Divine Intervention

That's how everything started for me. It's different for everybody, but there are some things that are common to the experiences of all the people who are like me. Sometimes I think of us as a network – we may not know each other, but we are connected by that which happened to us, and there are signs by which we can recognise each other. From the things I have read since my interest in this had been sparked, I know that, while we are not legion, there are more than just a handful of us out there. Whatever form it may take, one thing we have in common, apparently, is an initial strange encounter. Mine took place in July 2011, almost three years ago at the time of writing. The specifics don't really matter here, so I'll just say it took place in school – I went to class, not expecting anything out of the ordinary, when all of a sudden our professor started talking about me, telling everyone things he couldn't possibly have known. And that is one characteristic of this kind of encounter. Someone knows things about you. It may be a stranger approaching you, or someone who has been in your life for a while in one way or another. At some point, this person will reveal that they have knowledge about you that you thought you alone had. They know your secrets, and you will keep wondering how they acquired all that ‘intelligence’.

Another characteristic of an encounter of this kind is that it never happened. You will doubt it ever happened, and there's no evidence, no trace left that would confirm that it did. Yet, there will be this part of you that keeps saying, ‘But it did happen!’ If there were other people present when the encounter took place, people who could be witnesses, they won't know anything, and it will seem as if their memory had been erased. That's what happened to me. I approached two other students who had been in class with me that day and asked them, cautiously, if they remembered what had happened, which, of course, they did not.

My own memory of the event is subject to changes, as I noticed later. It seemed as if I were constantly ‘remembering’ new things about it, but I think what really happened was that new things were added to it by a mechanism which now seems to me like a mind virus. A virus that creates memories and makes you think they are genuine memories of things you have experienced. As time went by, I learnt to recognise fake memories, and the viral activity became less.

What happens after the initial encounter is, again, different for everyone, but there are always delusions. It's as if the encounter launched an avalanche of them. This is where our episodes of schizophrenia begin. Where we go on a wild ride and believe, and often do, crazy things. When we're in the midst of them, they make perfect sense to us – suspension of disbelief is complete. Only later we begin to realise that we were being deluded. That our brain had become creative, a playwright for our mind's theatre.

And we try to make sense of our experiences. As we make an effort to fit them all in one single context, we are telling ourselves our stories. Some of us settle for one story which then becomes their story – they might believe it's aliens intervening in their life, or a highly organised group of people. Whatever their theory, they will pursue it and single-mindedly subordinate everything to it, finding ‘evidence’ to support it everywhere. Others, like myself, at some point make a crucial realisation – there is no one story. They are all just models that our mind builds as it is trying to make sense of all the highly confusing experiences. And as the model is being adapted, our stories change. We may change from being the aliens' pet to being a prospective member of an organised group of people that operates in secrecy and makes us undergo a series of tests... After seeing all this model-building activity going on in my mind, I conclude that I will most probably never know – what happened, what I experienced will remain a mystery, and the best I can take away from it is this healthy scientific-style skepticism I seem to have developed as a result of dealing with all this... Madness! Not the worst result, I think.