Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
mental illness has been well documented, their role in everyday
life has perhaps not been considered enough. Greater understanding
of illusions and hallucinations among normal people
may provide explanations for experiences otherwise relegated
to the uncanny, 'extrasensory', or supernatural.
We would surely be missing something important about our own
nature if we refused to face up to the fact that hallucinations are
part of being human. However, none of this makes hallucinations
part of an external rather than an internal reality. Five to ten per
cent of us are extremely suggestible, able to move at a command
into a deep hypnotic trance. Roughly ten per cent of Americans
report having seen one or more ghosts. This is more than the
number who allegedly remember being abducted by aliens, about
the same as the number who've reported seeing one or more
UFOs, and less than the number who in the last week of Richard
Nixon's Presidency, before he resigned to avoid impeachment,
thought he was doing a good-to-excellent job as President. At
least one per cent of all of us is schizophrenic. This amounts to
over 50 million schizophrenics on the planet, more than the
population of, say, England.
In his 1970 book on nightmares, the psychiatrist John Mack -
about whom I will have more to say - writes:
There is a period in early childhood in which dreams are
regarded as real and in which the events, transformations,
gratifications, and threats of which they are composed are
regarded by the child as if they were as much a part of his
actual daily life as his daytime experiences. The capacity to
establish and maintain clear distinctions between the life of
dreams and life in the outside world is hard-won and requires
several years to accomplish, not being completed even in
normal children before ages eight to ten. Nightmares,
because of their vividness and compelling effective intensity,
are particularly difficult for the child to judge realistically.
When a child tells a fabulous story - a witch was grimacing in the
darkened room; a tiger is lurking under the bed; the vase was
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