares.”

There were four spiders in the Breakthrough version, now reduced to two -- but what they have lost in numbers they have made up in size. The Breakthrough spiders were a foot long, with a two-foot leg span; in The Super Natural, they are "three feet from stem to stern." It is unclear how this nautical term is to be understood in terms of spider anatomy, but it would be a strange way of referring to leg span, so I assume it means anteroposterior length. Either way, these spiders show a distinctly fish-like tendency to grow with each telling.

In Breakthrough, he had called the vision of the spiders the "mother of all nightmares," using a familiar idiom to indicate the most nightmarish nightmare imaginable. In this retelling, this has morphed into the bizarre not-quite-English "the mother and the father of the nightmares." Is this because there are two spiders now -- one the mother of nightmares, the other the father?

Fully awake now, I leaped out of the bed. Surely they would evaporate, will-o’-the-wisps of dream.

But no. I stood there at the foot of the bed staring at them. I was awake and they were as real as ever. I could even hear the slick clatter of their busy, complicated jaws.

Anne lay perhaps three feet beneath one of them, sound asleep. Some of its legs had come off the wooden planks of the ceiling and were scrabbling for purchase. The sound filled the room.

It looked as if it would fall on Anne, right now.

My dear God, how I wanted to run. But if I did that, then what would happen? She had said early on, “You won’t let anything happen to me, will you?” I told her that I would protect her. But how did I know that? Now, it seemed as if I was lying.

Another leg came loose and began jittering wildly. The abdomen was now tilted. I could see a stinger in it the size of a small knife. My body screamed at me to run, but I could not run, my love would not let me. On legs of lead, transfixed by terror, I approached the bed. The pulsating demon was inches from my face. I could not dare touch it, try to push it away. God only knew what would happen if it and its brother started running around the room. What was their venom like? Where were they from? Certainly not this world.

Leaping out of bed is a new touch, not mentioned in the Breakthrough version. There is no mention this time of the spiders' building "hutches" of silk; instead, he elaborates on the fear, mentioned in Breakthrough, that they would fall on Anne.

Spiders of course do not have abdominal stingers, but biology has never been Strieber's strong suit. At any rate, these are not ordinary spiders but spidery-looking demons -- like Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, who also had a stinger.

I did the only thing I could to protect my wife, which was to lie down on top of her so that my body was between her and the spider.

She opened sleepy arms, welcoming her husband to her in the night, opening herself body and heart to the man she loved.

I lay there, waiting for the spider to drop down on me. She lay there waiting for the act of love to commence.

In that instant, there was a feeling like weight lifted. My body felt free, my soul like the soul of a child. Like that, the spiders had gone. The night—the beautiful, earthly night, filled with sensual promise—had returned.

I wept and her comforting arms came around me. Joy filled me. We rode the small hours together in the boat of our love, crossing to morning.

In Breakthrough, the spiders vanished after he begged them for forgiveness. In The Super Natural, they disappear after he demonstrates his commitment to Anne by putting himself between her and the perceived danger. Breakthrough, written while Anne was alive, is understandably less forthcoming about their marital intimacies, falling back on the tried-and-true euphemistic "kiss" -- but even taking that into account, some discrepancy remains. In The Super Natural, the couple apparently spent the whole rest of the night together, "crossing to morning" -- raising the question of when Strieber managed to squeeze in the Bible study mentioned in Breakthrough.

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The Afterlife Revolution (2017)

There were in my life two instances in which I was shown something relating to an underworld. The first occurred after one of the meditations with the people from between lives. They used to page through my mind, causing me to relive past events in startling and uncanny detail. One night, paging through my memories, they came across a moment during which I had been tempted to cheat on Anne.

Where the earlier two accounts have a single "life review" experience, this one has Strieber's meditation partners habitually dredging up a memory or two each night over an extended period of time. 

They hesitated. Lingered. I writhed in discomfort.

After the meditation ended, I went as usual to bed.

I hadn’t cheated. I’d only been tempted. So all was well— wasn’t it? [. . .]

Had he done wrong, or not? Did he feel guilty, or not? Despite his assumption that "all was well," he "writhed in discomfort." A temptation successfully resisted seems cause for pride rather than shame -- unless it was resisted only imperfectly.

A few hours later, I woke up to see something so horrific that for a moment I simply did not understand what I was looking at. But then the two presences hanging from the ceiling above our bed became clear. But they were impossible. Nothing like that exists.

Except that they did.

I was looking up at two bulging black spiders, each easily two or three feet long. Their gleaming abdomens were ringed with yellow tiger stripes. I could see the pointed stingers at the base of their tails. Worse, they were scrabbling against the ceiling, struggling not to fall on us.

Dear god in heaven, it had to be a nightmare. I rolled out of bed, my initial impulse to run. But then I looked back and saw Anne lying there peacefully asleep. A few feet above her, the most unstable of the two looked ready to fall.

Now that I was on my feet, their appearance seemed entirely physical. I could even hear the rhythmic scraping of their claws as they struggled to find purchase against the ceiling.

This is pretty close to the description in The Super Natural -- two spiders, with stingers, much larger than the ones described in Breakthrough. (Whether they are larger or smaller than the ones described in The Super Natural depends on how we interpret "stem to stern" in that book.)

The rest of the anecdote is the same as in The Super Natural -- he lies on top of Anne, spends the rest of the night not reading the Bible, etc. -- so there is no need to quote it.

Recall, though, that Strieber began my speaking of "two instances in which I was shown something relating to an underworld." The second (or, rather, first) of these turns out to have to do with the young woman with whom he may or may not have done something terribly wrong in Beverly Hills.

A few years before, there had been not a test but a warning, and I will never forget it in all of my days and beyond my days.

In the years after Communion was published, Anne organized many groups to come up to our cabin. Often enough, as I have reported in previous books, they met the visitors.

Once, we had a group up which included a young woman who took a shine to me. She was attractive and I was tempted. I did nothing, however. Later, in Los Angeles, we once again encountered her and I was again tempted. Once again, I did nothing.

We spent that night in the Beverly Hills Hotel, and no sooner had I fallen asleep than I found myself being dragged downward through solid rock. I was in some sort of cage and I couldn’t get out. This was more lucid than any lucid dream I could imagine. It felt real. As I shot downward, I realized that I was inside the legs of a gigantic spider. Nothing I did would release me. Those legs were like iron.

Finally, I managed to get out. I found myself back in my body, hammering my arm against the bedside table. The lamp was smashed, Anne was screaming —and I was shaking with terror.

I connected what had happened to the temptation the young woman had offered me, and resolved never, ever to even entertain such a notion again.

Two questions immediately suggest themselves: (1) What on earth does it mean to be "inside the legs" of a gigantic spider? and (2) Wasn't there a crappy Will Smith movie about that? My best guess -- and it is only that -- is that he means that a spider had wrapped its legs around him, so that he was "in" its legs in the same sense that you might hold someone "in" your arms. (Inside, though? "If ever you're inside my arms again..."?) If the legs were hollow and he was literally inside them -- well, he could only be inside one leg at a time, right? Nor am I at all sure how to square any reading of "inside the legs" with being dragged downward through solid rock. Anyway, the key point here is simply that something scary and spidery occurred right after he resisted (or didn't) this temptation, and that he took it as a warning.

If Strieber's encounter with this woman (let's call her Beverly) had indeed been followed by a very memorable nightmare about a giant spider, then he must surely have made the connection when, a few years later, he relived the encounter with Beverly and was again menaced by giant spiders. It's strange that he never mentioned this earlier giant-spider nightmare until The Afterlife Revolution. 

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To me, the evolution of this spider story is evidence that Strieber is mostly honest, tolerably sincere, and completely unreliable. No deliberate liar -- particularly not one who happens to be a professional writer of narrative fiction! -- would have made the basic continuity errors we see here. If Strieber were lying, he would have kept his story straight. Before revisiting the spiders in his recent books, he would have looked back at the earlier account in Breakthrough, refreshed his memory, and made sure his newer version were consistent with it -- four foot-long spiders, faces three feet above the bed, reading the Bible, etc. But he obviously didn't check the Breakthrough version, because -- well, why should he? It was an experience from his own life, he remembered it clearly, so why would he need to look it up in a book?

In short, Strieber appears to be prone to what psychologists call confabulation.

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Update: Strieber's novel 2012: The War for Souls includes a monster reminiscent of the giant spiders in his non-fiction. (The main character -- a horror novelist named Wiley who wrote a best-selling non-fiction book about his close encounters with aliens, complete with a "rectal probe" -- is a ridiculously transparent stand-in for Strieber himself.)

He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!

Cf. The Afterlife Revolution, "Those legs were like iron." 

He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature-a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.

All three non-fiction accounts of the spider mention yellow stripes on the abdomen. Note that real spiders do not have "complicated" (compound) eyes.

Screaming now, he rolled.

There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.

But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.

As in The Super Natural and The Afterlife Revolution, the spiders have stingers like hymenopteran insects.

A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.

Silence.

Nothing there. Nothing at all.

Just as in the non-fiction accounts, the spider suddenly disappears.

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Update 2: It's October 2020, and I've just finished reading for the first time Strieber's non-fiction book Solving the Communion Enigma (published in 2011, when Anne was still alive). It features yet another retelling of the giant spider story.

Then I realized that something was happening, something quite new. My mind was sort of moving. I was seeing pictures from my own past. It wasn't as dramatic as I imagine the life review at  the time of death might be, but these images kept appearing, one after the other.

It was exactly as if I was looking at an illustrated book of my memories. But it wasn't me doing this. Somebody else seemed to be turning the pages of my memory.

At first the imagery was trivial. [. . .]  Then it became more complex, with images from related experiences superimposing themselves on one another. Looking back, I cannot even begin to describe them all. There were hundreds, thousands. [. . .] How lovely it was. How delicious my life had been, how beautiful -- and how much of it I had let pass by!

He gives several examples of these memories, none of them unpleasant. In the Breakthrough version, he was reliving all the wrongs he had ever done to other people, and he "couldn't make it stop," but in Solving the Communion Enigma, the review of memories seems to be positively delightful until they reach one specific memory.

And the, suddenly, I was focused on something very specific. It was the face of a woman. I knew it well. It was a woman I had wanted. Badly. And she had wanted me. We'd come close to connecting in a way that would have violated my marriage vow. I had really sweated over this. I had wanted her so badly. But I had not quite let myself slip into a love affair. Not quite.

But what was it that had stopped me, my loyalty to my vow or my love of my wife? A man might love his wife, but a temptation like this can be very powerful, and it certainly had been for me.

Then the memories ended. I slumped to the floor, devastated. I was pouring with sweat. Shocked and confused and telling myself, You weren't disloyal. You resisted the temptation.

I did not want to face what I had not resisted, which was the desire. I had been the instigator. My challenge to my vow and to the selfless love my wife has given me since the day we met was my doing. I had not been seduced, and that was very hard to face.

This sheds light on why Strieber felt extremely guilty about what had happened with this woman while at the same time insisting that he had resisted temptation. Shocked, wanting to forget the whole thing, but also remembering his desire for this other woman, Strieber goes to bed f"eeling bitter and confused and unsure of my loyalties," falls into a fitful sleep, and late wakes abruptly.

What I was looking at were two enormous spiders hanging on the ceiling. And I don't mean, for example, the size of tarantulas. These things were tremendous. Their abdomens were at least three feet long, gleaming black and banded by yellow tiger stripes. And what was worse, while the one over my side of the bed seemed stable, the one hanging over Anne was struggling and looked as if it was about to fall on her.

Instinct caused me to leap out of the bed, and as I did so, I though that this was one hell of a nightmare.

I stood there just absolutely agog because the things had not disappeared when I woke up. They still looked completely real. [. . .]

The one handing over Anne was trembling now. [. . .]

Strieber's instinct is to run, but he realizes that he must protect his wife, giving his life for her if need be.

As quietly as I could, I moved around the bed. I slid in beside her. She sighed and smiled, welcoming her husband. I slipped over her and held her to me, and lay like that, afraid to move. The core of my heart seemed to open, and I remembered why I loved this woman [. . .]

I was left like that. At some point, the spiders of nightmare had gone.

There is no mention of how he spent the rest of the night, whether reading the Bible as in Breakthrough or in some other way.

Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl

Doesn't that sound like the title of a Surrealist painting? Or perhaps something from a really weird version of Clue? (Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick? No, it was Whitley Strieber in Italy with a dead owl!) Actually, it's just another in my series of footnotes to the works of this very unusual writer.

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Cat Magic

In Whitley Strieber's 1986 fantasy/horror novel Cat Magic, this very strange memory of one of the characters is mentioned in passing; it just comes out of nowhere, has no effect on the plot, and is never mentioned again.

[The smell of paint] reminded him of the six weeks of the summer of 1968 he had spent in Florence. There had been college students from all over the world there, art students, working on the restoration of the Uffizi masterpieces which had been damaged in the flood of the year before.

He had met Irish magical Roisin, with whom he had cohabited for weeks, before he had found, jammed into her suitcase, the terrible rubble of a dead owl.

He had run terrified from her. Roisin, lost in the dangerous clutter of time.

George Walker, the character whose reminiscences these are, is unsympathetic and obviously deeply disturbed; one of his other memories involves setting fire to a live cat as a joke. While one can see the relevance of the cat-burning incident -- Walker's intense and strangely sexualized hatred of cats is an important plot point -- "Irish magical Roisin" with her suitcase full of owl rubble (rubble?) seems to have nothing to do with anything. The only possible purpose of the passage is to further establish that George Walker is a pretty seriously messed-up guy, and apparently delusional to boot.

Would any reader have guessed that this bit was actually pretty much 100% autobiographical?

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Communion

Communion, Strieber's famous non-fiction book about his close-encounter experiences, was published in 1987, just a year after Cat Magic. Here we find the first hints that the incident of George Walker and the owl-rubble may be based on some real experience of Strieber's.

In 1968 I ended up with four to six weeks of "missing time" after a desperate and inexplicable chase across Europe.

So both Walker and Strieber spent six weeks in Europe in 1968. Walker spent the latter part of his trip "running terrified" from Roisin, while Strieber characterizes his trip as "a desperate and inexplicable chase."

Later, in a discussion of various times owls have unexpectedly turned up in his life, Strieber mentions this:

I saw an owl once before, too, during the events of 1968.

So not only were Walker and Strieber both in Europe at the same time, for the same period of time, but they also each saw an owl there. There is no indication (yet) that the one Strieber saw was a dead owl, in a suitcase, but that's still quite the coincidence.

Later Strieber adds more details about his trip in Europe.

I took the train to Italy, second class. On the train I met a young woman and we began to travel together. At this point my memories become extremely odd. If I do not think about them they seem fine, but when I try to put them together they don't make sense. I recall that we went to Rome, but that we spent a few days in Florence on the way. For eighteen years I told the story that I stayed in Florence for six weeks. But when I went there in the summer of 1984 [. . .] I realized that I had almost no memories of the place. Even so, I placidly accepted this anomaly. For some reason, I left the young woman in Rome and dashed off on the train with no ticket, traveling almost at random. I ended up in Strasbourg.

 

Now we know that he stayed -- or used to think that he had stayed -- in Florence for six weeks, just like George Walker, that he met a woman there, just like George Walker, and that his "desperate and inexplicable chase" apparently involved running away from her -- just like, as you may have noticed, George Walker.

At the time he wrote Communion, Strieber seemed to have no memory of why he had left the girl; it was just "for some reason."

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Transformation

Transformation, Strieber's second non-fiction book about his close encounters, was published in 1988 -- a year after Communion and two years after Cat Magic. He once again revisits his travels in Italy in the summer of 1968.

In 1968 I was living in London. During the summer I spent between two and six weeks on the Continent, and have been unable to account for most of that time. As I reported in Communion, I crossed to the continent on a ferry and took a train south to Italy. On the trip I met a young woman. I remember her name and her nationality but have not been able to trace her. We went first to Florence and then to Rome. In Rome something happened that terrified me. My screen memory is that I got lost in the catacombs under the Vatican.

Whatever happened, I literally rushed back to my pensione and threw my things into my suitcase. Something I saw in the room horrified me. I have tried to recall what it was, but all I have been able to find out for certain is that I told a friend at the time that I had seen "a dried owl" somewhere in the room. If that is indeed what I saw, I am not surprised that I ran!

I made an unsuccessful attempt to extract more of this memory via hypnosis, but my feeling is that the material that emerged is not correct.

Strieber mentions that he remembers (but does not disclose) the woman's name and nationality. Given how much of this experience was apparently imported wholesale into Cat Magic -- leaving even such details as the date, the city, and the duration of the trip unchanged -- my money says she was an Irishwoman called Róisín, and I will go ahead and refer to her by that name. (It's just a guess of course, but it will be more convenient than constantly referring to "the young woman," "Strieber's traveling companion," etc.)

The owl puts in another appearance, and this time we are told that it was "dried" (and therefore presumably dead, as in Cat Magic). In the past I had always assumed that Strieber was referring to only one horrifying experience in this passage -- something that he (mis)remembered as getting lost in the catacombs under the Vatican and seeing a dried owl in one of the rooms there. Rereading it now in the light of Cat Magic and The Super Natural, I can see that the room where he saw the owl was probably the pensione he was sharing with Róisín, not in the catacombs. He saw something in Rome that spooked him, decided to leave, and then saw something else that spooked him in the pensione as he was packing.

Strieber still seems to have no memory of what exactly he saw; he "tried to recall what it was" but failed. The "dried owl" is something a friend remembers him saying at the time, not something that Strieber himself recalls at the time of writing Transformation.

What material, I wonder, emerged from the hypnosis session he mentions, and why did it seem incorrect? Did it involve seeing a dried owl (or the "terrible rubble" thereof) in Róisín's suitcase? And did he reject it as incorrect because he recognized it as coming from his fiction rather than from his life? We can only speculate.

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The Super Natural

Cat Magic, Communion, and Transformation were published in three consecutive years, from 1986 to 1988. We now jump forward almost three decades (and nearly 50 years after the events of 1968) to The Super Natural (2016), a non-fiction book co-written with Jeffrey Kripal. The symbol of the owl comes up, and Strieber once again tells his story.

Later, in 1968, I had a profoundly unsettling experience involving an owl. That year, I was living in London and attending the London School of Film Technique, now called the London Film School. During the summer break, I decided to travel on the Continent. On an overnight train to Florence, I fell in which a girl. We began traveling together. For a couple of weeks in Florence, we had a lovely time, living together in chaste intimacy. But then we went on to Rome, and when we toured St. Peter's, she became crazy, stalking through the church in raging silence. She scared me. I was living with her in a small pensione near the railroad station. I decided, "No more," and headed off to the pensione to collect my suitcase and get out of there.

I went into our tiny room, threw my toothbrush into my suitcase, and started to leave. Then I stopped. Her suitcase was lying on the foot of the bed. I have always been a bit too curious, and I opened it. What I saw shocked me to my core. In it was a nun's habit and, lying beside it, a dry, flattened owl carcass. I didn't get off the train again until I was in Strasbourg.

And we've come full circle, back to the Cat Magic version of the story, in which the dead owl is in the girl's suitcase. It's a "flattened" carcass, too, so perhaps this damage is what is intended by Cat Magic's strange description of it as "rubble."

As in Transformation, there are two scary events that precipitate Strieber's flight from Rome and Róisín. The first, though is not getting lost in the catacombs (which even in Transformation is admitted to be a "screen," or false, memory) but rather seeing Róisín "stalking" through St. Peter's Basilica "in raging silence." The second, of course, is the dead owl -- described as being in her suitcase, for the first time since Cat Magic 30 years before.

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What really happened?

If we take the anecdote in The Super Natural at face value, it means the one in Cat Magic is 100% true -- a real event from Strieber's life, inserted without any modification at all into one of his novels. (In fact it may even be truer than the non-fiction versions. Does anyone really believe that a 23-year-old American film student backpacking through Europe in 1968 would be "living together in chaste intimacy" with a young woman rather than "cohabiting"?) This raises the question of how many other bits of unmodified autobiography lie hiding in plain sight in Strieber's pre-Communion fiction. (I can think of a passage in The Wolfen that is a strong candidate.)

If we take the anecdote at face value -- but that would be just a tad naïve, wouldn't it? Strieber himself would be the first to admit that he is what is called an "unreliable narrator." Here are some possible ways of interpreting the texts.

1. The owl incident is fiction and was invented by Strieber for Cat Magic. As time went by, he began to get bits of this fictional incident mixed up in his mind with real memories from 1968 -- first "remembering" that an owl had somehow been involved and then finally, by 2016, adopting the Cat Magic incident in its entirety as a "memory." It's easy to imagine Strieber trying hard to remember as much as possible about that long-ago incident, coming up with a clear and distinct image of finding a dead owl in his girlfriend's suitcase, and assuming it to be a real memory, having long since forgotten that the image came from a novel he had written 30 years before. The question this interpretation raises is why Strieber would invent the owl-in-the-suitcase image in the first place -- given how bizarre it is, and how little it has to do with the plot of Cat Magic. Perhaps it was originally a dream or something.

2. The owl incident took place more-or-less as described in The Super Natural but was buried in traumatic amnesia, so that when Strieber wrote Communion and Transformation he no longer had conscious access to those memories. The memories returned decades later, after Strieber had to some degree managed to overcome his fear of the "visitors," which is why he was finally able to tell the story accurately in 2016. The question then is how some of the "forgotten" details recorded for the first time in The Super Natural managed to find their way into the fictionalized version in Cat Magic. Well, perhaps traumatic memories are only traumatic if they are thought of as memories. Perhaps when one is fantasizing or engaging in creative writing, otherwise censored memories may be able to slip into consciousness disguised as fantasies.

3. Strieber consciously remembered the owl incident all along, but for some reason didn't trust some of these memories during the time he was writing Communion and Transformation and was unwilling to commit them to writing. Given how many extremely bizarre memories he recounts in those two books, this hesitance seems a bit odd. Perhaps the similarity to Cat Magic made it seem as if the memories had been contaminated, but apparently he had overcome these misgivings by the time he wrote The Super Natural.

The million-year-old university

In my recent post The twilight of the brain, I make passing reference to the image of "a university a million years old," which occurs in Whitley Strieber's book Transformation (1988). On June 23, I happened to be reading one of the few Strieber books I'd never read before, The Super Natural (2016, co-authored with Jeffrey J. Kripal of Rice University) and found that it includes a retelling of the ancient university story, with many differences from the Transformation version. I took out my copy of Transformation to try to find the passage in question -- and found that I had opened it up directly to that very page! The synchronicity fairies have spoken, and a detailed comparison must be made.

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The two accounts

Here is the story as it is told in Transformation (pp. 108-111 in my copy, though I understand pagination varies among editions).

In 1972 a number of vivid thoughts surfaced that I now [around 1987] realize were connected to that summer [of 1968, when Strieber was traveling in Europe]. They involved a journey to a great desert. This desert had a tan sky that was so bright it was difficult to look at. It never really got dark there.

The little men took me into an oasislike setting that was bordered by tall, very thin trees and crossed by a narrow lane. Over this lane there stood an enormously high arch. One of the men with me -- who seemed very jolly and gay -- said that the arch was to commemorate "the achievements of the scholars." Ahead I saw a completely tumbledown building. It was on a cliff at the edge of the oasis and was so old that it seemed almost to have blended with the stones themselves. Beyond and below it I could see the tremendous desert.

I was told that the building was a university "a million years old." I was really very excited to go inside. We approached the building and I said, "Is it in ruins?" The reply was, "No, but the scholars aren't much good at maintenance." There was an imposing entrance, but I was taken around to a side door that was reached by clambering over sharp volcanic rocks. These stones were fearsome, and for years afterward I had a recurring dream of climbing through them and trying very hard not to cut myself.

As we approached the door we encountered two taller, thin men with gigantic, black, almond-shaped eyes. They were not nearly as friendly as the small men in blue. In fact, when they stared at me I felt naked. It was hard to be in their presence. One of them said, "He isn't ready yet." This deflated me. Things had been going so well; I'd felt very much approved. Now there was a sense of desperation. Why wasn't I ready? I wanted to go in.

The two tall beings left. One of my guides announced, "They said you weren't ready, but now they're gone." So in we went. I found an absolutely featureless corridor made of what seemed to be dark-green stone. The floors were dusty and felt like packed earth. There were doorways, and light shone across the floor from each. I was taken into the first room. Its floor was etched with a circle, and there was a large window looking out over the desert.

When I went into the circle I wanted at once to dance. There was no music, but when I danced I felt a sensation that I cannot describe. The best way to characterize it would be to call it a movement that led at once to great loneliness and great excitement. When I danced I found myself for moments inside other people and other lives. I was walking up a narrow, curved road. A portly redheaded man was running toward me. He was wearing a white toga, and my impression was that I was seeing something happening in ancient Rome.

The dance took on a great passion and intensity. Round and round I went, sailing through armies of lives, places familiar and unfamiliar. It was as if my soul had hungered for this. I sailed round and round and round, going faster and faster. I don't know how long I danced, but it was glorious.

Reluctantly, I left the university and was taken to another building. This building was a three-story adobe structure down the lane from the university. In it there was a room for me to live in. It was unfurnished. I slept on the floor. Once I woke up to hear somebody talking loudly in English. Two men appeared, both of them normal-looking. They were wearing khaki clothes that looked military. I had the impression that they were Americans. One of them had a Bell & Howell movie camera, which he pointed at me. They were standing outside the door to the room behind a white tape. The one without the camera said, "Why are they keeping you outside of the enclosure?" I replied that I didn't know, and he looked absolutely furious.

Next I was with a woman who was so pale that even her lips were without color. She handed me a piece of fruit that looked like a giant fig. She told me to eat it. I said that I didn't care to eat it. She replied that I had to.

Feeling very dubious, I bit into it. At once there was a terrible bitterness, and it seemed like my head was going to split open.

 

I was aware of a group of people, some with tears in their eyes, watching me from behind the line of white tape as I went off on my own. I found that the grass was very soft and fine, and I sat in it for a time. Then I started to return to the university, but one of the tall beings who's said I wasn't ready was there. He waved me away and I thought it better not to go. I went instead to an area of shacks made of what looked like adobe and dried tree branches. They were very rough and simple. In them I would find things like a single wooden bowl, or a discarded blue uniform. Some of the small men were there, and I was so surprised at the simplicity of their dwellings that they laughed aloud at me.

 

There isn't any more than that. 

Here's the version given in The Super Natural (Chapter 4; I'm reading an electronic edition that doesn't have page numbers).

[B]ack in our apartment on Fifty-fifth Street in New York, I had a more arresting experience with the kobolds.

It came in the form of another powerful dream. It probably happened in 1973 or 1974, but I still recall it vividly.

I was on a plateau in the middle of an enormous desert. The horizons were much too far away, as if the planet was two or three times its normal size -- or, I suppose, as if it was not this planet at all. Before me on the plateau was a narrow road, snaking elegantly through an expanse of close-cropped grass. There were tall trees, like cedars of Lebanon, in a grove off to my right. Ahead, the road passed beneath a tall triumphal arch. To my left was a squat oval building perhaps three stories tall, set in the side of a cliff. Beyond it was the immense desert view that I was seeing. The building was dark blue, and its windows had louvered awnings. The sun was bright and powerful, flooding everything with chalk-white light.

Having no idea what I should do, I decided to walk toward the building. As I went under the arch, I was joined by two small men wearing clothes that were busy with flaps, the overalls of workers. The clothes and the men themselves were a dark, iridescent blue, the same color as the building.

They drew me along to a little ravine. In it were some lean-tos made of sticks. They indicated that this was where they lived. I said, "These aren't even huts." One of them replied in a low, breathy voice, "They're all we need." At that moment, I got the impression of vast stretches of time, and how hard it was to maintain environmental balance, how you must waste nothing if you expect to survive long enough to matter. From that brief instant would later arise my own deep concern with the environment [. . .].

I asked them about the building. One of them replied that it was a university. Now that we were close to it, I could see that it was a wreck. I said, "It looks like it's in ruins." The reply, through bubbling humor, was, "It's a million years old and the scholars aren't very good at maintenance." Then they asked me if I would like to attend it.

I can remember the shocked delight and eagerness that flashed through me. I could see an arched doorway in the base. But as I drew closer, I found myself struggling through a field of sharp boulders. At that point, two very strange beings appeared, as tall as I was, very thin, with great, slanted black eyes that disturbed me very much as they bored into me.

One of them said, "He's not ready." This seemed to disappoint the blue fellows. It certainly disappointed me, and I tried to get around them, but they blocked my way. I sensed that the whole history and meaning of humanity must be known in that place, and that if I could matriculate there, I could learn the truth of us and the secrets of our lives [. . .]. I wanted to go in, and badly, but I understood that I had to obey them. The little blue men reacted with regret. They still thought I was ready. Finally, I turned away. The next moment, I woke up.

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The core story

Here is the core narrative, consisting of the overlap between the two accounts. This overlap is so substantial that these can only be read as two different versions of the same experience.

Strieber was in a large desert where the sunlight was very bright. There were tall trees, grass, and a narrow road or lane, which passed under a very large arch. At least from the time he reached the arch, and perhaps before that, he was accompanied by little men in blue.

He saw a building, built into the side of a cliff. He thought it must be in ruins, but the little men explained that it was a million-year-old university, and that the scholars weren't very good at maintenance. He had to climb through a field of sharp rocks to reach the entrance. At the entrance, he was met by two taller, thin beings with large slanted black eyes that stared into him in a way that he found disturbing. These two beings said he wasn't ready to enter the university. This disappointed both Strieber and the little men, who thought he was ready.

At some point, either before or after this attempt to enter the university, he saw some extremely simple dwellings made of sticks and understood that the little men lived in them.

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Differences

At first glance, the most obvious difference is that Super Natural presents this as a dream Strieber had in New York in 1973 or 1974, whereas Transformation presents it as something he actually experienced during his summer in continental Europe in 1968. Looking more carefully at the Transformation account, though, I see that he is careful to avoid actually calling it a memory. Rather, it was one of "a number of vivid thoughts" that "surfaced" in 1972, which he later decided "were connected to that summer" of 1968. In other words, nothing in Transformation is strictly inconsistent with the whole thing's being a dream or fantasy that he had in New York in the early 1970s.

The other glaring difference is that the Super Natural version ends when Strieber is prevented from entering the university, turns away, and wakes up -- whereas the Transformation version continues for seven more paragraphs, with Strieber entering the university after all, dancing there and seeing a vision of ancient Rome (a theme which he would revisit in The Secret School, this time placing it in his childhood), and even living in the vicinity of the university for a period of time. This seems awfully hard to square with Super Natural's "The next moment, I woke up" -- unless the narrative in Transformation is spliced together from several originally separate dreams or fantasies; he does introduce it with a reference to "a number of vivid thoughts." Apparently, by the time he wrote Super Natural, Strieber was no longer so sure that these scenes belonged together, or that they had any reference to 1968.

Besides these two biggies, there are a number of minor differences. Transformation refers only to "little men in blue," but Super Natural adds that the men themselves were "a dark, iridescent blue," too, as was the university building. In Transformation, we are told that the university "seemed almost to have blended with the stones themselves," which seems inconsistent with its being blue.

In Transformation, Strieber is led by the little men from the beginning; in Super Natural, he is on his own at first and is joined by the little men when he reaches the arch.

In Transformation, Strieber sees the little men's very simple dwellings after visiting the university, and their reaction to his surprise is to laugh out loud. In Super Natural, he sees the dwellings before the university, and the little men's reaction is to solemnly intone, "They're all we need," triggering a moment of insight which Strieber considers as marking the beginning of his concern with environmental issues. The supposedly transformative impact of this episode is missing in Transformation.

Kobolds aren't blue.

Apologies to Bill Watterson

In Chapter 4 of The Super Natural, Whitley Strieber attempts -- not for the first time -- to connect the little blue men of his close-encounter experiences with the kobolds of German folkore.

Like so many of the aliens believed to have recently arrived, little blue men have been with us for a long time. As is the case with most of the other forms, they were originally identified in folklore -- most frequently, in this case, in northern European folklore. [. . .] In the past, they were most often found in mines. Now they're known as "blue aliens." They were observed by German, Welsh, Cornish, and English miners. The folklore was most developed in Germany, where they were given the name kobolds. Because of its dark blue color, the metal cobalt, discovered in a German mine in 1735, was named after them. But the word "kobold" ultimately derives from the Greek for "rogue." Most appropriate, judging from my own experience with them. They were said to carry, at the level of the heart, a small orb, glowing red, and, in point of fact, I've seen that myself.

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Only in Strieber's books have I ever encountered the idea that kobolds are blue.

While "cobalt ores" were indeed named for the legendary kobold, this was because they are worthless and toxic, and were thus thought to be the handiwork of subterranean goblins -- not because they could be used to produce a pigment that was the same color as those goblins!

The glowing orb mentioned by Strieber can be found in the 1884 book Nineteenth Century Miracles; or, Spirits and Their Work in Every Country of the Earth, by Emma Hardinge Britten. I quote from p. 32.

From Mdme. Kalodzy, the writer of "Rambles in the Hartz Mountains," and "The Clock Makers of the Forest," &c., the author of this work has received the following account of these "Kobolds" or spirits, as witnessed by Madame Kalodzy and three companions, who spent a week in the hut of a peasant, one Michael Engelbrecht, in whose family the Kobolds seem to gave been perfectly familiar:--

"On the three first days after our arrival," said Madame K----, "we only heard a few dull knocks, sounding in and about the mouth of the mine, as if produced by some vibrations of very distant blows, but when on the third evening Michael came home from work, he brought us the welcome intelligence that his friends, the Kobolds, had promised by knockings to make us a visit. This we were right glad of, as Dorothea, our Michael's wife, had expressed her fears that they might be shy of so many strangers, and would not appear, unless we spent some hours in the mine.

"We were about to sit down to tea when Mdlle. Gronin called our attention to a steady light, round, and about the size of a cheese plate, which appeared suddenly on the wall of the little garden directly opposite the door of the hut in which we sat.

"Before any of us could rise to examine it, four more lights appeared almost simultaneously, about the same shape, and varying only in size. Surrounding each one was the dim outline of a small human figure, black and grotesque, more like a little image carved out of black shining wood than anything else I can liken them to. Dorothea kissed her hands to these dreadful little shapes, and Michael bowed with great reverence. As for me and my companions, we were so awe-struck yet amused at these comical shapes, that we could not move or speak until they themselves seemed to flit about in a sort of wavering dance, and then vanish, one by one."

The narrator went on to say, that she and her husband have since both heard and seen these little men, who always come and go very suddenly; appear as above described in the shadowy image on diminutive black dwarfs about two or three feet in height, and at that part which in the human being is occupied by the heart, they carry the round luminous circle first described, an appearance which is much more frequently seen than the little black men themselves.

Here is Strieber's glowing orb (though not described as red), but notice that the kobolds that carry it are unambiguously described as black, not blue. (That the kobolds announce their arrival with knocks is also relevant to some of Strieber's encounters, though he doesn't mention it.)

I suppose it's possible that Strieber's description of the kobold is based on other accounts than the ones I've been able to find, and that those other accounts describe the creature as blue. I doubt it, though. I strongly suspect that Strieber was alluding to this story by Madame Kalodzy and that he found it the same way I did: by checking up the references in the Wikipedia article on kobolds. Strieber writes, "They were observed by German, Welsh, Cornish, and English miners"; cf. Wikipedia's identical list of four countries: "Medieval European miners believed in underground spirits. The kobold filled this role in German folklore and is similar to other creatures of the type, such as the English bluecap, Cornish knocker and the Welsh coblynau."

The bluecap of Border folklore at least has the advantage of being blue! (Wikipedia describes it as "a mythical fairy or ghost in English folklore that inhabits mines and appears as a small blue flame.") No particular color seems to be associated with the knocker or coblynau. Kobolds themselves are variously described, but never as blue, and the color most commonly associated with the mine-dwelling variety is black.