STORYTELLING AND THE PARANORMAL

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Two of my main areas of writing are the short story and the paranormal. As a writer of fiction I allow my imagination to wander, whereas the paranormal essayist tries to use rationality in order to theorise on the unexplained.
Whilst both areas can deal with ghosties and ghouls and other creepy things, you would have thought the two disciplines were otherwise unrelated. Yet I’ve come to understand there is an amazing linkage between storytelling and the paranormal.

Dracula is a perfect example.

Not long after the novel was published, many cases began to appear taking elements of the novel. It was as if a little bit of fiction had crept into paranormal reality.
I’ve written before of how alien abductors seem to bow to cultural impulses. Known as ‘cultural tracking’, it is as if our appreciation of what an alien looks like and does owes something to the way we relate to it through story and culture.

I think a similar impulse can be found in the paranormal.

Take the classic scenario for past life regression, where a hypnotized person can go back to previous lives. Yet usually this happens best with a therapist who believes in reincarnation.
It is almost as if a form of ‘transference’ has occurred, with the ideals of the therapist actually passed on to the subject. Indeed, ‘false memory syndrome’ suggests a similar form of infection between therapist and subject.

The process can be traced back to the ancient campfire.

Here, the tribal shaman would be more like a storyteller than a mystic, recounting magical tales of gods and demons. But did he relate what had happened, or create what was soon to be?
The campfire storyteller was most likely the original source that became the great myths of antiquity. From these came legends and finally folklore. And the early literature of the paranormal seems to echo such tales.

The poltergeist is a classic example.

We can trace examples of the poltergeist going back centuries. Yet we do not see it as a poltergeist, but as a troublesome fairy, having its wicked paranormal way with a household.
Today, the phenomena can be very similar, but it is of a more sinister nature, and if an entity is seen, it is most likely to come from the local graveyard. Culture has impinged upon the subject and provided subtle transformation.
In the modern world psychology has devised subjects such as semiotics, which tell us how symbols around us have power to affect our behaviour. You’re hungry and you see the label on a can of soup and salivate. But this response is to an image of expectation rather than the sight or smell of food.
And it is the role of the storyteller to provide images and scenarios within culture in order to entertain and educate us. But the above suggests that maybe his role is more fundamental than this.
Perhaps the storyteller also exists to place that little bit of control over our cultural psyche, producing our myths of tomorrow, and regulating our behaviour by doing so.
Of course, I am not saying that the storyteller creates the paranormal. Clearly, other ‘mechanisms’ exist for phenomena. But I am suggesting that such mechanisms bend to the storyteller’s whim.
Perhaps, if we understood this, we would have a better understanding of the prompters and machinations behind the human condition.

© Anthony North, December 2008