Elaine Showalter and Christopher Benfey
Dear Chris,
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StumbleUponI've heard of hovering between sleeping and waking (and vice versa) as a phase of hallucination or confusion that might produce images of alien abduction, but never knew it was called "sleep paralysis," let alone kanashibari. However, alien abduction is just the cultural narrative some groups have imposed on their hallucinations or peculiar sensations. Maybe in Japan there's a phenomenon called "giant stepping," and some Japanese are convinced that it's really happened to them, and write books about it, and go on TV, and make movies, Invasion of the Step Giants.
If so, alas, most of the victims of giant-stepping will be women, and they will also believe that the giants stepped on them with sexual intent. Americans started seeing spaceships and aliens in the 1890s (there's a great story about one man in Minnesota who was ordered by aliens to make two dozen egg-salad sandwiches), but the abduction stories didn't get going until the 1950s, and they are sexual from the start. The main thing to know about alien abduction stories is that they are recovered under hypnosis. In other words, if I just walked into John Mack's office and said I had been abducted last night and taken to Havana like Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls , he would throw me out. But if I just said I felt funny, and had a weird freckle on my hand, and then under hypnosis remembered being on a spaceship with JFK and Khrushchev over Cuba (as one undercover reporter told him), he'd be fascinated.
There's another professor, David Jacobs at Temple, who thinks it's already too late to defend ourselves against the alien breeding program, and that half of us are alien-human hybrids. Jacobs says that special alien agents in blue jeans are seducing American women every day. These aliens are often very romantic and charming, too, and tell the women they would really, really like to make a commitment but can't, because they have to get back to the mother ship. Explains a lot, doesn't it?
The dolphin story is in the papers here today. In general, all the main stories are medical. Young NHS doctors are in public rebellion against their long shifts without sleep. There's also a major scandal and ethical debate about one hospital in Sheffield accepting an organ transplant donor who stipulated that his kidney should go only to a white patient. On TV last night, several leading physicians said they would refuse the donor rather than accept such a racist policy, but there's a serious shortage of organ donors here. Last year, 200 people in the U.K. died while waiting for transplants, and there are over 6,000 people on the waiting list. Ironically, although the Asian community, according to these doctors, is particularly susceptible to kidney failure diseases, the tissue match is less good with non-Asian organs. But Asians are rarely organ donors for religious and social reasons. Not-so-brave new world.
Elaine
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