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Chapter One at the top of my voice. Never had I been so angry, so utterly frustrated. The mud shadow too another leap, clearly to the bottom of the valley. I kept on screaming, shaking my legs. I wanted to shake off whatever might come to eat me.” This is pretty scary stuff, to say the least. But, can it be true? Before we think that this is just a phenomenon or hallucination of shamans or anthropologist, let’s have a look at another event in a slightly different context. This is just a short segment of an account obtained under hypnotic regression. The hypnotist is Barbara Bartholic, and the subject is “David”, the son of Dr. Karla Turner. Something was obviously missing in David’s recollection of events, so Barbara asked him more about what he had seen by the fir tree. “I’m looking at a shadow”, he replied. “maybe it’s the cat, he likes that tree. Rustling, pomegranate tree. At the bottom? but how? This, there’s something moving, but I can’t see it. It’s a dark spot, a black spot, moving around the tree. And it’s gone”. “T saw, it looks irregular. Is it a shadow? It’s black. It’s on the ground. It’s moving around and away, quickly, rustling. Like walking on leaves. And it’s very faint with a whisper... a snake sound, real faint. [...] My brain’s not working”, he said. “I’m just tramping behind her to the car. Ah, ah. But I want to go look at that. I heard a noise.” “A rope, pulled real fast”, he replied. “Whoooo, kind of like a top. But soft, so it was muted. And that’ when I see the thing. The black. It’s just blackness, on the ground. Very quick. Something hit me before”. “Shocked me”, he answered. “In the back. In my hip, at the bottom of my spine... I’m bouncing, mechanically, towards the satellite dish, I think. .... It’s big.... It hurt, all over, the shock. Tingles real loud. All over my bones it’s tingling, shaking. [...] I’m walking around the tree, and I hear a noise. Like a top, a spinning top. It starts high-pitched and goes lower, and goes away pretty fast. So I look towards it. I can’t see very well. ...It’s like a blot on the ground, ... a black towel? Or a garbage bag? Kind of odd-shaped. It’s flat, flat-flat. It, it is on the ground, it’s no different than the ground, but it’s just black and moving fast. And it’s making a little noise. ...I’m looking at the thing. ...A blackness. A ‘not.’ Like a ‘not-there.’ Like a moving oil puddle on 210 Barbara asked him to expand his description, so David continued. “What did the noise sound like?” [Barbara’s question. ] “Where?” Barbara inquired. » Castaneda, 1998, pp. 231-233.