Believe

When I was a kid, I believed in everything. It was like the scene in Ghostbusters where Janine Melnitz interviews Winston Zeddmore for a job helping out the seriously overworked trio of Dr. Venkman, Dr. Stanz, and Egon.

She asks him, "Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full transmediums, the Loch Ness Monster and the theory of Atlantis?"

Winston replies, "If there's a steady paycheck in it, I'll believe anything you say."

There was no paycheck in it for me, but I would have gleefully added Bigfoot, the Yeti, Nostradamus, the Rosicrucians and Illuminati and any of another half dozen secret societies, the mystery of the Easter Island statues and all that stuff about extraterrestrials helping the Incans build their pyramids.

I accepted it all with equal enthusiasm. I ate that stuff up. I read Frank Edwards and Erich von Daniken and Robert Blum. Nobody was wrong. All of it was true.

If pressed, I would have also told you that Jim Morrison was alive and well and running guns in North Africa, living the kind of life that Joseph Conrad would have been pleased to write about. And that he bumped into Elvis from time to time.

I would have also shared with you a little known secret concerning the Kennedy assassination: it was a conspiracy, all right. An intergalactic conspiracy. You see, medical professionals extracted some of Lee Harvey Oswald's blood following his arrest, and they found certain ... anomalies. Inexplicable anomalies. The kind that later propelled entire episodes of The X-Files.

As a Philosophy minor in college (longer ago than I care to reveal, thank you very much), I continued to live experimentally. I explored with the kind of enthuisasm and fervor only undergraduate students can summon. I took every subject I studied and I lived it.

For one semester.

From September through December, I was an existentialist. From January through May, I was a classical realist. When the summer session rolled around, I spent ten weeks leaping and frolicking in the fields of the shaman.

From one year to the next, I cycled through two or three belief systems, completely embracing each one until the term was over, then moving on. My emphasis was comparative religion, which made an excellent excuse for diving into the waters of Zen, Tao, Islam, Cherokee, Druidic practice, and Teilhardian Catholic mysticism (if you don't know who Pierre Teilhard de Chardin is and want a fun, readable primer, check out William Peter Blatty's novel Legion, the sequel to his classic The Exorcist. The novel has absolutely nothing to do with the execrable film sequel, Exorcist II: The Heretic).

After graduation, life started becoming more and more about a steady paycheck. Over a period of two or three years - my first years in the Air Force - I became Winston Zeddmore.

It wasn't the environment, as you might think. I ran into plenty of military people inclined to believe in the paranormal, extraterrestrials, or psychic abilities. I heard at least a dozen ghost stories for each new assignment. I lived in England for 12 years. The country is crisscrossed by ley lines, dotted with standing stone sites and Norman churches built on old pagan holy grounds. How did the Normans "acquire" those sites, you ask? By slaughtering the pagans, of course, and stealing the land.

With that kind of long, bloody history, England really was spook central. But by this time, I was a skeptic. I lived in High Wycombe, only a few miles from the West Wycombe caves, a purported haunt of the legendary Hellfire Club, one of the aforementioned secret societies proud to call Ben Franklin a member.

I took a photograph in those caves I still can't explain. A white, oblong shape, resembling fog, appeared where I had definitely not seen any such thing while taking the picture. Ghost? Not if you asked me. At that time, if you questioned me about paranormal phenomena, I would say, "I believe in the possibility."

Which was pretty much the same as saying no.

Not only was I saying no, I was proud of it. I had finally grown up, grown out of that silly fantasy about flying saucers and ghosties and goblins and things that go bump in the night.

Except that every short story I sold over the next ten years had one of those creepy crawlies as its subject. My first professional sale, a story called Five Past Four, was one of only a handful that did not contain a supernatural element. The rest? Haunted boys; demons popping out of mirrors; ex-girlfriends returning from the grave; homicidal, dimension-hopping creatures; a man chased by the apocalypse, ever in his rear view mirror.

And on. And on.

My subconscious, calling me a liar. Oh, there was a good excuse for that one, too. "For a guy who doesn't believe in that stuff, Dave, you sure write a lot about it."

I explained that fantasy fiction gives writers a rich and abundant metaphoric environment to work in. Those monsters are really symbols, see. Our daily fears, lack of control, cultural paranoias and various other repressed issues, all dressed up in vampire regalia. It's still not really about the creepy-crawlies.

Except that it was, and I was a liar, and I here confess. There are some things in fiction it's okay to lie about. You can change a name here or there, a hair color, an eye color. You can make your male college roomie a girl in your story and no one will say boo about it (except maybe the roomie).

But in many ways, you must tell a much more naked truth in fiction than you would if you were writing a biography. All those symbols catch you out. They tell a deeper tale than the one you think you're telling when you begin. They speak of things you may not even have realized you believed yourself, because they speak from the subconscious.

As you become aware of these truths in your conscious, work with them. Use them. Liberate them. Free them to run in your conscious mind. They are tools for your use.

Fortunately, my subconscious refused to be repressed. My stories told truths I never told aloud. And so they sold. Many years, later, I read them again and realized what I had been trying to tell myself. Better late than never, I suppose.

Discover what you really believe. Then be true to it.

If you don't, you really are a liar. People read fiction, but nobody reads liars.