Several years ago I had one of those experiences, which everyday life is probably full of on some microscopic, atomized, imperceptible level and which would fall into the category of the paranormal.

Now before we go any further I should confess that while I’m a life-long atheist I’m also not a sceptic in terms of the paranormal and in fact I don’t see any contradiction between these two positions. Or rather let me re-phrase that, I am a sceptic, in fact I’m deeply sceptical, but I feel that what is supposed to be scepticism these day is in fact something rather different that I’ve decided to call “neurotic materialism”: neurotic materialism is the violent assertion of rationalism in the face of any even mildly inquisitive approach to what has been deemed irrationalism, a kind of explosion of rage, often couched in terms that to me seem to parallel the discursive strategies of neo-liberalism and Capitalist Realism, that of the childishness of the believer, an absolute hostility against the refusal to be contained within the parameters of the scientific worldview or the rationality of the market system.

There has been a confluence of these two positions of course, I suspect that there’s also an overlap of capitalist realism and neurotic materialism especially among those who used to be seduced by the possibilities of an outside to both, alternate forms of social organization, areas of experience and perception outside the standard paradigms. Of course one of the foundational texts of capitalist realism is Dawkins’ “The Selfish Gene” and the irony here is of course that while the sceptical, scientific mind hunts down and destroys any deviation in the name of rationality the contemporary political rationality based on free markets and homo economicus rest in the fundamentally religious notion of the invisible hand. I don’t think NM is a response to the recent rise of religion or even of Islamic fundamentalism I think instead it’s mostly an off-shoot of the End Of History.

There’s a classic bit of N.M here in response to Phil’s posting a very interesting and rigorous discussion on the overlaps between the paranormal and contemporary physics. What’s certain is that the commentator hasn’t watched it but is instead simply responding in a not very detached, fundamentally emotional way to Phil’s desire to have a little bit more of an enlightened dialogue between the two fields. The response, then, in that way is a perfect demonstration of the kinds of hysterical, intolerant scepticism that always strikes me as developing out of the speakers own woundedness, a form of negative solidarity: I have had to close down my imagination, the free range of my enquiry in the name of maturity, and you must suffer along with me!

Now let’s also be clear: I have no truck with Hippies, with new-age stuff generally, with mediums and spiritualist but I think that there probably is a point at which what you might call the “hard paranormal” died off or at least was driven conclusively underground and forced to slum it with all kinds of tat-peddlers and wannabe-gurus. However, ignorant as I am, I think it would also be fair to say that if anything destroys simple, common-place conceptions of time, space and causality it’s modern physics. There’s a very interesting British writer, Andrew Crumey with whom my own life overlaps in a small way (he moved out of a house in Leeds and I moved in directly after him) whose work explores some of these complexities (Mobius Dick being an excellent example). I mean, pick up a copy of the New Scientist or Nature and it’s a head-fuck beyond the dreams of most speculative fiction.

But still, on to my own paranormal experience. It’s mild so don’t start getting anxious that it’s going to reveal hitherto hidden depths of madness and paranoia.

I woke up about six o’clock in the morning, a bright Summer Sunday as I recall, to go for a piss. As I did a voice in my head said one word to me very pointedly, it was clear and distinct cutting through the tangle of babble and scraps of memory and dream that float around and interweave, alternately thickening and weakening as you slide in and out of sleep.

The word was “interregnum”.

Interregnum. As I had a piss I puzzled over the word. I wasn’t even sure I knew what it meant: if it even was a word it was one I hadn't used, in speech, writing or even as part of my internal discourse, ever, as far as I could tell. Of course I’m interested in words, and annoyed by not knowing what one means, especially if it appears to be a word that is swimming around in there somewhere. I went back to bed. I slept for a few hours. I got up, ate breakfast, then we went into London to watch a film.

We got there a bit early and went for a walk around Soho to kill time. Inevitably I wandered into a bookshop and this being a Soho bookshop there wasn’t much in there of interest, lots of books on and of photography of course, a few pulpy novels. The person I was with started to look at something so I scanned around a little more attentively for something to read.

The only book that I could see that was of the slightest interest to me was a biography of Louis McNiece. I can’t remember the name of the book but there can’t be that many McNiece biographies out there.

I do remember however that it was on a low shelf so I squatted down to look at it. It was a thick, hardback edition and instead of opening it at the start and looking at the contents page I just opened it at random.

The first word I saw,sitting there in the middle of the page?

Interregnum.

I was of course completely stupified by this and immediately started explaining the whole incredible situation to my partner, who, while rather mystical about her own experience was suddenly drily and irritably sceptical about my own: it was simply co-incidence and if it hadn’t been a really statistically unlikely coincidence it wouldn’t have impressed itself upon me. Of course I know that argument and again, from the outside I can understand the scepticism, but for me, from the way this extremely low-frequency word had so pointedly arrived in my mind on the same day that I wandered into a bookshop, picked up the only book in there that was of interest to me, opened it at random and saw the same extremely low frequency word, well…

I’m sceptical about my own experience of course: it confirms nothing to me but still if there’s one thing I am sceptical about it’s the notion of linear time, and so I am prepared to imagine that in some ways when we sleep we enter a-temporality, that consciousness is fundamentally way of ordering what would otherwise be a kind of a-temporal miasma, so for me the idea of pre-cognition, of something from what the conscious mind delineates or fences off as time-yet-to-come but which the unconscious mind has access to as part of its base-level a-or-multi temporality being caught, trapped on the wrong side of the filter as you suddenly wake up, well that’s an idea I like to explore (especially in fiction as it happens).

So of course I’m sceptical but I’m also intrigued and exploratory and the hysteria of the neurotic materialist seems to me more childish, knee-jerk, emotive and irrational (and in many respects not very well informed) than that of the curious sceptic.

I’m sceptical about scepticism. Which is surely how it should be.