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+--- Thread: Guillermo Del Toro's close encounter (/thread-5419.html)
Guillermo Del Toro's close encounter - Magical Realist - May 24, 2018
"In the interview del Toro briefly explains to Cameron how he was 15 or 16 years old when he was in the company of a friend all alone on a deserted highway, carrying a six-pack of beers –“which we didn’t consume!” he quickly points out– and looking at the stars. Then the two teens noticed a small, bright light moving across the night sky in a non-linear fashion, zipping away from one spot to the other very rapidly.
(Mind you, this probably happened around 1980 or ’81, waaaay before the Mexican UFO flap that started in 1991, when Jaime Maussan was making regular appearances on national television showing the latest grainy video recorded by an amateur UFO hunter)
Guillermo and his friend decided to honk the car horn to see if the zig-zagging object would react. And react it did! The faraway UFO breached the distance between its location and theirs in a matter of seconds, and that’s when they observed it looked like a structured craft with the stereotypical shape of a flying saucer.
That an incredibly talented artist like Guillermo has had paranormal experiences doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In my personal essay for UFOs: Reframing the Debate I tried to make the argument that artists and creative individuals seem to be more open to the kind of things most of society tend to frown upon –much more with del Toro, whose life-long love for monsters marked him as an outcast from the beginning– and also perhaps better equipped to engage with these mysteries than if you try to understand them from a strictly ‘left-brain’ approach.
But what fascinates me the most about this is the way del Toro interprets the experience, after so many years: he was disappointed at how ‘badly designed’ and clichéd the saucer looked like –complete with blinking lights that went all around its rim!– His aesthetic criticism didn’t prevent him from experiencing the ‘artificial fear’ often reported by close encounter witnesses though, and in a state of utter panic he and his companion decided the time wasn’t right to play “Human Eye for the Alien Guy” and fled the scene at full speed. The kitschy Disco-like disk kept pace of their vehicle, until eventually they lost sight of it..."---- https://www.dailygrail.com/2018/05/ufos-guillermo-del-toro-terence-mckenna-and-the-co-creation-hypothesis/
RE: Guillermo Del Toro's close encounter - C C - May 24, 2018
(May 24, 2018 05:01 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: . . . and that’s when they observed it looked like a structured craft with the stereotypical shape of a flying saucer. That an incredibly talented artist like Guillermo has had paranormal experiences doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. [...] artists and creative individuals seem to be more open to the kind of things most of society tend to frown upon [...] he was disappointed at how ‘badly designed’ and clichéd the saucer looked like –complete with blinking lights that went all around its rim! His aesthetic criticism didn’t prevent him from experiencing the ‘artificial fear’ often reported by close encounter witnesses though [...] he and his companion [...] fled the scene at full speed. The kitschy Disco-like disk kept pace of their vehicle, until eventually they lost sight of it..."
Typical cliché saucer of popular fiction inter-subjectively realized in their experiences. Was Clifford Simak prescient?
Out Of Their Minds, 1970 novel written by Clifford D. Simak - (Summary ... Review)
EXCERPTS: A writer finds himself trapped in an isolated village where anything imagined becomes reality [...] Horton Smith is a foreign correspondent who, upon returning to his hometown of Pilot Knob to write a book, finds himself in a mess beyond his wildest imaginings. An old professor has been assassinated by a mysterious archer, and from him Horton inherits a tattered manuscript boldly claiming that mankind will be replaced by the fictional characters it invented. This is apparently a form of evolution. Over the course of the book Horton will drink moonshine with Snuffy Smith, be attacked by Don Quixote and deal with the Devil.
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Fictional characters make 'experiential crossings' into real life, study finds
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/14/fictional-characters-make-existential-crossings-into-real-life-study-finds
EXCERPT: It’s a cliche to claim that a novel can change your life, but a recent study suggests almost a fifth of readers report that fiction seeps into their daily existence.
Researchers at Durham University conducted a survey of more than 1,500 readers, with about 400 providing detailed descriptions of their experiences with book. Nineteen per cent of those respondents said the voices of fictional characters stayed with them even when they weren’t reading, influencing the style and tone of their thoughts – or even speaking to them directly. For some participants it was as if a character “had started to narrate my world”, while others heard characters talking, or imagined them reacting to things going on in everyday life.
The study, which was carried out in collaboration with the Guardian at the 2014 Edinburgh international book festival, also found that more than half of the 1,500 respondents said that they heard the voices of characters while reading most or all of the time, while 48% reported a similar frequency of visual or other sensory experiences during reading.
According to one of the paper’s authors, the writer and psychologist Charles Fernyhough, the survey illustrates how readers of fiction are doing more than just processing words for meaning – they are actively recreating the worlds and characters being described....
MORE: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/14/fictional-characters-make-existential-crossings-into-real-life-study-finds