collected audio interviews
As part of the research I have been interviewing people who have experienced psychic phenomena or unexplained events in their lives. I have interviewed around 25 people so far: friends, friends of friends, strangers, people who have heard about what I’m doing and contacted me.
“I
was hanging the nappies out on the line and I suddenly had this image
as if it was on a screen, very clearly, from above, and very very high
up, and I was overlooking my friend’s swimming pool, and I could
see my two children, and I saw one of them jump into the water...and she
wasn’t wearing her armbands. And my immediate thought was, this
is a thought and I must act on it. I dropped the basket, ran into the
house
and got them on the phone.....and it was true, it had just happened.”
Extract from interview with research participant (January 2003)
These
interviews are creating a powerful collection of autobiographical experiences
- specific examples of precognition, telepathy, and clairvoyance. Participants
are also asked a sequence of questions about their beliefs, thoughts and
ideas around the potential and power of the mind.
Many people who have taken part talk about their experiences with much
clarity and insight, and when quizzed about any understanding of their
experience they usually say something like "I
just knew, it was there in my mind, I just knew, I didn’t question
it." This absolute sense of ‘knowing’
is potent and intriguing. Referencing the definition of precognition in
the New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, I read this: “It
can be argued that precognition is impossible...... It does not mean
that
people cannot have true, uninferred beliefs about the future but only
that, since this cannot be causally explained, it cannot be called knowledge.”
These are the sorts of gaps, thresholds and dilemmas that lie at the heart
of this project, and it is this territory of the acutely observed personal
experience set within and sometimes against generalised beliefs, structures
and cultures, that is the ground for exploration.
“I was lying in bed, I was fast asleep OK? I woke up in the middle of the night, I sat up in bed and said....and I can remember exactly what I said, I said Sue’s coming but she’s got stuck, and then I lay back down again and went to sleep.
And
about 3 o’clock in the morning, Sue arrived at the flat, and we checked
times, and the time when I had woken up and said this, she had been stuck
on a road trying to hitch to get to see me. So the reason I remember this
incident is because I woke up...I was utterly convinced, there was no
question of it, I knew and there was no reason why I should have known,
we hadn’t been in touch for about two years, I’d no idea she
was coming to see me at all.”
Extract from interview with research participant (February 2003)
Some of the audio interviews fed directly into the performance: we ‘re-spoke’ the recorded words live – a performer listens to the interview via CD player/headphones and speaks the words as soon as they hear them; this technique is an attempt to capture the actual ‘telling’ of the experience, the ‘liveness’ of the moment, and to stay as accurately as possible with the rhythms, patterns and nuances of that telling.
The audio interviews make an impressive collection – a continually expanding archive of empirical research into the paranormal.
People
interviewed during research:
Gretchen Caplan Faust, Dr Serena Roney Dougal, Willow Roe, Debbie Booth, Alan
Boldon, Sue Farrow Jones, Palden Jenkins, Carolyn Findlay, Barbara Bridger,
Misha Myers, Lawrie Lin Waller, Coreo Balfour, Jenny Smedley, Jaki Whitren,
Frances Howard Gordon, David Williams, Lydia Lite, Robert Mathew.
Interviews
used in performance:
Barbara Bridger, Debbie Booth & David Williams
