Thursday the 16th is the tenth anniversary of the first Stranger Things series, a landmark date sadly forever contaminated by the dumpster-fire sequels and a truly loathsome and cringe-inducing finale.

I’m currently at work on a video presentation explaining how the franchise was so thoroughly infantilized and sabotaged by Netflix, and this piece will hopefully give you a sense of why they had to destroy it.

The following is an expanded, revised and reformatted version of a piece from 2016, looking at the very real and very evil experiments that were done on Americans — and American children — during the Cold War.

The people behind these atrocities would have you believe it was all done in the name of Science, yet somehow it all ended up looking like the same old black magic practiced by the Sorcerarchy for millennia…

(The real) Stranger Things’ mixture of horror and historical sci-fi brings a real-world connection into relief, one that had seemed like it could only be a google-eyed paranoid rumor.

I’m talking here about the bleed-over from the pseudoscientific to the supernatural in CIA black projects, particularly that juncture at which MKULTRA and ARTICHOKE bled into MK OFTEN:

According to author Gordon Thomas’ 2007 book, Secrets and Lies, the CIA’s Operation Often was also initiated by the chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Branch, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, to “explore the world of black magic” and “harness the forces of darkness and challenge the concept that the inner reaches of the mind are beyond reach.”

As part of Operation Often, Dr. Gottlieb and other CIA employees visited with and recruited fortune-tellers, palm-readers, clairvoyants, astrologists, mediums, psychics, specialists in demonology, witches and warlocks, Satanists, other occult practitioners, and more.

There’s been some controversy over the exact nature of OFTEN, but given that Gordon Thomas is a reporter whose sources are very much inside, I think it’s a safe bet that OFTEN was producing one set of directives for the suits upstairs and following an entirely more arcane path once the checks were cashed.

But the real controversy isn’t so much over the nature of OFTEN’s work, but more about the people involved in it. As our man Recluse wrote:

John Marks indicates that OFTEN was under the direction of a Dr. Stephen Aldrich who ran the project out of the Office of Research and Development (ORD).

Aldrich was a veteran of the Office of Scientific Intelligence and had been involved in ARTICHOKE during the early 1950s, a point in which it had formally begun to investigate parapsychology and other fringe topics (including lobotomies, radiation, ultrasonics, etc).

Researcher Alex Constantine wrote this about Aldrich in his 1995 book, Psychic Dictatorship in the USA:

At Langley, the experiments were presided over by Dr. Stephen Aldrich, a patron of occult research, foreshadowing the use of mind control technology by satanic cults in the 1980’s and 90’s, according to Julianne McKinney, director of the Electronic Surveillance Project of the Association of National Security Alumni.

Dr. Aldrich, a graduate of Amherst and Northwestern, took control of The Firm’s Office of Research and Development (ORD) in 1962 upon the departure of Sidney Gottlieb. The occasion marked the birth of Operation Often, an investigation of the occult. With Houston sorceress Sybil Leek as their guide, CIA behaviorists studied the arcana of the occult underground.

The SEI contributed a social laboratory to Often in 1972 at the University of South Carolina in the form of a course in rituals of demonology and voodoo.

What was the SEI?

The Scientific Engineering Institute in Boston, another CIA cover, was established in 1956 to study radar.

Radar again. Huh. Constantine:

Aldrich took control of the Office of Research and Development (ORD) in 1962 from Gottlieb. CIA behaviorists carefully studied every aspect of the occult underground.

In 1972 the Scientific Engineering Institute sponsored a course at the University of South Carolina in rituals of demonology and voodoo… Aldrich focused on remote brain manipulation and the occult, the thread that runs through SEI.

Aldrich’s interest in the occult (shared by scores of others in the intelligence world.) may explain his penchant for remote brain manipulation, based as it is in “psychic” technology.

Under the direction of Aldrich, writes John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, ORD technocrats “kept probing for ways to control human behavior, and they were doing so with space-age technology that made the days of MKULTRA look like the horse-and buggy era.”

What do we know about Stephen Aldrich?

Dr. Aldrich was born in Evanston, Illinois. He attended Deerfield Academy and Amherst College before entering Northwestern Medical School from which he received his medical doctorate in 1947.

Following his residency in Internal Medicine at St. Luke’s Hospital (Chicago) and a year as the Parmly Fellow (teaching and research) at Northwestern University Medical School, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency and served until 1979.

While with the CIA, he established their overseas medical support program and created and managed the first national life sciences program in scientific intelligence.

He served as a consultant to the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, the National Institutes of Health, and the Departments of Defense and Justice.

ALL MONTAUK AND NO ACTION

Then there’s the Montauk angle, based on a series of books by Peter Moon that put forth an elaborate theory about time travel and mind control:

Stranger Things’ original title was Montauk, named after the sleepy fishing village on Long Island’s easternmost tip.

Among so many tales, local lore tells of young boys being abducted and forced to participate in an assortment of psychological and paranormal experiments on a nearby secret military base, including time travel, telekinesis, teleportation and mind-control...

Radar too was part of the Montauk mythos that inspired the story in the first place, and the allegedly unconventional, off-the-books usage of the technology:

Key to the Montauk Project allegations, the SAGE radar worked on a frequency of 400 MHz – 425 MHz, providing access to the range of 410 MHz – 420 MHz signals said by theory proponents to influence the human mind.

At Montauk, the chair was connected to the SAGE antenna and the thought patterns of the occupant of the chair could be amplified and transmitted at the 410-420 MHz range in order to influence the minds of anyone within range of the transmission.

The stories in the series of Montauk books are nearly delirious in their nose-thumbing at the laws of physics and common sense, and are themselves are based on an urban legend with an even dodgier pedigree. But never underestimate the power of a myth told with utter conviction and a total lack of shame or apology.

As I wrote in 2008:

The alleged time travel properties of the ‘Montauk Project’ were fictionalized into a book in 1978 and then a film in 1984, both called The Philadelphia Experiment.

It’s all a hell of a story- I’d love to believe it. Unfortunately, even as far as conspiracy theories go, there’s hardly a speck of evidence for any of it. But these things don’t need to actually be true to make an impact on the Dreaming Mind. In fact, it often helps when they aren’t.

MEMORY WIPING

I wrote that in a two-part piece on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, another of these films I’ve watched more times than is actually healthy.

Montauk plays a feature role in the film, which uses the kind of selective memory erasure technology that MKULTRA ghouls were in endless pursuit of as a central conceit.
The question is how did a romantic comedy come to incorporate such esoteric topics in the first place?

The mind-erasing properties of Dr. Mierswiak’s device and the ‘reversal of time’ motif used in the storytelling of Eternal Sunshine tie in too neatly with Montauk Project and mystery school lore to be coincidental.

I’m thinking that Kaufman ran across information on the Philadelphia Experiment and Montauk, and thought a memory-erasing mind control machine would be a great plot device in a romantic comedy. Which sounds pretty typical for Kaufman, come to think of it.

There’s also another possibility:

Either that or the CIA spooks whom he encountered while writing Confessions of A Dangerous Mind fed him the inside scoop for this movie as well. I’m open to all possibilities when it comes to these films.

And here we find ourselves back in the horror show, the one that those mainstream media puff pieces on the “secret government experiments” won’t go near.

Let’s start with:

QKHILLTOP was a cryptonym assigned in 1954 to a project to study Chinese Communist brainwashing techniques and to develop interrogation techniques.

Most of the early studies are believed to have been conducted by the Cornell University Medical School Human Ecology Study Programs.

The effort was absorbed into the MKULTRA program and the QKHILLTOP cryptonym became obsolete. The Society for the investigation of Human Ecology, later the Human Ecology Fund, was an outgrowth of the QKHILLTOP.

If “Human Ecology” rings a bell, it’s because it was one of the fronts that funded the loathsome Lauretta Bender, who administered electroshock treatment to children as young as three. Mentally-ill children, mind you, many of whom were orphans.

One source reports that, inclusive of Bender’s work, electroconvulsive treatment (ECT) was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service from 1956 to 1969.

Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation...

A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York.

Electroshock therapy ravages memory, and several programs were undertaken to use ECT in conjunction with drugs to erase memories of torture and interrogation victims, which may in fact have originally inspired the technology in Eternal Sunshine.

But ECT was a primitive technology; efforts were undertaken to find more exotic methods of memory erasure:

Another MKUltra effort, Subproject 54, was the Navy’s top secret “Perfect Concussion” program, which was supposed to use sub-aural frequency blasts to erase memory.

However, the program was never carried out.

Translation: “We destroyed the paperwork, suckers.”

REMOTE CONTROL

Then there was the notorious Dr. Jose Delgado, who implanted electrodes into subjects brains in order to control them like puppets:

Delgado, a neurophysiologist at Yale University School, was especially interested in Electronic Stimulation of the Brain. By implanting a small probe into the brain, Delgado discovered that he could wield enormous power over his subject.

Using a device he called the ‘stimo-ceiver’ which operated by FM radio waves, he was able to electrically orchestrate a wide range of human emotions. These included rage, lust and fatigue.

Delgado’s work may have inspired even more insidious experiments and practices in order to neurologically control subjects. Either that or it inspired a corpus of rumors and urban legends about said technology, if not outright disinformation.

RADIO ACTIVATED

Whichever the case may be, it’s beyond question that work into the remote control of the human brain was an overriding concern for many involved in projects like MKULTRA and its sister programs:

Over the years, certain journalists have asserted that the CIA has mastered a technology called RHIC-EDOM, Radio Hypnotic Intracerebral Control and Electronic Dissolution of Memory.

Together these techniques can — allegedly — remotely induce hypnotic trance, deliver suggestions to the subject, and erase all memory for both the instruction period and the act which the subject is asked to perform.

According to published accounts, RHIC uses the stimoceiver, or a micro-miniaturized offspring of that technology, to induce a hypnotic state.

EDOM is the erasure of memory from consciousness through the blockage of synaptic transmission in certain areas of the brain.

By jamming the brain’s synapses through a surfeit of acetylcholine, neural transmission along selected pathways can be effectively stilled.

According to the proponents of RHIC-EDOM, acetylcholine production can be affected by electromagnetic means.

The topic remains controversial, with many researchers arguing both for and against the actual execution of these planned methodologies.

A careful comparison of Lawrence’s work with the MKULTRA files declassified ten years later indicates a strong possibility that the writer did indeed have ‘inside’ sources.

Here is how Lawrence describes RHIC in action: ‘It is the ultra-sophisticated application of post-hypnotic suggestion triggered at will by radio transmission.

It is a recurring state, re-induced automatically at.intervals by the same radio control. An individual is brought under hypnosis.

This can be done either with his knowledge — or without it — by use of narco-hypnosis, which can be brought into play under many guises. He is then programmed to perform certain actions and maintain certain attitudes upon radio signal.’

There have been cases of individuals involved in crimes of violence who complain of outside influence, but since schizophrenia can account for similar symptoms it all stays very much in that gray area.

UNDER THE RADAR

Montauk ties in not only with advanced radar systems like SAGE, it ties into the use of decommissioned NIKE bases (connected to Bell Labs) for the use of mind control experiments on children.

There is documented evidence of these experiments taking place in California under the direction of Louis Jolyon West:

• Studies of violent individuals.

• Experiments on prisoners from Vacaville and Atascadero, and hyperkinetic children.

• Experiments with violence-producing and violence inhibiting drugs.

• Hormonal aspects of passivity and aggressiveness in boys.

• Studies to discover and compare norms of violence among various ethnic groups.

• Studies of pre-delinquent children.

• It would also encourage law enforcement to keep computer files on pre-delinquent children, which would make possible the treatment of children before they became delinquents.

The question remains why NIKE bases, when you have an entire Federal infrastructure to work with?

There had to be something connected to the installations themselves. And as discussed before it may have something to do with radar, which started the entire Montauk ball rolling in the first place.

Perhaps it’s because radar uses microwave technology, and it appears that microwave technology was/is part of the mind control arsenal:

What can low-level microwaves do to the mind?

According to a DIA report released under the Freedom of Information Act, microwaves can induce metabolic changes, alter brain functions, and disrupt behaviour patterns.

PANDORA discovered that pulsed microwaves can create leaks in the blood/brain barrier, induce heart seizures, and create behavioural disorganization.

In 1970 a RAND corporation scientist reported that microwaves could be used to promote insomnia, fatigue, irritability, memory loss and hallucinations.

And “microwave auditory effect” is a very real thing:

The microwave auditory effect, also known as the microwave hearing effect or the Frey effect, consists of audible clicks (or, with speech modulation, spoken words) induced by pulsed/modulated microwave frequencies.

The clicks are generated directly inside the human head without the need of any receiving electronic device. The effect was first reported by persons working in the vicinity of radar transponders during World War II.

I’m convinced that very exotic experiments were being done at Montauk, only they had nothing to do with time travel tunnels and Total Recall thrones.

They were almost certainly mind control experiments using advanced microwave technology and drugs, quite possibly on children. We may never know exactly how or why. But it’s almost certain similar work continues today.

DMT-ULTRA

Given the parallel dimension theme at work in Stranger Things, it’s worth noting that the DMT trials done in the 1980s (arguably a descendant of MKULTRA, after a fashion), often featured disturbingly consistent reports of humanoid entities.

Given its concretization of the ethereal dimensional realm posited in these trials, it’s worth noting this feature in Stranger Things.

One common feature of the hallucinogenic experience caused by DMT are hallucinations of humanoid beings, characterized as being otherworldly.

Hallucinations of strange creatures had been reported by Szara in the Journal of Mental Science (now the British Journal of Psychiatry) ... Stephen Szara described how one of his subjects under the influence of DMT had experienced “strange creatures, dwarves or something” at the beginning of a DMT trip.

Other researchers of the experience described ‘entities’ or ‘beings’ in humanoid as well as animal form, with descriptions of “little people” being common (gnomes, elves, imps etc.).

This form of hallucination has been speculated to be the cause of alien abduction experiences through endogenously occurring DMT.

The frequency and consistency of the manifestations of these beings caused Dr. Rick Strassman, who was running one of the programs, to discontinue the trials.

Several factors led to the cessation of the New Mexico research. The biomedical model was increasingly intrusive and dehumanizing, and it was difficult recruiting new volunteers for these studies...

Long-term benefits were meager, and adverse effects were adding up. The frequency of “being-contact” was unexpected and personally disorienting.

- Rick Strassman, DMT: The Spirit Molecule synopsis

Now, think about it: does anyone seriously believe that such encounters didn’t manifest during MKULTRA as well? Given the grab-bag of pharmaceuticals used, often in combination and often in extremely high doses, I’d bet these, uh, encounters were quite common indeed.

If that was the case, isn’t it fair to assume that increasing, facilitating or exploiting such encounters didn’t become a goal, or perhaps one of the primary goals, of the program?

If so, you would naturally want to work with children, who might not only be more susceptible to the effects of hallucinogens, but who would also be able to endogenously produce chemicals like DMT as well.

Perhaps this is exactly why so much work was done on children — in hospitals — during the MKULTRA years.

And before and after as well.

STORY WITHIN THE STORY

I also noticed an attempt in Stranger Things to tell a parallel story, one that almost felt like a tale told out of school.

• It felt more like a real-life horror; a local boy abducted so an insane government doctor can carry on with his experiments when his primary subject (Eleven) escapes.

• Will enters into the parallel world of hallucination, induced fever, drugs, and madness that Eleven escaped.

• The doctor, like any typical sadist, allows the boy to contact his mother on occasion to ramp up his terror and anxiety.

• The doctor does so with the hopes that such heightened emotional states will accelerate the process and produce more of the desired psychic results.

The generic government installation seems like a trope, but in fact what we are seeing was a replay of the experimentation on children and marginal populations that took place during the MKULTRA/etc years.

Work done with electroshock therapy, drugs, and perhaps, even more exotic technologies. Meaning work done in hospitals.

We see Eleven dressed in a hospital robe, which would be unnecessary if she were in some random DoE hideaway (pajamas would have done just as well) and we see orderlies dressed in hospital whites, rather than military tans or blues.

I don’t want to read too much into this series — the symbols are fairly blunt and blatant — but this reads like signaling to me.

That Will’s ordeal is a metaphor for his own Cameron-like re-patterning under an MKULTRA protocol seems fairly obvious by the fact that the monster’s nest is found in the (Upside Down) library, where Hopper and Powell first stumble upon all of the information on the Hawkins lab and Brenner’s connections to MKULTRA.

This isn’t the most subtle kind of allegorizing I’ve ever seen, but given the target audience I don’t think an overabundance of subtlety would serve the purpose.

GOVERNMENT WITCH

The reality of medical experimentation on children in America is real, grim and much, much worse than anything Hollywood screenwriters can dream up.

One of “America’s own Josef Mengele’s” is a woman many hail as a hero, Dr. Lauretta Bender, seen as a pioneer in the field of psychiatry. What goes unmentioned in her mainstream hagiographies is her long, brutal and heartless experimentation on children in hospitals, particularly some of our most vulnerable and marginalized children.

From early 1940 to 1953, Dr. Lauretta Bender, a highly respected child neuropsychiatrist practicing at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, experimented extensively with electroshock therapy on children who had been diagnosed with “autistic schizophrenia.”

In all, it has been reported that Bender administered electroconvulsive therapy to at least 100 children ranging in age from three years old to 12 years, with some reports indicating the total may be twice that number.

One source reports that, inclusive of Bender’s work, electroconvulsive treatment was used on more than 500 children at Bellevue Hospital from 1942 to 1956, and then at Creedmoor State Hospital Children’s Service from 1956 to 1969.

This is torture. Let’s make no mistake about it. Administering shock treatment to three year-old children is torture.

When MKULTRA came to town, Dr. Bender was an eager participant, administering the drug to children, all under the age of eleven.

In 1960, Dr. Bender launched her first experiments with LSD and children. They were conducted within the Children’s Unit, Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens, New York.

The LSD she used was supplied by Dr. Rudolph P. Bircher of the Sandoz Pharmaceutical Company. Her initial group of young subjects consisted of 14 children diagnosed schizophrenic, all under the age of 11.

Eleven. Is that in fact the real significance of the name?

Bender soon found kindred spirits to assist and finance her work, which lasted into the 1970s.

Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation...

A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, another CIA front group...

And again, we’re dealing with government witchcraft, a nexus of spooks and the spooky. It’s a witch’s brew of spies, psi, Satanists, saucer-chasers, and many stranger players still.

MKULTRA was a lot weirder and more insane than a lot of people assume, but the truly nasty wetwork was handled by its sister programs. These CIA sorcerers were after something, something that you couldn’t find in a science textbook.

Let’s hope to God they never found it.

Dreaming has always been a major part of my life and a central concern of The Secret Sun.

As you probably remember, the name itself comes from a recurring dream I’d had since I was a kid, where the sun comes out in the middle of the night, but only a select few realize it. And I personally define Synchromysticism as the art of using the tools and techniques of dream interpretation on our waking lives.

So any novel, film or TV show about dreaming and its numinous powers is necessarily going to catch my attention. Jacob’s Ladder, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Mulholland Dr., and Twin Peaks: The Return are among my very favorites, as you probably also remember.

And now I think I’m adding the 1980 TV movie adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven to the pile.

I first saw it back in the Eighties on PBS; it was one of those moments where you feel like you’ve stumbled on some hidden treasure room in the middle of an overgrown field, a treasure no one ever thought to look for. I’d never heard of the book or the film, and it really hit me like a bolt from the blue.

I rewatched it back when it turned up on YouTube in the 2000s, and we watched it again for our Metaphysical Movie Party. I couldn’t possibly have made a better choice.

The adaptation was apparently made in two weeks for a quarter-million dollars in 1979, and it most definitely captures that elusive ’79 energy I’ve spoken of in the past. Granted $250K translates to over a cool million today, but that’s still chump change for a feature film. But that is exactly why this movie is so incredibly resonant and numinous. Even its primitive optical effects sell the story.

Then again, I’ve long felt that the films that really get under your skin and stay there are often independent films made on a shoestring. A lot of it comes down to the passion and the undiluted vision of the auteur, but also the lack of CGI (or God help us, AI ) digital slop to assault your optic nerves.

By necessity, everything onscreen is real, physical and tangible, so your eyes never get lost in the uncanny valley. There’s also usually a lack of overly-familiar faces to take you out of the story as well.

In this case, the story is set in Portland, Oregon but was actually filmed amongst the newly-built Brutalist citadels of oil-boom Dallas, which give the film that Conquest of the Planet of Apes kind of “Future is Now” feeling. It shouldn’t work, but it does.

The rain and the post-apocalyptic gloom also feel like they influenced Blade Runner, which we’ll shortly see is quite apropos.

Another limitation-turned-to-strength in The Lathe of Heaven is the small cast. Sure, there are street and subway scenes and whatnot with plenty of extras wandering around, but the thrust of the narrative focuses on three characters; an unfortunate future-prole, his doctor and his lawyer.

If not for the concrete caverns many scenes are set in, you could stage this story in a small Off-Broadway space without missing a trick. Apparently, some theater groups have done just that.

Now, Sci-Fi can be a funny old thing. The folks who put the ideas out there first aren’t always the best ones to put them all together in a palatable package. I’ve always felt Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie ever made, and that Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation stomps on the graphic novel, which I always felt was overlong and fails to stick the landing.

Same way Kubrick’s vision for 2001:A Space Odyssey beats anything Arthur C. Clarke could have done on his own.

And so it was that Ursula K. LeGuin — an old friend and classmate (Berkeley HS Class of ’47, appropriately) of Philip K. Dick’s — managed to write a more definitive PKD novel than the man himself ever could.

Dick was usually too speed-soaked and God-haunted to really bring it all on home for much of his career: great books like UBIK, A Scanner Darkly and VALIS are the exceptions, not the rule.

Thus, both The Lathe of Heaven’s greatest strength and handicap is that it will forever be seen as PKD fanfic in a way, though it’s certainly been praised as a powerful potboiler on its own.

First serialized in the magazine Amazing Science Fiction Stories in 1971, The Lathe of Heaven won the Locus Award for Best Novel the following year. Garnering praise from critics and peers alike, Philip K. Dick once wrote, “One of the best novels most important to understanding of the nature of our world is Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven, in which the dream universe is articulated in such a striking and compelling way that I hesitate to add any further explanation to it; it requires none.”

The New York Times commented, “The Lathe of Heaven is a rare and powerful synthesis of poetry and science, reason and emotion,” while Newsweek called it “gracefully developed and extremely inventive… what science fiction is supposed to do.” — Suntup Press

But critics have also noted that LeGuin’s emphasis on character over concept sets it a cut above the standard PKD novel:

LeGuin wrote a novel about the effect of world-changing on three-dimensional characters. Philip Dick wrote world-changing from the point of view of alienated, miserable people nobody could care about. LeGuin wrote from a position of hope and Dick from a position of existential despair. — Reactor

One also gets the very strong impression that both main characters are LeGuin’s image of Dick: meaning the tortured visionary, and the ruthless god-auteur who puts his creations through unimaginable hells.

And curiously for a self-proclaimed Marxist like LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven is an essentially conservative and cautionary tale, if not an outwardly reactionary one.

The utopian and egalitarian dreams of the story’s villain seem perfectly reasonable on their face, but all soon lead to real world nightmares. In this, the Portland setting is all too appropriate, seeing that the city has become a major hub for broken idealists, all desperately looking to the failed collectivist and utilitarian fantasies of the past for some kind of roadmap to a golden future.

The Lathe of Heaven is also profoundly anti-futuristic and anti-technocratic. That theme feels more relevant to us than ever, with tech bros striving to digitally colonize the unconscious mind in much the same horrific way we see onscreen.

There’s even a subplot where an alien invasion unites a world on the brink of nuclear conflagration.

Even with all of that thematic meat on its bones, The Lathe of Heaven is both a human and humane fable, something all too rare in this day and age. I was hoping that my rewatch wouldn’t be hampered by nostalgic expectation, but I can honestly say I enjoyed it more than ever before.

It was one of those films where you just let go of the world and fall into the story, the way I remember so many films did when I was young. Which just goes to show that my problem with new movies is the problem with new movies, not me being old and jaded or some nonsense.

In short, The Lathe of Heaven is a must-see and a shoo-in selection for the Grand Secret Sun Cinematic Syllabus.

Watch it here. https://archive.org/details/the-lathe-of-heaven-1980

ENDNOTES: The Lathe of Heaven is a book Gordon and I often discussed, and I believe it was covered in a Rune Soup course.

We also saw how Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea novel series was clearly a major influence on Ghislaine Maxwell’s sea-steading fantasies, but don’t let that bother you none.

Aside from the influence the film seems to have had on Blade Runner, I got the feeling that it influenced the novel that was adapted for a prior movie party selection, The Medusa Touch.

Listen, I know it’s the weekend and you’ve probably got other plans, so let me just quickly drop a couple hot links for ya…

The latest post on The Secret History of Rock ‘n Roll has alt.rock playlists for 1987 (which I covered here recently), ‘88 and ‘89. The late Eighties were the peak of, well, pretty much everything, but especially so for alternative rock. Not that there wasn’t a lot of great alt.rock in the Nineties, but the groundwork was all made in those oddly-lost years.

Click here to get your fix. Don’t forget to save the lists!

https://secrethistoryofrock.blogspot.com/2026/07/the-great-eighties-playlist-project-in.html

And don’t forget your 1980-1986 megapack!

Direct link here: https://secrethistoryofrock.blogspot.com/2026/05/eatin-to-eighties-your-summer-party.html

The Secret Sun Mothership is going to be featuring a curated selection of classic posts this summer. It all kicks off with a revised and expanded take on a post from a while back on Twin Peaks and the Twin Universe Paradox.

Click here for a wild ride: https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2025/02/the-twin-universe-paradox-part-one.html

And all you nifty Nineties-heads, don’t forget to check this one out…

Have a great weekend, everybody!

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You all know where I stand by now: Music is Magic, straight up.

Sometimes I think it’s the only true form of magic, but I don’t like to get too over-reductive about it; gotta keep the door open to other (if not lesser) possibilities.

Still, nothing tattoos a time and place onto your memory circuits like a great song, so Music is my personal time machine.

Music powers me to phase in and out of various periods of my life, and can also often revive long-buried experiences. I’m a Cancerian, so you know I’m eminently qualified to hold forth on these things.

Case in point, I went up to the ‘Tree for my high school reunion a couple years back. It totally sucked, like the other reunions I put myself through, but that dismal borefest was actually just a pretext. My real goal was to sojourn through my psychic landscape while vibing on my November ’83 playlist, which made for the most mystically-potent phase of my younger years.

Main reason being that I was taking a psych class in my senior year, so I was doing a lot of heavy dreamwork at the time. I think that — along with raging hormones and the bushels of weed I was smoking morning, noon and night — had fully submerged my consciousness into a 24-hour mystical idyll. It’s hard to explain exactly, but it’s still something I cling to ever tighter in these dreary days of spiritual and psychosocial entropic collapse.

Anyhow, that real reunion with my closest high school companions — the sun, the streets, the landscape, and the eternal ocean — was such a raging success that I’m still buzzing a bit from it. No lie. It certainly helped that I undertook this pilgrimage on a magnificent New England morning, replete with a cloudless sky, an invigorating chill, and all that eye-melting foliage.

Anyhow, I’ve constructed this playlist especially for my GenX peeps, which I am certain will zoom you back to a better time and place as well. But you don’t need to be GenX to enjoy great rock, so let’s get into it…

1987 was a turning point for Eighties rock: Boomercentric classic rock was starting to fade again after getting a big corporate push in the mid-Eighties, GenX metal and alternative rock were on the ascendancy, and the Top 40 was rapidly losing the luster it had just three years prior.

The slack left by Cyndi Lauper and Huey Lewis et al would be taken up by rudimentary proto-hip-hop and plastic mall pop like Taylor Dane, Debbie Gibson and Samantha Fox.

1987 was also a pivotal year for me. I landed my first full-time art gig, got married and had our first baby. I was immersed in Alan Watts, and also formed my first real band and started writing real songs, all at the tender age of 21.

So fire up the wayback machine and let me give you the skinny, Ginny.

Colourbox - “Hot Doggie” Another great track from 4AD’s seminal Lonely is an Eyesore compilation. An artifact of that oh-so-brief period of time when it at least felt like everyone in England was trying to sound like Big Audio Dynamite. So crank it up, you mad doggie.

INXS - “New Sensation” This one always reminds me of my first art job in Manhattan. I worked on the 46th floor of One Penn Plaza (across the street from Madison Square Garden) and could just barely tune WDRE-FM out of Long Island in, which made a miserable and abusive job tolerable.

I also shared an office with this adorable little manic pixie who was hip to all the latest sounds. I’ll never forget she was late to work one day and our boss came in and asked, “So where’s the ditzy little chatterbox this morning?”

Public Image Ltd - “Seattle” Some folks thought Happy was a disappointment after Album, but I loved it. Especially this tune, which just builds and builds and builds the tension until the coda pops the pressure valve. I first heard this on 120 Minutes while me and the missus were getting ready for our wedding. Or was it on The Cutting Edge?

Psychedelic Furs - “Heartbreak Beat” A lot of early fans gave up on the Furs by this point, but I loved Mirror Moves just as much as Talk Talk Talk. Sure, this might have seemed facile at the time, but it’s nothing less than manna from Heaven in these dark times.

Echo and the Bunnymen - “Bedbugs and Ballyhoo” The Bunnies always had a Doors fetish, which fired some of their best tunes. Here they stop playing footsie and just go for the full Jim Morrison gusto. Classic.

Prince - “Sign O’ the Times” This was the last hurrah for Prince and me, but what a way to go. A double-LP set that just peed all over 1999, with one indelible pop smash after the other.

REM - “Finest Worksong” Life’s Rich Pageant was the peak of my REM fandom, especially since the aforementioned manic pixie chatterbox played it all the time at work. Did I happen to mention she was adorable?

I wasn’t as interested in Document past the hits, but this one’s a stormer.

Wire - “Madman’s Honey” REM got these art-damaged Brits to reunite in the Eighties but a lot of OG fans didn’t dig the dance-oriented version of the band. Those records can indeed be hit or miss, but you just can’t lose when Colin Newman gets his whimsy on.

Bryan Ferry - “Kiss and Tell” Another ‘DRE special. Ferry here is complaining about the tell-all book Jerry Hall wrote after their split, but I can’t really muster the pity for a rich rock star’s breakup troubles with a supermodel. Them’s the breaks, bud. Suck it up like the rest of us.

That Petrol Emotion - “Big Decision” This band rose from the ashes of The Undertones, a band I was a huge fan of back in high school. They weren’t nearly as exciting as the ‘Tones, but still snuck in a couple classic tracks.

David Bowie - “Never Let Me Down” This titular album tried to recapture the Let’s Dance glory days, but ended up trying way too hard. Which is a shame, because this cut is prime time Bowie, way better than the rest of the record, and on par with his best IMO.

Depeche Mode - “Never Let Me Down Again” Another ‘DRE standard. I was highly resistant to the Modes, having filed them away in my dreaded “simpering fop” cabinet. But this one got me warmed up for Violator.

U2 - “Bullet the Blue Sky” The 90s killed my enthusiasm for this band but good, and we all know what happened with Bono. But there are still a few choice U2 cuts I can tolerate, and who could resist this pounder anyway? One of two songs on Joshua Tree that are rather barefaced knockoffs of their old touring mates, The Comsat Angels (“Exit” is the other one).

The Alarm - “Rain in the Summertime” I have to admit this band was a bit of a pet peeve of mine back in the day, mostly on account of them seeming to copy other artists instead of forging their own identity. But with hindsight, they were pretty good forgers, they were terrific when I saw them in their Stiff Little Fingers phase, and the late Mike Peters was a total mensch. This is U2-mode Alarm and reminds me of our wedding as well, so big ups.

The Replacements - “Alex Chilton” The ‘Mats jumped the shark in a supreme fashion soon after, but this is one of the best songs they ever did. Not to mention one of the best pop punk tracks of the late Eighties.

Squeeze - “Hourglass” These pub rock veterans split after making some dull-as-dishwater records in the early Eighties, then the two main guys dished out more of the same (just with added cringe) as “Difford and Tilbrook,” then they got the old band back together, squeezed out some overproduced squinch, then came out of nowhere with this classic. Goes to show you that persistence pays off.

10,000 Maniacs - “Don’t Talk” Natalie Merchant would eventually go full Debbie Downer schoolmarm, but it’s hard to fault In My Tribe. Well, “Like the Weather” kind of stinks, but we’re talking about an album that ends with “Verdi Cries,” so no harm, no foul.

Shelleyan Orphan - “Southern Bess” I first saw these Neo-Raphaelite chamber-pop weirdos on the same episode of 120 Minutes (or was it The Cutting Edge?) as “Seattle,” and was eventually able to hunt down the album. Weirdly, I always kind of thought of them as an archaic version of Haysi Fantayzee.

Magical stuff, and Caroline Crawley was pure porcelain-doll/ginger-spice goddess, with a generous side of Frase. Plus, her “ooh-ha-ha’s” on this track INCINERATE MY SOUL.

Joe Strummer - “Tennessee Rain” Joe dropped his share of clunkers (see Combat Rock), but he could then turn around and serve up a slammer like “Love Kills,” or a bulletproof melody that sounded like it had been sung around campfires on the Oregon Trail. This one was from the soundtrack to an absolutely dreadful Alex Cox film, but Stephen Foster himself would have been damn proud to call it his own.

Suzanne Vega - “Luka” You know it, you love it, you sing it in the shower. Back in the day you couldn’t throw a rock in the East Village without hitting a dozen Suzanne Vega lookalikes, but that and those Yamaha DX7 patches fill me with a warm nostalgic glow. Of course, there’d be a battalion of Vega clones by the Nineties, hence the Lilith Fair.

Cocteau Twins - “Crushed” Need I say more? Well, all I will add is that I literally felt the gates of Heaven fly open the first time I heard this one. It lit up every single opioid receptor in my brain like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. But then again, I hadn’t heard this earth-shattering epiphany of a live version yet.

The Mission - “Tower of Strength” File this under “songs I like by bands I hate,” probably since I’m such a sucker for “Kashmir.” Oh, and it was produced by John Paul Jones. Avoid the eight-minute album version like the plague that it is.

Sisters of Mercy - “Lucretia My Reflection” The song that launched a thousand Hot Topics. If you asked me to pinpoint the exact time Goth became its own culture and not just another New Wave fad, it would that ominous bass-line intro burrowing into the world’s ear.

Front 242 - “Don’t Crash” Another contribution to my musical lexicon from the pixie chatterbox. She was a poor little rich girl from San Francisco and had snuck into all the hip clubs playing all the latest creepy and low-key fascist Industrial disco. I went for those crazy detuned synths on the breaks - still mess me up.

Gene Loves Jezebel - “Gorgeous” This band could really get on my nerves, but this track summons up visions of a montage from an imaginary John Hughes movie, with some lovestruck Valley girl trying on the latest fashions for her giggly girlfriends at Beverly Center — maybe Heather Graham or Ione Skye. Someone like that.

Danny Wilson - “Mary’s Prayer” Yep, still another ‘DRE classic. I should have called this playlist “WDRE Lives,” but everyone remembers it as WLIR now, and “WLIR Lives” looked kind of stupid in the thumbnail. Anyhow, bulletproof pop songwriting from a band that seemed to vanish shortly after. Funny how one-hit wonders are like that.

ABC - “When Smokey Sings” I don’t think anyone expected these blue-eyed soul counterfeiters to still be at it five years past their prime, but I for one am thankful they were. Their last hit, but what a sendoff. This is just pure Eighties sheen and sounds great cruising down the Parkway.

Flesh for Lulu - “Postcards from Paradise” Like Gene Loves Jezebel, these Batcave leftovers ditched the gloom and picked up the power pop. I think a lot of their groups were primarily aiming for Hollywood’s attention, and these chaps actually did earn John Hughes’ notice, and the lesser track from this album “I Go Crazy” landed a spot on the Some Kind of Wonderful soundtrack.

Sinead O’Connor - “I Want Your Hands on Me” My bandmates loved The Lion and the Cobra but I wasn’t nearly as impressed. I liked the singles, but the rest of it felt like pure filler. And Sinead’s skinhead look was a major turnoff, especially since she had such a beautiful face. Still, another ‘DRE classic.

The Bangles - “Hazy Shade of Winter” An Art Garfunkel cover of all things, and used for the Less Than Zero soundtrack. Didn’t know what to make of this band. They seemed like a Go-Go’s clone when they hit the scene, only without the sacred pixian adorability of Belinda and Jane. Suzanna was no slouch, but you know I was all about the pixies, Charlie.

I remember our old roommate’s mom came to the house for Christmas in ’85 and gave him a copy of the Less Than Zero paperback and an ounce of weed for his presents. My mom gave me tube socks and a brown sweater. She seemed to think brown was my color.

The Smiths - “Stop Me if You Heard This One Before” I kind of lost interest in The Smiths by Strangeways, Here We Come, but in hindsight I think it’s their strongest set. Certainly the best produced. Morrissey soon left the band and then carried on exactly as before, only without having to split the cash four ways.

Ramones - “I Wanna Live” Poor Ramones, always desperate to meet the mainstream halfway - or Halfway to Sanity, in this case - but it was just never gonna happen. They’d already been tried and found wanting, and were all pushing 40 by this point. But you can’t blame a band for trying, especially when you’re talking a power-pop toe-tapper like this one.

The Cramps - “Can Your Pussy Do the Dog” I was never all that crazy about the post-Bryan Gregory Cramps, since his wall of non-Euclidean noise gave the band a hard edge the later stuff never had. But I’ve always had a soft spot for psychobilly and these crazy cats and kitten are its pioneers.

Circle Jerks - “Fortunate Son” The Jerks were long past their prime by ’87 and wasted guitar genius Zander Schloss (who played with Joe Strummer on the aforementioned “Tennessee Rain”) on bass, but they still had the wisdom to compensate for their songwriting deficiencies by mangling some CCR.

X - “Left and Right” The first four X albums are simultaneously my favorite West Coast punk and my favorite punkabilly records, but they ran into the same brick wall of commercial indifference their peers did. Billy Zoom had split by this point, replacement Tony Gilkyson wasn’t nearly as interesting, and like rockabilly god Brian Setzer, X was trying to cash in on the Eighties’ heartland rock sweepstakes. I dropped out on them then, but I’ve warmed up to some of that material since.

Midnight Oil - “Dreamworld” These Aussie schoolmarms usually got on my nerves, but my ears often perked whenever they dropped the hair shirts and got on with the rockin’ and rollin’. I hated “Beds are Burning” with an extreme passion but would crank it up whenever this one popped up on the old Marconi.

Moving Targets - “The Other Side” Late Eighties post-hardcore/proto-emo punk is an undervalued genre, and a lot of great bands and records got lost in the shuffle. This Boston trio made a great record with Burning in Water, which is buttressed with nimble playing and hook after hook after hook. Any fan of uptempo rock will enjoy it.

Squirrel Bait - “Kid Dynamite” Second verse, same as the first. As someone who knows his classic punk, I can tell you this is one of the greatest punk singles ever cut, featuring one of the greatest rock vocal performances ever, if not one whom hardly anyone has ever heard.

The most incredible part about this explosion of well-crafted noise is that these Louisville sluggers were still in high school when they cut it. My high school friends, by contrast, were all making meathead hardcore.

The Cure - “Why Can’t I Be You” My heart belonged to the sparse and spooky first three Cure albums, and they lost me until they went back to that desolate well on Disintegration. But the missus loved this double LP, and the hits made it tolerable for me. Plus, this is so gosh-darned Eighties you can smell the Aqua Net.

Siouxsie and the Banshees - “The Passenger” I was a Banshees fan to the bitter end (still love The Rapture), but the John Valentine Carruthers era left me a little cold. Which is a shame because he was such an incredible guitarist. But he fell on the wrong side of Siouxsie’s cat-o-nine-tails, and the all-covers Through the Looking Glass fell on my deaf ears. With the single exception of this Iggy cover, which kicks ass on the original.

I’m currently grinding away on my new video, which, if the Good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, will be up in the next 48 hours…

Meantime, I recommend you check out my piece on Elliott Smith, if you haven’t already.

And before I forget, do check out my Eighties megamix thread. The guests at your next barbecue or beach party will thank you. And me.

One name that always comes up whenever I talk about the highly-questionable departures of Kurt Cobain and Jeff Buckley is Elliott Smith.

His is a case I’d long been familiar with, but hadn’t find any tangible links between it and the others.

Spoiler Alert: I have one now.

There are the obvious links between the men: three troubled GenXers who arose from the alt.rock underground and rooted their music deep in traditional American idioms.

All three were also exemplars of what I called the “Orpheus archetype” in The Secret History of Rock ‘n Roll: introverted and sensitive singer/songwriters who could do their thing equally well solo-acoustic or with an electric rock band.

But there are also significant differences:

• Buckley was a virtuoso singer and guitarist who could sing or play literally anything, yet exuded an androgynous energy that a lot of rock fans found off-putting.

• Cobain went more for the snotty suburban punk vibe, so he downplayed his own considerable skills.

• Buckley was a player who struggled with writing, whereas Cobain was much stronger, song-wise.

• Smith was no slouch either as a guitarist or singer, but the strength and appeal came from his off-kilter yet hook-filled songwriting, similar to artists like Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, and well, Tim Buckley.

So what was that common denominator I mentioned before?

Well, the same one we looked at in my previous video between Jeff Buckley and Daveigh Chase: DreamWorks.

The same DreamWorks whose 2002 adaption of The Ring would place 12 year-old Daveigh in the path of a sociopathic sexpest at the 2003 MTV Movie Awards.

Now, I’ve been telling you that Daveigh’s tragic and terrible death feels like the pivotal piece of the puzzle I’ve been struggling with for more than twenty years, and it’s looking more and more to be the case.

A preternaturally gifted actress and singer, Daveigh died a miserable and prolonged death on LA’s hellish Skid Row:

Former child actress Daveigh Chase died of AIDS on June 16, 2026, at the age of 35. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner’s Office officially confirmed the cause of death, noting that chronic polysubstance use was a significant contributing factor.

Chase was initially hospitalized for severe malnutrition. She subsequently contracted bacterial meningitis and multiple serious bloodstream infections, which ultimately caused her body to experience septic shock.

Reading that brought back a flood of memories of all the old Peter Duesberg interviews I’d hear on Gary Null’s old radio program, Natural Living. If you get my meaning.

If not, we’ll get into it later.

And while digging into the Buckley/Chase nexus, a reader pointed out the fact that the notorious Rolling Stone article that first disseminated the scientifically and logistically impossible official account of Jeff Buckley’s death had none other than the sex-pestilent Diddy Daddy on the cover.

Like I say, Synchronicity often answers questions we have no conventional way of answering ourselves…

Head over to the always-free Secret Sun Mothership to read the rest…

https://secretsun.blogspot.com/2026/07/a-midsummer-nights-dreamworks-ashes-to.html

… then share your thoughts back here.

For those of you who missed it, here is the video presentation in question. It builds on the previous Siren and Disclosure Day posts from this past month, and adds more burning questions to the pile.

• Why was Dreamworks so deeply involved with people in Jeff Buckley’s immediate circle in the days following his death?

• Why did Dreamworks release a series of films dealing with suspicious drowning deaths in quick succession - In Dreams, What Lies Beneath, Minority Report, The Ring - some of which had been very heavily rewritten to include those themes in the aftermath of Jeff Buckley’s death?

• Why did Dreamworks kick this mini-trend off with a film that had its main theme sung by the Sibyl? Was this some kind of ritual humiliation?

• Was Daveigh Chase’s career so heavily Fraser-coded and synched (especially the Dreamworks production of The Ring) because she had come up against the same network of sex-sickos that the Sibyl had?

• Was all the blatant Fraser-coding in Disclosure Day just my overheated imagination, or simply business as usual for Spielberg?

  THE SECRET SUN EXTENSION SCHOOL is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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Or how about those Hollywood thrillers where the investigation of the death of some once-famous figure who’d fallen on very hard times ultimately leads to a vast international conspiracy of occult-besotted sex pests?

Some of those movies were pretty cool, no?

Those were the days.

Anyhow, you gonna be around tonight, at 9 PM ET? Yeah?

Well, then come hang out with us. Got something I want you to see.

Christopher Knowles is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: A Midsummer’s Night Dreamworks

Time: Jun 28, 2026 09:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

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OK, folks; this is the moment of truth. Our third and final survey takes us up to the present, and how you are managing your mind, your body, and your spirit in your adulthood.

As before, you are under no obligation to share your answers with the class, but all the same I would ask you to take some time to ponder on these questions for your own reflecti…

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Synchronicity often answers questions we have no conventional way of answering ourselves. By that I mean it never fails to astonish me how many gaps that are filled in with synchronicities turn out to be confirmed by provable facts, often rather quickly after the syncs first arise.

It goes like this: a question will be raised, then a sync will often ari…

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I’ve posted a piece at the Mothership concerning the horrifically tragic end of Daveigh Chase’s Hollywood dream.

There is some rather harrowing video there (that I’ve posted a warning on), as well as video taken from the 2003 MTV Movie Awards that has to be seen to be believed. Yet again, we have another case of “How did we not see what was right before…

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What do I mean by that?

Well, there’s a particular - and extremely curious - plot device in the film that harkens back to the Great S…

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Given we’re at the 43rd anniversary of its release, the Secret Sun Radio Mystery Hour is back, serving up this epic conversation with Dr. Cherlyn Jones on the landmark 1983 album by The Police, Synchronicity.

The LP was the initial entry point for Dr. Jones and I to the concept itself, as well as to Uncle Carl’s paradigm-shattering work, so it only makes sense that it was released smack-dab in the middle of the Year that Broke Reality.

The good doctor and I go far afield from the pop charts to fold in the thoughts and theories of legends like Jung, Peter Kingsley, Paul Bowles, Goethe, and more. We even take a peek into the ancient Sibylline Prophecies.

All of which is to say that you can’t afford to skip this one.

You can check out more of Dr. Jones’ work at her site: https://landnamwarrior.org/

OK, now we’re wading into the deeper waters. This is the big one, so hold on tight...

This questionnaire focuses on the later teenage and young adult years. So things are, by definition, going to be a bit different than your preteen years. Being mystically inclined is never easy as a general rule, but as you got a bit older, you may have developed the skills to handle it more effectively.

Now, some questions may seem to contradict each other, but as I’ve said, I’ve developed these criteria based on a lifetime of study and observation, and are part of wanting to better understand what defines a modern mystic, or what develops the mystical mindset as life goes through its cycles.

Why?

Well, there have been countless papers written on mysticism in premodern times or societies, but precious few on what it means to be a mystically-inclined individual in a media-drenched modern culture with a totally new set of experiences and symbols to process. And understanding what that really means is what this undertaking is all about.

Now, I want to make this perfectly clear: this survey is for YOU and you alone.

This survey is about understanding who you really are, and how that fits into an overall mystic personality profile. You are under absolutely no obligation or expectation whatsoever to share anything you wish not to (though feel free if you do). This is simply intended to inspire contemplation…

MENTAL/EMOTIONAL HEALTH

1. Did you experience depression or other issues in your teens or twenties?

2. Were you treated for a mental health issue?

3. Were you a victim of a traumatic accident or assault?

4. Did you lose a close friend or family member?

5. Did you develop a difficult relationship with a family member?

6. Did you grow up in a dysfunctional family environment?

PHYSICAL HEALTH

1. Did you experience a major health crisis or illness in your teens or twenties?

2. Did you drink excessively in your teens and twenties?

3. Did you smoke weed excessively?

4. Did you take hard drugs like meth or heroin?

5. Did you develop an eating disorder or similar behavior?

6. Did you find yourself drawn to Eastern religious practices like yoga?

7. Did you practice martial arts, especially forms like Aikido or Tai Chi?

8. Did you take up solo athletic activities, like jogging/running/long-distance walking?

9. Did you go through a phase where you obsessed over your health?

10. Did you go through a phase where you focused on physical fitness?

RELIGIOUS LIFE

1. Did you experience a religious crisis in your teens or twenties?

2. Did you drift away from organized religion?

3. Did your parents do so after being quite devout in your younger years?

4. Did you join a strict Evangelical church (or non-Christian equivalent) in rebellion against your secular family?

5. Did you develop extreme beliefs of an apocalyptic variety?

6. Did those beliefs center on environment or wildlife issues?

7. Did these beliefs motivate you towards any type of activism?

DREAMING LIFE

1. Were your dreams still vivid in your teens and twenties?

2. Did you dream of zombies or aliens, or similar tropes of being “taken over?”

3. Did you have an unusual number of nightmares or fever dreams?

4. Did you dream of flying?

5. Did you experience sleep paralysis in your teens or twenties?

6. Did you have a number of prophetic dreams?

7. Did you keep a dream journal?

ALIENATION

1. Did you feel like an alien or outsider in your youthful environment in your teens and twenties?

2. Were you excessively truant in high school?

3. Did you self-separate from other kids in school, sit alone at lunch, etc?

4. Did you seek out counsel or friendships with teachers or other adults?

5. Did you develop a mentor/mentee relationship with a teacher or relative?
   

   THE SECRET SUN EXTENSION SCHOOL is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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OK, here we go. This is the first part of a survey on the mystical mindset, and as such, is strictly voluntary and confidential.

You’re under no obligation or expectation whatsoever to share your answers. If you choose to do so, they will not be packaged nor sold, nor disseminated by myself in any way without your permission.

This process is strictly abo…

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The film’s not even out yet, and already the Syncs are off the charts. I was planning this as a standalone video, but there’s way too much information to go through in that format. And you deserve to know(les)!

Come hang out and unwind and let the syncs flow! Tonight @ 10 PM ET. Scroll for link.

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This video is one of two follow-ups to the recent Siren Saga blowout. The first expanded on the many… questions I have concerning the official narrative of Jeff Buckley’s death.

Questions, I might add, I didn’t have at all until just a couple years ago, when just the smallest detail of information from an inside source put the entire story in a radical — even an extremely radical — new context for me. To be honest, I hadn’t thought all that much about the Buckley situation for quite some time.

Funny how that happens.

And now, more than ever before, this story starts to seem not just a great myth for our times, but maybe even THE great myth of our times...

All of this has sent me back to the original source material, only to suspect how much is being said between the lines in some of Buckley biographies. This is almost certainly a function of people being NDA’d up the wazoo, but I’m well used to that, believe me; I can perceive all the many pantomimes of non-disclosure avoidance. And now that I know to look for them, the inferences and insinuations seem flamingly obvious (as you’ll might agree when you watch the video).

Anyway, here’s what I wrote over at the SSI…

OK, this never-ending saga just blew wide open again.

• Did you know that shortly before his death, Jeff Buckley was shocked to discover all the money he’d made after three years of extremely heavy touring was gone?

• Did you know that in the days leading up to Jeff Buckley’s death that one of his managers was grooming a “Backup Buckley?”

• Did you know that Jeff was “freaked out” by this, and feared he was going to be replaced by a “clone?”

• Did you know that this Backup Buckley began a residency at Arlene’s Grocery - where the original Buckley played his last NYC shows - just three days after the original’s death?

I don’t know how I missed this before (assuming it’s not the Shimmer), but all of a sudden this story has taken on a whole new dimension...

Interesting comment from a friend: “Having sat across the table from someone who bartended (Buckley’s) last open mic and personally went out as part of the search party in the immediate aftermath of his disappearance, no one who was part of that social group at the time believed any of the official story then or now.”

Brother Brandon, my Ninja of Twinja, dug up an interview with the Backup Buckley and he doesn’t seem to buy the official story either....

I recommend people watch that interview, specifically the first half. There seem to be absolute volumes spoken between the lines. And maybe not so much “in between the lines” either: he even uses air quotes when talking about the official story of drowning.

I should add the Backup Buckley is actually an incredibly talented musician, and is also a much, much better songwriter than Buckley was himself. As I’ve speculated, Buckley’s difficulties with strong hooks and choruses — which he seemed acutely aware of, despite his many other talents — may have been the catalyst for this entire mess in the first place.

And as I explain in the video, the Backup Buckley doesn’t seem to be mixed up in any shenanigans here, least so far as I can tell…

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