Out of my mind with terror
For years Melvyn Bragg secretly lived in fear of "out of body experiences". For the first time, he tells how he overcame his nightmare
They began when I was about 13 and continued upwards of two years, at times intensively. They faded away slowly, but still at 18 or 19 I was apprehensive that they might return, and in force. They did, briefly, at the end of my twenties, but since then I have been spared.
Usually they came at night. I cannot recall the first time, but I do remember the first onslaught. My parents kept a pub and they would be downstairs from about 5.30pm until after 11pm. I would have been out at choir practice, the Scouts, swimming, playing football, whatever, and come back to take it on. Having eaten a quick snack in the bar kitchen downstairs, I would go up to my bedroom - I would be alone in the flat above the pub. I would know that it was waiting for me, but I had no alternative but to go upstairs, although I would feel distraught.
I used to say my prayers then and yet I never mentioned this fear in them. For one thing, that would have been to extemporise, and the prayers I said were set ones, spoken twice on Sundays in church and most mornings in school assembly. There was no room for individual additions except to bless parents and relations, but that was something allowed for. What was not allowed was to tell anyone what was happening.
I cannot remember before or since being anything like as terrified. I remember the fact of it now, and even a little digging into memory gives off something of the taste of it. I would simply lie in bed waiting for it to happen, screwing up my eyes as tight as possible, hoping that I would be felled by instant, merciful sleep or somehow left alone. When I was, the relief the next morning was momentary before the fear began to build again.
What happened was this. Not part of me, but what I was left the boy's body on that bed and went above - it seemed to the corner of the ceiling next to the window. It hovered there. It stayed there. It, that thing, that object, was me. The huddle on the bed was controlled by it. There was no will in the boy's body. There was only, as it were, a holding state uninhabited, save for a possessing aura of terror. Whether the terror was in the body or in that thing which, at times, I thought I could make out and describe, I do not know. But the experience was terror.
If the thing moved away then the body would be finished. It would be no more, because that thing not only controlled the body but gave it life. The desperate fear was - would these two fuse again or not? What did this presence want the body to do besides lying inert and being a void? Somehow an invisible helpline would be thrown and the two would come together - and usually by that time I was exhausted and went into sleep of a sort.
This became the secret obsession of my life over those years. The noise from the pub downstairs, which could be lulling or, sometimes on Fridays and Saturdays, rather threatening, would often be a help. But when the pub closed and my parents had cleared up and settled downstairs for their final talk, the silence intensified the dread.
On spring and summer nights they would often go out for a walk after they had cleared up. I wanted to rush down and beg them not to after the cheery "We're just off for a bit of fresh air", but of course I would have been ashamed to have done that. I dare not. Left alone was the worst possible state. And so I would track their walk. I knew the route. I would try to time it. I would try to "be" with them.
Down Burnfoot past Scott's, where they used to have the funeral horses, to Joe Hill's on the corner with a shed in the garden where he slept for his asthma. Then into Birdcage Walk, along the cinder track past the allotments, with the pigeons silent as the pub, and on to the West Cumberland Farmers' warehouses. I feared I was always ahead of them and forced myself to slow down. Past Toppins field, where I used to sledge and where I used to play when I used to live in Council House Yard. Toppins field, with its great beech tree and its bomb shelters dug in the war. Then the Redmaynes clothing factory where my mother had worked as a girl.
Then they would turn into Station Road opposite the factory and slowly up the hill back into the middle of the town, left around Blue Bell corner, past Tickle's Lane and Plaskett's Lane and down towards the pub. I was always ahead and so I'd go over the route again trying to pick out more and more details until I heard them coming down the hill and, finally, the key turned in the lock and there would be some comfort.
These experiences, or attacks, were never anything other than utterly terrifying. I have read other people describing analogous experiences in terms of happiness and hope; that was never mine. In its most intensive period, they began to happen in the classroom, on the street, everywhere, and I seemed to spend my entire time constructing strategies to evade them or endure them.
It was impossible to talk to anyone about it. My parents could not have been better or kinder, but it was inconceivable that I could discuss this with them. How would I describe it? What would I, literally, say?
It has taken me this long to write about it openly and autobiographically, although it was part of the main character in my first novel - when I was 25 - unconsciously as it were.
I was still convinced that I had never admitted to it when, consciously, I made this state part of the underpinning of the main character in a later novel when I was in my late forties. But it was when I found myself referring to it in a recent interview about religious belief, in which the possibility of a duality and a soul was introduced, that I wanted to begin to put on paper something of that experience.
I could not talk to my parents, as I have said. I was not ill, so there was no need of a doctor. It was totally off the radar as far as friends were concerned. I just had to get through it, although at the time I thought simultaneously both that it would never end and that this attack could be the last.
I am sure that there are a number of plausible explanations. We know that people with an amputated arm can be driven to a frenzy at the pain in their missing fingers. We know from those who have been almost dead but just "returned" that similar experiences to mine are not uncommon. A. J. Ayer described one such most vividly.
There are fantasies within the human condition and in the casebooks of many analysts - Oliver Sachs is just one example - which furnish explained instances of circumstances much more bizarre. I am sure that materialists of consciousness will bring forward proof and so on. And there is the undeniable, unpredictable pressure of adolescence.
But at the risk of building far too much on this slender base of personal experience, my current thinking is that what I experienced is evidence of a duality, of a split, in Christian terms, of a distinction between body and soul.
It is relevant perhaps, and it could take away from my case that I was brought up as a strong Christian and the religious experience was, with me - as is common - especially strong in early adolescence. But the solidity of the thing which was undoubtedly outside my body, and the number of times it happened, and most importantly, the fact that it was the life, the intelligence as it were, is something I cannot, and do not want to, deny.
I'm prepared to be told that this evidence is too personal and too slight, but for what it is worth I hold on to it and find in it a duality which magnetises my earlier, schooled, received faith.
Perhaps these experiences would have faded away on their own, but at about 15 I realised that I had to attack them. At the same time I was not doing well at school and I knew that I had to study or leave and get work. I began to overwork and to write and to do as many other things as I could manage. Most importantly, I stayed in that bedroom studying on a chopped-off table which was wedged between the bed and the wardrobe. This was a conscious attempt to face up to it, in the very place where I had experienced it most violently and frighteningly. Gradually, I grew a bit stronger, although even in my late twenties I could feel fragile and vulnerable.
It is something that I would like to understand more. I would also like to gather up the determination to attempt to go through that experience again, but that will take a build up of energy and nerve which another part of me says it would be foolish to do. To seek to uncork a part of the past now blessedly gone would be not only painful but dangerous.
MELVYN BRAGG
Melvyn Bragg, author/broadcaster. Born 1939. Educated locally and at Oxford where he read Modern History. Published his first Novel - For Want of a Nail in 1965 and his latest Credo, published in 1997 and On Giants' Shoulders to be published March 1998 accompanies the Radio 4 series. He has written over a dozen books, mostly novels but also a biography of Richard Burton and an Oral History of England - Speak for England.
He has worked in broadcasting since 1961 and is currently Controller of Arts at LWT, Editor and Presenter of The South Bank Show and Executive Producer of several other arts strands. He introduces Start-the-Week on Radio 4 on Monday mornings, he is President of the national Campaign for the Arts, Governor of the LSE and he writes a weekly column in the Times every Monday.