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By Root 671 0

Georgia. If this analogy is carried further—and it is, by an increasing number of scientists—then the “sender” is separate from the “receiver.” The content of the transmission does not originate in the brain, any more than the host of All Things Considered is physically in your radio. This is not to say that all our thoughts come from another, spiritual, realm, any more than everything we hear comes through the radio. It merely suggests that perhaps people suffering with an overactive temporal lobe are able to tune in to another dimension of reality, which the rest of us are unable to access. Maybe Saint Paul and Joan of Arc and Dostoyevsky were not crazy. Maybe they just had better antennae.

And maybe that was the case for Terrence Ayala as well.

Terrence smiled graciously when I met him at Henry Ford Hospital, even though I had kept him waiting for some time. A handsome forty-seven-year-old African-American, lean and muscular in his pullover sweater,Terrence spoke softly, almost shyly. I thought it a winning trait for a man with his résumé: Princeton University, the University of Virginia Law School, most recently a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of Florida.

Several years earlier, Terrence had undergone an operation that left him with a stuttering problem. His words, though they spilled drop by drop from his mouth, glistened with insight and originality. As I listened to him, I thought: This is a man who sees the world differently.

What Terrence sees is either hallucination or an alternate reality, depending on your point of view. Terrence told me that when he falls asleep at night, “frequently there’s this dark presence, usually off to the upper right side of my body. If I’m lying down it will usually be looming over me. And I have a sense that it is a very evil presence. I can see it now—well, I can re-create that experience. It’s a very palpable, powerful experience.”

“And the presence seems just as real as, say, the walls, the table in the room ... ?” I asked.

“Oh yes! It’s as though there’s another person in the room.”

I remembered Michael Persinger’s “Sensed Presence.”We decided to call the presence “Bob.” I asked Terrence if he thought Bob was onto-logically real.

“Well, it’s part of my reality,” he responded.

“Do you think your brain picks up information that, say, mine can’t perceive?” I asked. “I mean, do you think you can tune in to alternate realities, or states of consciousness, that I can’t?”

“Absolutely,” he said. He leaned forward.“If you look in a room full of people dancing, the majority of folks will be going to one beat, but there may be others who are tuning in to five or six or seven rhythms. And they can not only tune into them but move in consonance with those sounds, whereas other folks are just sticking to what others would agree is the dominant beat.”

He laughed. “I wish I could tune in more frequently to the one everyone else is trying to dance to.”

“When was the last time you saw Bob?” I asked.

“Not in the last two or three months,” he said. “They changed my medication.”

“Oh. They changed your medicine and that helped?” I asked.

“Helped?” he repeated.

I was startled. “Do you feel it’s a loss?”

“I do,” Terrence said. He had grown, if not fond of, then accustomed to his extra sense that he believed allowed him to tap into a different dimension.

“You know, we pay a lot of money to musicians who can hear different vibes and harmonies and express them for those of us who have not spent time training those abilities. We pay visual artists to make perceptible the images they have in their minds. And I guess this goes into a whole area of what we would call mental illness, and why we classify these things as illnesses rather than just differences.We have a habit of trying to bring people into conformity through medication and modern science and all kinds of things. Who knows what realities we’re medicating away?”

This is the pivotal question. Are we medicating away realities or delusions? Science believes it has the dispositive answer. For, like magicians with their