Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century

Jake Poller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429590283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

The twentieth century saw an unprecedented spike in the study of altered states of consciousness. New ASCs, such as those associated with LSD and psilocybin mushrooms, were cultivated and studied, while older ASCs were given new classifications: out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, psychokinesis, extrasensory perception. Altered Consciousness in the Twentieth Century analyses these different approaches and methodologies, and includes exciting new research into neglected areas.

This volume investigates the representation of ASCs in the culture of the twentieth century and examines the theoretical models that attempt to explain them. The international contributors critically examine a variety of ASCs, including precognition, near-death experiences, telepathy, New Age 'channelling', contact with aliens and UFOs, the use of alcohol and entheogens, analysing both the impact of ASCs on the culture and how cultural and technological changes influenced ASCs. The contributors are drawn from the fields of English and American literature, religious studies, Western esotericism, film studies, sociology and history of art, and bring to bear on ASCs their own disciplinary and conceptual perspectives, as well as a broader interdisciplinary knowledge of the subject. The collection represents a vital contribution to the growing body of work on both ASCs and the wider academic engagement with millennialism, entheogens, occulture and the paranormal.

Mapping the Psyche

1 Writing in the Space Between

Life after Death in the Fiction of Richard Matheson

Jennie Chapman

How should we classify Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come (1978)? It depends on whether you prefer your answers simple or complicated. The most obvious response is that the work in question is – of course – a novel. It proceeds by way of narrative prose. It has a more or less sequential plot. It has recognisably human characters. Despite its fantastic premise, it strives for a degree of verisimilitude, in both content and form. It runs to about 300 pages. It is sold in the fiction section of the bookshop.

But a closer look reveals an ontological status that is more complex than this classification permits. What Dreams May Come follows Chris Nielsen, a middle-aged man who is killed in a car accident but whose existence continues in Summerland, less ‘a country’ than ‘a state of mind’, which he wishes into existence by thinking positive thoughts, and which is continually shaped and replenished by his dreams and desires.¹ Summerland rectifies the flaws of the earthly realm: its citizens live ‘as they wished they had lived’ on earth, forging a spiritual existence that ‘reflect[s] each person’s concept of perfect happiness’.² Chris’s eternal bliss is interrupted, however, when he learns that his wife, Ann, unable to live with the loss of her husband, commits suicide and is consequently cast into a purgatorial domain where she must dwell until her appointed time of death comes to pass. Chris cannot bear the thought of his wife’s suffering, and so decides to risk his own immortal happiness in order to salvage hers, journeying into the ‘lower realm’ so that she might be spared its privations.³ In presenting this scenario, Matheson participates in a well-established tradition of ‘speculative fiction’, which ‘characteristically proceeds from a radical “What if…” premise. What if there were magic? What if electronic computers had genuine cognition? What if your town were overrun by flesh-eating zombies?’⁴ The premise that Matheson mobilises is perhaps the ultimate ‘what if’: what if death is not the end? What if we enter into another kind of life, in an altered state, after death?

Fantastic though this schema may be, it is by no means beyond the bounds of what is considered permissible in works of fiction: more outlandish possible worlds than this have been conjured and accepted at face value by readers who willingly suspend their disbelief. But typically, authors of fantasy fiction do not claim that the worlds they describe and the characters who inhabit them are objectively real – which cannot be said for the author who concerns me here. There are, of course, species of narrative – ‘true crime’; the ‘non-fiction novel’ exemplified by Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) – that do take as their inspiration real people, places and events. In these cases, the content of the narrative may be checked against verifiable records – police documentation, interviews, court transcripts – for its proximity to the ‘facts’, such as they are, of the case. Matheson’s narrative is incommensurate with this model, however: though it attempts to persuade readers of the truth of its depiction of the afterlife, there is no material evidence that would lend definitive credence to the author’s account. Furthermore, What Dreams May Come departs from the formal conventions of the novel in important ways. Parts of the text work less in the service of plot and character development than they function to summarise and explicate aspects of Matheson’s conception of the afterlife, which constitutes a heady brew of traditional religious concepts (reincarnation, karmic law, purgatory), esoteric principles inspired by Spiritualism and Theosophy (the etheric body, astral projection), and parapsychological research on near-death experiences (NDEs) (such as the paradigmatic Life After Life, published by Raymond Moody three years earlier). This array of sources (which, in another unusual feature, are formally listed in a bibliography that follows the narrative) provides Matheson with the building blocks that construct his narrative world; but while this cannot be said to be the work of pure imagination, neither is it based on empirical, testable fact. For all of these reasons, What Dreams May Come cannot be properly categorised as a novel. But if it is not a novel, what is it? And how should it be read? This chapter situates Matheson’s vision of the afterlife in the ‘space between’: at the confluence of several seemingly incongruous discourses, where spiritual beliefs meet scientific research and popular literary fiction. In positioning his narrative thus, Matheson eludes the discursive limitations of these individual modes of expression in a manner befitting the evanescent nature of his subject matter. To demonstrate these claims, I locate the hitherto under-investigated What Dreams May Come, first, in the context of Matheson’s eclectic and genre-bending oeuvre, in order to make sense of the multiple sources, influences and traditions that intersect in the narrative; and, second, in the context of the emergent parapsychological field of Near-Death Studies that emerged in the mid-1970s, around the time Matheson was researching What Dreams May Come. The concluding section aims to bring these two lines of inquiry, into Matheson’s narrative practices and his scientific influences, respectively, together to consider the cultural function of fictionalised accounts of life after death when putatively ‘true’ testimonies of NDEs are readily available to interested readers.

Fiction That Tells the Truth: Alterations and Adaptations in the Work of Richard Matheson

Matheson is far from alone in his desire to map that ‘undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns’ (Hamlet 1.1.80). Working from the premise that death does not extinguish consciousness but, rather, merely alters it, theologians, mystics and artists across the ages have sought to imagine and describe what that altered state of consciousness might entail. Contemporary fictions set in the afterlife are numerous: Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2003) and Mitch Albom’s Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003) are among the most popular, but writers as diverse as Will Self (How the Dead Live, 2000), Amy Tan (Saving Fish from Drowning, 2006) and Etgar Keret (Kneller’s Happy Campers, 2009) have imagined various forms of life after death. Where Matheson’s offering deviates from these and others in the genre is in its overt claim of truthfulness regarding its depictions of the afterlife: in his prefatory note, Matheson makes the astonishing claim that ‘only one aspect of [the story] is fictional: the characters and their relationships. With few exceptions, every other detail is derived exclusively from research’.⁵ While the likes of Sebold and Albom make no claim for the veracity of their post-mortem visions (though this has not discouraged some readers from understanding these novels as guides to what we might expect after we die),⁶ Matheson’s novel is fiction that – purportedly – tells the truth. In situating his narrative in the borderland between life and death, Matheson also blurs the boundaries between other apparently oppositional and mutually exclusive categories: truth and speculation, fiction and non-fiction, the possible and the impossible. The book’s form exemplifies and dramatises its subject: to write the borderland of life and death is to accept an indeterminacy that cannot be contained by the parameters of a single genre, and thus What Dreams May Come reads as a heterogeneous melange of religion, science, superstition and speculation, held together by the unifying force of narrative plot.

At first glance, What Dreams May Come appears as an anomaly in Matheson’s oeuvre, a departure from the tales of horror, such as I Am Legend (1954) and The Shrinking Man (1956), for which he had become acclaimed. In fact, although Matheson is most frequently classified as a horror writer, Mathias Clasen points out that the author ‘basically left horror behind’ as early as 1971, following the publication of Hell House.⁷ It was at this time, the mid-point in his career, when Matheson’s fiction took a decidedly metaphysical turn, the corollary of which was a deep ambivalence on the part of the author concerning his contribution to the horror genre, the intensity of which appeared to increase in proportion to his religious sensibilities. In an interview in 2004, Matheson expressed the hope that ‘I have done more than frightened a couple of generations. I hope I’ve inspired a few people one way or another’.⁸ Another interview makes his discomfort even more explicit: ‘I hate the word horror. To me, the word horror means visceral. It’s supposed to make you sick to your stomach’.⁹ Such anxieties are reflected in Matheson’s spiritual fiction. The protagonist of What Dreams May Come shares his creator’s profession of screenwriter, and the content and nature of his output evokes deep post-mortem unease. Shortly after death, Chris undergoes the customary life review, in which his life ‘unreel[s] before me, a succession of living pictures’.¹⁰ Though this ‘film titled My Life’ begins positively enough, its narrative takes a darker turn as it shifts from Chris’s triumphs to his regrets.¹¹ ‘I felt the biting pang of every unfulfillment. Not only personal but in my work as well – my failures as a writer. The host of scripts I’d written which did no one any good and, many, harm’.¹² Later, when Chris encounters in his heavenly home ‘a line of bound scripts on one of the shelves and recognize[d] the titles as my own,’ he reacts with ‘shame as I realized how many of the scripts had dealt with subjects either violent or horrific’.¹³ These metafictive allusions invite us to read the novel as the mea culpa of a writer seeking to dissociate himself from his early work and the moral values bound up in it. Hence, much as Chris is enjoined to use his experience of the afterlife as an opportunity to rectify his earthly faults, so What Dreams May Come seeks to make artistic amends for the sensational tendencies found in a repentant author’s sophomoric efforts.

But another reading situates What Dreams May Come as a continuation of, rather than a deviation from, an artistic trajectory characterised by generic border crossings. Matheson’s writing career was defined by adaptation. A prolific screenwriter for both film and television, many of his novels – including What Dreams May Come¹⁴ – and short stories were reproduced for the screen, some by Matheson himself, some by other screenwriters. Some of his novels have engendered multiple iterations: I Am Legend, published in 1954, has...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Mapping the Psyche
• Millennialism
• Entheogens
• Bibliography
• Index