…That upon other occasions I was placed in a formal hypnotic trance is also a distinct possibility. Once Brother-in-law discussed the Bridey Murphy case with great enthusiasm and asked me if I thought further examples of reincarnational memory uncovered with hypnosis should be researched — but adequately, he emphasized, by someone with resources.
When I objected that I did not believe in reincarnation, he replied with sympathetic approval, “Neither do I, Kerry, but I think the possibility should be investigated anyhow, by someone with more money than those guys who wrote the Bridey Murphy book, someone who could conduct a very thorough investigation.
He made sure to obtain my agreement. But I do not remember personally volunteering to be the subject of any such probe.
I do possess a distinct memory of sitting with Slim, late one afternoon, close to twilight, in a corner bar in some podunk Louisiana town, waiting from Brother-in-law to return. That we were sipping beer in a place that resembled in structure the Napoleon House (with openings to the streets instead of walls on two sides) but was plainer - with Seven-Up signs instead of wrought-iron frills. I cannot at this point recall how we got there or where we were afterwards. Possibly related to an earlier time in the same day is a memory of breakfasting with Slim one blazing morning in a tiny restaurant on Lake Pontchartrain, with Brother-in-law inside a houseboat just across the narrow dock from the front window of the cafe. Again I don’t recall how we got there or where we went afterwards.
More than once I have wondered, though, if I was hypnotized aboard that houseboat that day, perhaps by means of drugs, and then methodically programmed. For I have a number of memories which are dream-like in quality and seem unrelated to anything else ever happened to me, except that they are vaguely associated with Brother-in-law. Woody Guthrie singing about the “arch and the stones” in one of his albums reminds me vividly of these disassociated fragments of memory, of a few pertaining to images of myself as the “first post-revolutionary man” of uncharacteristically utopian and romantic Marxian rhetoric, and as a lonely anarchist harmonica player wandering in America. Also I seem to recall in the same sense having received instructions regarding a future mission of saving the U.S. from a Russian invasion, and of being told that I would be able to rely on the radio for help just by listening to the music.
Such things cause me to speculate that Brother-in-law may have been a high-level double agent who sold projects to hypnotically program me to both Russian intelligence and Division Five of the FBI — without telling anyone but Slim what an outrageous practical joke he was playing on us all. An alternative possibility to his involving the Russians is that he might have sold such an idea to an Eastern European bloc nation, perhaps Albania or Bulgaria or Poland.
“The only thing wrong with Communist theory as the Russians practice it, Kerry, is that they have no mechanism in their system to guarantee the withering away of the state.”… (pp. 70-2) The Dreadlock Recollections (c) Kerry Thornley, 1984
