Corbin, imagination becoming real, and teenage boys startled by a cracking branch

Last night I listened to a video in which a pseudonymous ex-Mormon podcaster relates some seemingly demonic encounters he experienced in 1978 and 1979. Due to his sometimes linking to older apologetic articles he wrote under his real name, I know and must mention for sync purposes that this podcaster's first name is a somewhat unusual one: Corbin.

Here's the video, which is much more serious than the flippant title and thumbnail would suggest:

In one of the stories he tells, what he thinks at first is mere imagination begins to become more and more real:

I had heard these things [missionary tales of evil spirits] during the day when it really didn't bother me very much. But that night, it was to return to haunt me by playing upon my imagination and filling me with childhood fears. Imagination -- at least I thought it was my imagination at first. . . . I experienced intense feelings of dread and sensed the presence of evil entities swirling invisibly about me in the air. I attributed this too to an overactive imagination. I question now whether these feelings were purely imaginative.

As the story continues, what began as imagined fears induced by hearing a scary story eventually manifests as physically audible scratching sounds at his bedroom door. As many people know from experience, talking about and imagining such things can cause them to appear. (Caveat lector!)

This morning, I finished Gary Lachman's book Dark Star Rising. In the last chapter, "The Politics of Chaos," the name Corbin suddenly appears, never having been mentioned in the rest of the book, and is repeated seven times. This Corbin is a philosopher who wrote about how imagination can manifest in reality:

The French philosopher and scholar of mysticism Henry Corbin wrote extensively on the imagination and what he called the Imaginal World, a kind of realm in between the physical world and that of pure thought. It is the realm in which dreams take place and hypnagogic visions, and in which the "picturizing" that leads to the "actualizing" of our prayers goes on. . . . The Imaginal is real, Corbin argued, but it's a different reality from what we are used to.

The name Corbin, incidentally, means "raven." In Corbin the podcaster's story, he thinks at first that the scratching might be the family dog scratching on the door "for admittance." Poe's famous poem "The Raven" concerns  itself with a mysterious sound which the narrator at first thinks is "some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door." He then reports, "I opened wide the door;-- / Darkness there and nothing more." Corbin, too, opens the door and finds only a dark hallway.

One of the stories Corbin tells features the sound of a branch cracking. He and a high-school friend hear this while they are up on the roof talking about the pre-existence and the war in heaven, and they associate it with the demonic manifestation that preceded Joseph Smith's First Vision.

Our discussion was suddenly interrupted by a cracking noise, loud in the still night, which emanated from the shadow enshrouded trees just beyond the rooftop on which we were seated. Both Bruce and I jumped at the sound. We peered into the shadowy tree boughs, seeing if we could make out what had caused the sound. We saw nothing. This is just ten feet away from where we're seating, if that far. It might have been seven feet away. That's why we jumped so much. It was a loud snapping, cracking sound like a tree branch being broken. Neither could we figure out what could cause such a sound in a tree at a spot twenty feet off the ground. We both agreed that it had sounded like a dry twig snapping under a person's foot or being broken across a person's knee, but that seemed even more ridiculous. . . .

Bruce explained to me that one of the reasons the sound had startled him so much is that it was virtually identical to the sound Joseph Smith hears in the movie The First Vision, [which] the church had just created. . . . Stuart Peterson, I think, was the name of the young boy who played Joseph Smith. There is the sound of a cracking branch, which is supposed to presage the appearance of Satan. Now, why a cracking branch is supposed to presage the appearance of Satan is anybody's guess, but it does appear in that movie. So Bruce explained to me that's why he was so startled because he made the connection between the sound we heard up on the roof and the sound that Joseph Smith hears in the movie. And this happens as Joseph Smith gets down on his knees to pray in the grove just before the powers of darkness seize him. Later, when I saw the movie, I too felt that the sound we had heard on the roof that night was substantially the same as the sound heard by Joseph Smith in the Grove. I suppose one cracking branch sounds the same pretty much as another cracking branch.

I did not attach much significance to the coincidence of sounds at the time, since the use of that sound in the movie appeared to be a directorial device to dramatize the scene and nothing more. . . . But many years later, I was to discover that the use of that sound to represent the presence of dark powers in the movie came not from the director's imagination, but from a lesser known account of the first vision by Joseph Smith. . . . Joseph Smith doesn't out and out say he heard a twig or a branch snapping behind him. He says, "I heard a noise behind me like someone walking toward me." A cracking branch would definitely fit that bill, although Joseph Smith does not specify it as being such.

I've bolded so much of the above to emphasize Corbin's word choice. Though there is the odd reference to a "twig" or "snapping," his overwhelming preference is for the phrase "cracking branch" (a much less common expression than "snapping twig").

This morning, after finishing Dark Star Rising, I had several choices as to what to read next, but (possibly influenced by a recent dream featuring time travel and a Jew), I ended up deciding on Red Warrior's Gift, Shaul Behr's sequel to Ari Barak and the Free-Will Paradox.

I've only read a few pages, but the novel's very first scene has Ari and Howard -- two classmates of high-school age, like Corbin and Bruce -- are up on a large overhanging rock overlooking a path, just as Corbin and Bruce are up on a roof. Then this happens:

Suddenly, a branch cracked behind them. They spun around to find Thaddeus [a Greek soldier] about five meters from them, his face livid beneath the layer of dust, his sword pointed right at them.

In one of the stories Corbin tells, he is taken from his bed to a field and then finds himself back in his bed again, in a completely different position. He is unable to move, and he hurts his neck trying to move his head.

I was once again back in my bedroom, lying on my back on my bed, but now I was turned end for end so that my feet were up where my pillow was and my head was at the foot of the bed. I was lying on my back with my head hanging off the end of the bed. My eyes were still open, and I was looking down at the floor at the foot of my bed, upside down. . . .

I tried to move, but once again found that my body was paralyzed. All I could move were my eyes, so I could not vocalize my prayer. I thought it instead. Not feeling that I had the time to maneuver out of this paralysis by that slow finger-by-finger method I talked about earlier, instead, I gave a mighty frantic wrench of my head, hurting my neck in the process, so that I could sit up. . . . [A]s I sat upright, I found that my body position had once again reversed itself, so that now I was sitting up as I had originally laid down, with my head on the pillow at the head of the bed, as opposed to hanging off the foot of the bed. 

Here's what happens next to the Greek soldier in Red Warrior's Gift:

When questioned later, the bewildered Thaddeus could not recall how it had happened: one moment he was brandishing a sword at two apparently helpless Hebrew youths; the next he found himself suspended facedown from a nearby terebinth tree, a thick branch threaded through the backplate of his armor, and his sword nowhere to be found.

He and the three other soldiers who are with him then hear a voice behind them:

The three soldiers spun around. Thaddeus cricked his neck trying to see where the voice had come from.

So like Corbin, Thaddeus suddenly finds his body in a different position, with no memory of moving. Each man finds his movements severely limited in his new position, and each hurts his neck trying to move his head.

Update (1:00 a.m.): Just now I was listening to Whitley Strieber interview Dean Radin. Strieber says at one point, describing a close encounter, "There was a loud cracking noise. I couldn't move. I was in bed when it happened." This obviously syncs closely with the content of this post. I've read accounts of this particular experience in Strieber's books, and he usually describes it as a "crunching" sound like someone biting into an apple. But in this interview, the one I happened to listen to tonight, he said "cracking" instead.