Are Ghosts Information Patterns?

When we think of ghosts and paranormal activity, our minds usually conjure up white ephemeral shapes drifting through attics and basements, fears of possession by demonic and supernatural forces, and the echoey utterances of deeply unhappy spirits hell-bent on avenging their earthly mistreatment. Rarely, if ever, do we conceptualize ghosts as the embodiment of information, the leftover spillage of energy patterns slowly being stamped out by the inexorable passage of time.

Now that I’m in the process of making a horror film, this is what I’ve been thinking about lately. My movie, HellHouse, is not about paranormal activity, but rather a much more human terror caused by dementia and sadistic violence. The research I’ve been conducting, however, has found me revisiting a lot of old classics—The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining—and even newer films about struggles with the spirit world, including The Sixth Sense, Stir of Echos Paranormal Activity, 1408, and The Ring.

The idea of the spirit realm is not new. In fact, it’s one of the defining concepts in the collective psyche of our race. The earliest humans grappled with the idea of a spirit world. Philosophers like Descartes contemplated the divisions of the material world and the world of the mind. We are ‘haunted’ by the idea of our own mortality. Over the years we’ve struggled with the possibility that those who have died before us are not completely gone, that part of them lives on in some kind of supernatural realm that spills over into the world of the living.

simulation of dark energy distribution

I want to now lay out a concept of ghosts that is probably not new but certainly not boring. It centers around the idea of energy and information. To be sure, the physical universe—everything from galactic formation to organic intelligence—is constructed of energy and patterns of information. Underneath the velour of the macroscopic world the matrix of our reality is comprised of constantly shifting quantum particles, intertwined dimensions, and amplitude distributions the true nature of which is hardly understood. After all, over 90% of our universe is comprised of “dark energy” and physicists readily admit they have no idea what it is.

Let us consider for a minute the research that has been conducted in the last couple decades regarding the role of consciousness in the physical universe. Pioneering groups such as PEAR (Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research) and the Global Consciousness Project have been working to prove that consciousness has a physical impact on the world around us, that it can in fact influence random systems. Many of the researchers involved in these projects say the data collected shows nothing less than powerfully comprehensive evidence that mind does affect matter, albeit in small, sometimes negligible ways. By small they mean we can’t crunch cars, fly, and telekinetically control the world, like the recent film Chronicle would suggest. However, the research shows there is a strong likelihood that mind, matter, and energy are interconnected and affect one another.

face behind face belongs to Freddy Jackson who died two days before the pic was taken

Let’s take this conversation and embed it within the context of death, the cessation of the human mind. Let’s say the PEAR researchers are right, and the human mind affects the information of the physical world around it. If our consciousness affects matter, it stands to reason that our subjective state of mind would be a factor in the nature of the affectation. We already know that death is a tremendously powerful physiological process. Could it be that people who suffer extremely unpleasant deaths, or die under extreme physical and psychological duress, could leave behind traces of that information which remains in the general flow of energy? Perhaps paranormal visitations and hauntings are real and represent interactions with poorly understood remnants of human energy. Are ghosts information patterns?

Since I have no clue as to the answer, I will simply pose the question. Don’t haunt the messenger.

HELLHOUSE

click on picture for teaser trailer

Most people don’t openly profess an interest in serial killers or the subject of murder, as these topics are considered morbid and untoward. But the 24 hour news cycle has it’s own sardonic obsession with brutality, and you can see evidence of this every night on the local news and CNN. For months at a time, people crowd around their television sets, listening with bated breath for the salient details of a buried baby or a raped teenager. But we are not obsessed with violence and terror. I repeat, we are NOT obsessed with violence and terror!

But for those of us who do secretly wonder about the final thoughts of a tortured soul, or the sounds a serial killer makes when no one else is around, have I got a film for you! My film, HELLHOUSE, which I am co-writing/directing with my friend and fellow horror movie fanatic, Jared Salas. We have launched a KICKSTARTER campaign for our movie and are expecting to begin shooting principal photography in spring.

HELLHOUSE is about a financially desperate couple, Collin and Aria, who decide to start robbing houses in order to pay their bills….they pick the wrong house. What they find inside will keep law enforcement officers and scientists baffled for years to come, and hopefully moviegoers too!

Right now we need help funding this movie. We’re not asking for much and the money we do get will be used for camera equipment, lenses, and for the creation of a haunting prosthetic mask for the film’s antagonist. Anyone out there who wants to support an independent avante garde horror film in the vein of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, The House of the Devil, and Quarantine is encouraged to visit our KICKSTARTER page, watch the teaser trailer and get on board the HELLHOUSE production!

Psi Research, Human Consciousness, and Noosphere

Image via Wikipedia

The Margins of Reality, the Global Consciousness Project and the Noopshere

In the 1990′s researchers at Princeton launched the PEAR (The Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research ) program to investigate the role of consciousness in the physical universe. The book that resulted from this research, The Margins of Reality, presents statistical data backing up the idea that the intentions of a human observer can affect random numbers. In other words, because of the presence of a human systems that should be behaving randomly stop behaving randomly and actually become ordered. This research evolved into The Global Consciousness Project, which uses random number generators–on days such as 9/11, the dates of celebrity deaths, and in general on days when certain events will attract the attention of millions of people–to document the effects of large scale human consciousness on random systems. The Project goes further to propose a global mind, a conjoined force of matter, energy, and consciousness, that some refer to as the noosphere.

INSCOM, Project Stargate, and Remote Viewing

If you’ve seen the movie The Men Who Stare At Goats or watched any number of conspiracy documentaries about covert government research projects you might be familiar with the concept of paranormal military programs. There is, in fact, a very real track record of the U.S military testing remote viewing and telepathy on civilians and for use as interrogation techniques in the War on Terror. One of the most documented of these programs was called Project Stargate, which lasted from the early 70′s to the mid-90′s. Project Stargate experimented with clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, and remote viewing in order to gather military intelligence and assist with covert missions.

Retroactive Precognition

In January of 2011 Dr. Daryl J. Bem of Cornell University wrote a controversial paper called “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect” in which he described a series experiments he conducted seeking to prove precognition. More specifically, Bem presented evidence that future events can affect present cognition. Working off the premise that there are “anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms”, Bem tested 1,000 college students for their ability to correctly intuit random information. In one study, Bem conducted a reverse memory test, having his subjects categorize random words that they would later commit to memory. Bem’s results showed that the students were more likely to recall words in the present if they later memorized them.

Ganzfeld tests

Ganzfield tests are parapsychology techniques which are used to test people for ESP powers. They typically involve various levels of sensory deprivation. For example, a normal Ganzfield test might feature a subject, the ‘receiver’, sitting in a chair with halved ping pong balls over his/her eyes and red light shining over them while listening to white or pink noise on headphones. Meanwhile the ‘sender’, another person in a separate location, chooses a concept, a picture, an idea, etc., and attempts to transmit that target into the mind of the ‘receiver’. During this session, the receiver speaks out loud, describing what he or she sees. With the incorporation of more contemporary tools, such as automated computer systems, researchers who use the ganzfield method continue to report statistically significant paranormal anomalies.

-Jake Anderson

Philip K. Dick: Explorer of an Uncertain Reality

author Philip K. Dick published 44 novels

Of contemporary science fiction (SF) writers, one of the most interesting is the late Philip K. Dick (1928-1982), although there is some question whether Dick, strictly speaking, wrote science fiction at all. Certainly he had little concern for Vernian accuracy on hardware; sometimes he seems to have a contempt for it. Still, he used the conventions of SF, and in the minds of most critics he greatly enriched the genre.

In his prolific career, he worked through many of the conventions and themes of SF, but finally his work always had a personal stamp. His favorite subject matter is the alternate universe fiction, although it usually seems that the alternate universe is essentially his means of exploring the slipperiness of reality, even the burden of reality. In whatever version of reality we find ourselves in Dick’s work, one feature is consistent: the future is as sleazy as the present. The future does have the gleaming chrome and steel that we anticipate, but it also has unswept streets and cluttered hallways of everyday reality. One does not escape the dreariness of life in the future; the problems of life are with you in all versions of reality.


One of the earliest of Dick’s novels, Eye in the Sky (1957), illustrates his special method. It is crude by the standards of his later work, and has signs of having been hastily written. (We suspect, though, that even some of his best work was hastily written. Fast writing was long a fact of life for anybody who wanted to make a full-time living as a SF writer. Writers didn’t get paid much for each book, so they had to write a lot of them.)

Eye in the Sky depicts a nuclear plant accident that causes eight people who were on a plant tour to experience a new and special relationship with reality. The characters discover that they experience, in turn, existence in each others’ minds. First, all the characters must live in the mind of a religious fanatic, and reality in that world
corresponds accordingly. Angels swarm in the sky, and in the middle is a giant eye (thus the title), presumably belonging to God, watching everything. The characters move
through the mind of a Victorian prude, a psychotic, a Russian Communist, and so on. The important aspect of this novel isn’t the idea so much as it is the technique. In a Dick
novel, you aren’t just told that you are in an alternate reality; you experience and feel that reality.

Another dimension of his career was his ability to build a personal vision out of the gamut of SF themes and conventions. For example, in The Martian Time-Slip (1964), he writes a novel in the Mars tradition, complete with canals and an ancient civilization. But we know that the story is uniquely his when we find the canals lined with suburban-like housing developments and bored housewives carrying on affairs with traveling salesmen.


Dr. Bloodmoney: Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965) is a post-nuclear war novel, but one that has a bizarrely cheerful ending. In Dick’s vision of post-holocaust existence, even the mutated life forms come happily out of the sewers to join the panorama of life.

The Galactic Pot-Healer (1969) is in the galactic tradition, but it is evolved far beyond Asimov’s galactic empires. In Dick’s version of the future, pottery has become so rare that any handmade pot is worth preserving, and a pottery repairman travels the galaxy fixing them. The novel is obviously a put on, but so well done that we accept and enjoy it.

Some of Dick’s other adaptions of traditional SF include The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, (1964) about time travel; Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, 1974 (technologically enforced political dystopia); and The Unteleported Man, 1966 (interstellar travel by “gates”). Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969) deals with artificial life (portions of-the novel were the basis for the movie Blade Runner).

One of his major novels, Ubik (1969), is so unusual that it defies conventional description. Set in what is presumably the near-future, Ubik starts as a satire on paranormal powers, as the novel introduces telepaths, parakineticists, resurrectors, animators, and others, all available for hire through an agency. Next, the novel seems to show Dick’s light regard for conventional SF, as a group of paranormals are sent to the moon to protect a starship project—an absurd development, given the near-future setting.


The novel takes yet another turn after the paranormals, sabotaged in their mission, start to experience strange events—reality starts to wither around them (these scenes can only be appreciated by reading them). We assume that he is working with the same technique as in Eye in the Sky—the characters seem to exist within the reality of somebody’s mind.

Then what is at first a surprise ending suggests an even more radical perspective in the novel.

The novel has been interpreted as everything from a satire on capitalism to a criticism of the limitations of the bourgeois novel.

The rest of this article is devoted to another of Dick’s acknowledged masterpieces, The Man In the High Castle (1962), a work that is unlike anything else he wrote (a strong statement, considering the variety of his work). It is his only alternate universe story in which he so closely extrapolates from a clearly defined historical period (the decades before and after World War II. It is also a very tightly constructed novel, not always one of Dick’s virtues.



The Man in the High Castle is set in a world in which the U.S. lost World War II. Nazi conquerors occupy the east coast, while the Japanese occupy the west coast. In the middle, serving as a buffer between the conquering powers, is the PSA (the Pacific States of America), the last home of free Americans. At the most obvious level, the novel explores the traits of the occupying powers. The Nazis are the monsters we know them to be, but the Japanese turn out to be relatively benign masters. They did not, as one American character says, “build ovens” (referring to the mass extermination in the Nazi concentration camps).

But the novel is about many other things, and is open to multiple interpretations. We may see the novel as an analysis of the mind-set that produces technological innovation. In this version of history, set in 1962, technological development is well ahead of the timetable in our “real” world. Not only have the Nazis colonized the moon, they have already reached Mars.

Dick presents a runaway technology that is a product of fascistic, masculine thinking–a thinking that refuses to take an ecological perspective into consideration. The Nazis are clearly on a path to self-destruction, which, if unaltered, will result in the destruction of the entire globe. But Dick’s criticism of runaway Nazi technology is, by indirection, a criticism of runaway American technology.


At the center of the action is Operation Dandelion, the plan that the Nazis have for a nuclear strike on the Japanese home islands. The Nazis in their paranoia are unwilling to share world power with anyone else. In a surprising way, though, Operation Dandelion is an observation on the reality that we know. Even while we share with the characters a horror of the planned nuclear strike, we can’t help but remember that Americans, in our reality, in fact carried out something quite like Operation Dandelion. There has been only one nuclear war, and Americans fought and won it.

From yet another direction, the novel is about art. Some of the characters of the novel are themselves reading a novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which depicts a version of history in which the Japanese and Germans do not win the war. Considered subversive, the book is forbidden in the Nazi zone, although the Japanese tolerate it. The author, Hawthorne Abendsen, reportedly lives in a highly fortified home (the “high castle” of the title) within the Pacific American States, and is the target of a Nazi assassination attempt.

It is tempting to assume that The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is about our world, thus giving the novel a total symmetry. That is, we read a novel about an alternate world in which the people are reading about our world. But this is not the case. The alternate world setting in The Grasshopper Lies Heavy depicts yet a third reality. Dick is very skillful in planting mysteries that keep the reader speculating.


The novel may also be about the scientific assumptions that underlie our thinking. As we pointed out previously, the book may be seen as having a basis in quantum theory rather than space-time physics. But Dick does not attempt to use that terminology. He presents his scientific assumptions through the behavior of his characters. Several characters seem not to rely on cause-effect logic (what we might see as space-time logic) for making careful decisions. Instead, they refer to the I Ching, a book in Chinese culture used for divination. The I Ching is related to a concept of “synchronicity,” which sees the oneness of all events, and the relation of individual subjectivity to those events. Thus a random cast of dice can, for the person doing the casting, assist in predicting his or her future.

The cast of the dice is part of the oneness of all, and can help us predict seemingly unrelated future events.

-Steve Anderson

Braco: Eye Contact Champion/Spiritual Healer

On Sunday Alli and I went to a guru, a spiritual healer. We’d heard about him from a friend who swore the man was a conduit for universal Source energy, that to be in his presence was to enter a sacred contract with divinity. Naturally, I was a little skeptical, but also fascinated. Both the skepticism and fascination stemmed from the guru’s manner of healing: the gaze. Apparently the guy just came out, stood on a platform and stared. For this, the gazee was charged $8.

photo by dervishcandela

The healer’s name is Braco. He comes from Croatia and looks like a boyish hippy with beautiful locks of silvery hair sweeping down over his shoulders. He wasn’t always a spiritual guru. He started off skeptical of a healer named Ivica that his mother was going to. Braco accompanied his mother to a session and found himself completely transfixed and overwhelmed by admiration. He began to spend every day with Ivica, until Ivica drowned while the two were swimming in the ocean. His community demanded that Braco take over Ivica’s healing duties, so, reluctantly, he did. Now his God-given gift for transformational healing draws over 200,000 people a year. Thousands upon thousands of them claim miraculous recoveries and transformations have occurred in their lives since standing in Braco’s gaze.

We arrived at the Marriott in Woodland Hills eating breakfast burritos. Quickly bypassing the throngs of people and merchandise tables stacked with DVD’s and books, we bought our tickets and entered the crystal chandelier-decorated ballroom. A blond publicist with a cinematically cadenced voice told the healer’s backstory, adding–much to our chagrin–that at one point in his life Braco had actually escaped from a mental institution. My friend, who was volunteering for Braco’s slate of weekend staring contests, had left out this detail during his initial pitch. It’s not a deal closer, but definitely a game changer. You can wage as many Foucaldian critiques of institutional psychiatric evaluation as your heart desires, when the cook tells you he escaped from a mental institution you don’t eat the mystery meat.

photo by nothingstock

Then New Age flute music started playing and Braco came out, stood in front of the projection screen, on which they had shown some video clips, and commenced gazing. His head moved from left to right almost imperceptibly as he slowly swept his line of sight across the ballroom. This went on for about twenty minutes. My friend had predicted I would see an aura around him. Sure enough, I did start to see a kind of white force-field of energy outlining his head. But I also saw this outline on the people in front of me, who also happened to be backdropped by the white projection screen. Later, Alli explained to me that a white backdrop, combined with a spotlight, could easily produce an effect like that. Or, I was actually seeing their spiritual aura. I couldn’t see the force-field on anyone not standing in front of the projection screen though.

When the gazing was over, several people in the crowd raised their hands and testified to feeling the awesome powers of Braco’s gaze. One man said he felt “activated”, like he was flying through the air. He also said he had been there at the Marriott attending Braco gazings for three days, then started laughing maniacally. Another man stood up and gave a very earnest and touching testimony of a boy who had died of cancer recently. The boy had witnessed a Braco gazing and afterward had called forth all of his friends to his hospice in order to write them each a personal love letter before he died.

I can’t say I felt anything out of the ordinary. But the blond publicist did say that some people wouldn’t feel any energy directly but would rather act as vessels, carriers, disseminating the energy to others who come into contact with them over the following days, months and years. Like a virus of goodness.

When my friend had first told me about Braco, a couple months earlier, I happened to be staying at this house in Agoura Hills. I went down the street one day to get a bite to eat at the local diner, the Canyon Grill. There I saw a man that looked exactly like Braco, to a T, sitting with a woman who looked like the blond publicist. Braco had a tattoo on his arm and sat staring at the floor. At the time, my friend said it was a sign that Braco was already a part of my life, which kind of creeped me out. Now, having witnessed his gaze, I can say that my experience of him staring at the floor of the diner was the climax, retroactively attained through irony and gastrointestinal discomfort caused by a breakfast burrito.

I’m sure any number of crowd psychology studies, peppered with convergence theory, groupthink, noosphere, collective hysteria, and communal reinforcement, would help explain why so many people feel that their lives are transformed by a man staring at them for twenty minutes. Or, Braco could legitimately be a vessel for the resplendent energy flowing through the conjoined universal fibers of mind and matter. Or, he’s a bat-shit crazy con artist who drowned his mentor in the ocean in order to take over a potentially lucrative spiritual healing business. Or maybe both, “one of God’s own prototypes…too weird to live, too rare to die.” Though in this case, he was considered for mass production.

The only truly nebulous thing that happened to me during Braco’s gaze occurred about halfway through, when I looked to my left and saw a middle aged woman making direct eye contact with me. She sustained it for two full minutes, then slowly looked away. Thanks, Braco!

-Jake Anderson