Stalked By Nightmares

As a child, a woman had been sexually assaulted by her father. But the horror really began when, years later, hallucinations of him started to plague her. It is a case that provides unique insight into the very nature of reality.

What is `reality and what are dreams? To the scientist, things are only real when they can be communicated by the senses or by instruments that are extensions of the senses, when their measurements can be taken and their behaviour observed, when deductions can be made about them and certain laws subsequently established. In the realms of thought, sane men also distinguish, mainly without difficulty, between fantasies and `real' concepts.

But research has shown that there are, indeed, `realities' beyond those generally perceived by our five senses, such as notes with a pitch too high to be heard by human ears. And there may be yet another form of `reality, confirmed by the experiences of mystics while in their ecstasies. In spite of this, the fact remains that `sanity for most of us is the common ground of shared sensory perception: on the whole, the cat sits on the mat and not vice versa.

But what if our minds betray us, not in casual mistakes but by completely misinterpreting data supplied by our senses? What of Sybil Isabel Dorsett who, among her 16 personalities, saw herself in the mirror variously as a sophisticated blonde, brown-haired, a tall, willowy redhead, a dark, brown-eyed man, a blue-eyed man, a timid ash-blonde, a small, slim brunette - and with widely differing characters to match. She even bought clothes to suit one personality that would be utterly unsuitable for her `real' physical self, the choice later utterly bewildering her other selves when they inhabited her body.

And what of Ruth, a 25-year-old American woman, married to Paul and living in London with their three children, the patient of Dr Morton Schatzman, psychiatrist? Her experiences are narrated in Schatzman's book, The Story of Ruth, dramatised on television by the BBC in 1982.

Ruth described her symptoms to Dr Schatzman:

sex with Paul seemed `dirty', she was scared of doors, avoided company, panicked in crowds and hated going shopping; she had no appetite, felt negative towards her children, and sensed that her brain was going to explode. She had been the third in a family of four, the youngest being 10 years her junior. While her mother was having the last baby, Ruth's father attempted to rape her - and nearly succeeded. That the assault was likely to have been real, not imagined, is supported by the fact that the father was an habitual drunkard and regularly took drugs. He was also violent - once he actually fired a gun at Ruth (but missed); he had forged cheques; and he was a frequent inmate of mental homes and jails.

Sickening hatred

Ruth told her mother about her father's assault, but she professed not to believe her daughter, and packed her off immediately to the children's home where she had gone to live whenever her father deserted the family. Ruth married at 17, never lived with her parents again and felt what she described as a `sickening hatred' towards her father.

But what Ruth did not immediately tell Schatzman was that, almost every day, she had seen an hallucination of her father that appeared as real and solid as any living person. He had begun to appear a year after the birth of her youngest child. Sometimes she saw his face superimposed on Paul's or on her baby's; and even when she did not see him, she felt his presence in the house. She believed he wanted her dead and was prompting her to suicide. Once he sat with her at a friend's dining table, and looked so solid and ordinary that, if Ruth had been at home, she felt she would have offered him coffee. On another occasion, he occupied a chair between two visitors. She heard him speaking and watched him following their conversation - although he was invisible and inaudible to the others present.

Ruth became an in-patient at the Arbours Crisis Centre set up by Dr Schatzman and colleagues in London in 1971. There, she continued to see her father. She even felt her bed moved by his legs knocking against it (although it did not actually move). She saw him very clearly - `I can see each tooth' - heard him laughing and even smelt the sweat on him while in the doctor's presence.

Schatzman saw that Ruth thought rationally: her overall pattern of behaviour was not that of a psychotic, and he knew that it was statistically common for mentally healthy people in the West to have some experience of hallucinations. Having read that the Senoi, a Malayan tribe, thought dream life so important that they taught children to face, master and use whatever caused terror in their nightmares, he suggested to Ruth that she follow their example and confront her father's apparition.

The victory was not immediately, nor easily won, however. Ruth continued to see her father, sometimes superimposed even on to complete strangers, and to hear and smell him. She also felt that he read her thoughts and sensed that he was trying to master her and take her over. The psychiatrist told her to send the apparition packing, which she eventually did on occasions - but sometimes his distinctive smell remained.

On her sixth day at the centre, Ruth saw Paul change into her father; and when he lightly touched her hand, she felt it squeezed until it hurt. She refused to sleep with her husband that night as she felt he was her father. Then, the next day, she saw her father's face superimposed upon Dr Schatzman's. The doctor had suggested that she try to change him into her father because confronting something usually makes one fear it less and it would prove to Ruth that she had control: if she could summon the apparition at will, she could also will it away. This achieved, the next step was to create the illusion without using a real body as a `model', and dismiss it: this she managed to do.

Further advance was made when Ruth again superimposed her father on to Schatzman, but he appeared to be wearing different clothes from the doctor. When Schatzman moved towards her, the apparition did so too; and when Schatzman lightly laid his hand upon Ruth's, she again felt her hand being painfully squeezed. She succeeded in dismissing the appearance, but the experience left her very tired.

When Ruth left the centre after 11 days, Schatzman suggested that, far from being crazy, she was gifted in being able to summon and dismiss apparitions at will. Her family history suggested to him that the gift might be hereditary. At this point, the doctor had to go to New York for two-and-a-half weeks, during which time Ruth's father appeared to her at least eight times. She heard the rustle of his clothes and the popping of his cigarettes out of a packet, and was awoken once when he sat on her bed. She managed to send him away once, confused him on another occasion by casual reference to coffee and on a third, when he appeared while she was having a bath, asked him to pass her a towel. The apparition subsequently ceased for 19 days, its longest continuous absence, but then suddenly reappeared, superimposed upon Paul in bed.

On his return, Schatzman suggested that Ruth should try to create a friendlier apparition as an experiment in control. After some effort, she projected a complete image of her best friend Becky, and held mental conversations with her.

Ruth's apparitions usually behaved normally (although occasionally they walked through closed doors), but she also hallucinated the consequences of their actions, could feel a draught of air through a door that had been opened by them and even saw Becky squeezing toothpaste on to a brush before handing it to her. The duration of the appearances varied from seconds to 15 or 20 minutes, and their creation both excited and drained her. She found that her apparitions also had personalities: and although she could finally dismiss them, she could not always make them do what they did not want to do.

Ruth next `doubled' Dr Schatzman in his presence - creating, in effect, his doppelgänger sitting in a chair on his left. When Schatzman went to sit in his double's chair, the latter sat in his, and when he passed in front of the apparition, he blocked it from Ruth's sight. She saw both men, reflected simultaneously in a mirror; and when Dr Schatzman held out his arms to thin air, Ruth saw him actually dance with his double!

Ruth made further progress when she produced an apparition of herself with which she established mental communication, although she found the experience exhausting. She repeated the experiment in Dr Schatzman's presence, her head hurting and heart pounding with all the effort this involved.

A twilight world

By this time, in many respects Ruth had changed from patient to co-researcher with the psychiatrist. When she observed that an apparition's legs cast a shadow, experiments were carried out with light and darkness. Ruth could hallucinate the darkening and lighting-up of a room, yet failed to be able to make out the words on a book cover in a room that was actually dark but which she saw as lit. She could walk round an apparition, viewing it from every angle, could feel it (it was, she said, a little colder than a living being), and could see and feel it moving parts of her body, though these did not really move, or only very slightly. The apparitions could write messages that Ruth was also able to read, but the paper remained blank to everyone else, and they did not appear in photographs of the chairs in which she saw them, nor did their voices register on tape recorders - thus proving they had no objective reality.

Ruth next discovered she could create her father's apparition superimposed upon her own reflection in a mirror, and did so with Dr Schatzman sitting by. `He', in reply to the psychiatrist's questions, gave information about himself. For Ruth, the experiment resulted in considerable discomfort; but, although she felt her father's fear, anger and sexual desire, she was not taken over by him. The experience involved similarities to mediumistic trances. However, whether the information that was given by her `father' was true could not be determined.

During several such sessions, a number of facts connected with her father's previous history and Ruth's childhood emerged. She seemed to feel his and her own emotions simultaneously; and the more she learned about him, the more she pitied him. She also found she could create him and merge with him without using the mirror, and still sense his feelings as before. `The more I relaxed,' she said, `the less I saw him and the more I became him.' Schatzman discovered that he could talk directly to the father through Ruth and found a plausible personality consistent with itself but not with Ruth's. Schatzman wondered whether this personality could have been a buried aspect of herself.

A startling development occurred when Ruth visited the USA and spent some time with her father there. She created an apparition of Paul in her car - what is more, her father apparently also saw it. Perhaps even more startling was her success in twice making love with apparitions of Paul whom she created on nights when he was absent. Both experiences were, she reported, sexually very satisfying.

Ruth even succeeded in making a double of herself. This doppelgänger-which brought memories of forgotten incidents from her youth - may simply have been a mechanism that enabled her to tap into subliminal recollections. Whatever the explanation, Ruth recalled past incidents in great detail, many of which were later confirmed by her mother. Sometimes, she could even merge with her own apparition, so that she would enter `memory trances', which in some respects were like those of spirit mediums and in others like hypnotic regression. In time, she learned to use this `trance' technique without having to create her double, but did need someone else to be present in order to tell her what she had said, because she would not remember it.

In her regressions, Ruth talked and behaved like a child or an adolescent; and given a number of psychological tests while regressed to various ages, she performed in them as girls of those ages would be expected to do, thereby showing that she was reliving her past. Other tests proved that Ruth's apparitions affected her sight and hearing exactly as flesh and blood entities would have done.

But why did these hallucinations come when they did? In 1976, when they began, her elder daughter was three years old - the age at which Ruth first :` entered the children's home - and her eldest child was `' seven, her age when her father returned to the family after his first period of desertion. These recollections of childhood traumas, perhaps subconscious, allied to the loneliness of living overseas in England - another Ruth amid the alien corn - could well have triggered such experiences.

And what of Ruth after the therapy? Her apparitions were to become pure entertainment. When driving alone, for instance, she found she could put one in the passenger seat for company, or converse with another, silently, at a boring party. The implications of her story for psychical research are far-reaching indeed.