If the reader has dealt with the fluffy bunny crowd before, he can probably guess what their reaction has been to this argument. Not even letting us finish before breaking in, the true believers would blurt out a comment that if we had been there with them, that we'd know what they were seeing was real. "I know what a dream looks like and feels like". "But do you?", we ask, leading to the usual rantfests we've come to know and love. Acting on impulse, remember? "You think it, you believe it, you say it - and don't stop to really listen, because that would only slow you down". Such is the mentality that results.
Graduate students, on the other hand, are not noted for acting on impulse. If they were so inclined, they couldn't be grad students - the long hours of study and work on top of that leave little room for a social life during one's coursework, requiring that a lot of gratification be deferred. Further, were one to react as these acolytes had, in the course of a real academic discussion, one would quickly be shown the door. Undergrads may be indulged shamelessly in some places; PhD students seldom are, because the latter are expected to be able to do serious research, and are now in the academic loop.
Sam, true to his own nature and years of conditioning as a student, was more than willing to examine his beliefs and actions, even when the conclusions that he was lead to were not the ones which he would have preferred.
Remember that dream of his that we mentioned at the beginning? The way in which it seemed more real than even real life itself? "So, you're saying that Sam had a genuine supernatural experience, and was sucked into an astral projection, or something like that?", one might ask. Some in the Wiccan community certainly thought so, and Sam, as he pointed out himself, would have liked to think so. Fate, as he put it, had been pruning his family tree with a machete, and this dream gave some of those who had been taken from him, back to him, if only for a moment. "And that", he pointed out to one of his less skeptical listeners, "is a good reason to doubt the reality of anything I was seeing there. The dream looks too much like something my mind would conjure up to give itself the illusions it needed", answering the objections that arose. (3)
There are occasions when one may reasonably suspect that something supernatural is going on. (4) But, in the case of that dream, acknowledging the uncertainty imposed by the serious limits of our knowledge, Sam would argue (and we would agree) that one would seem to have a perfectly reasonable non-supernatural explanation.(5) Ockham's razor would compel us to choose the less miraculous explanation provisionally, at least until further reading should give us cause to doubt the plausibility of said explanation. We can't help but notice the resemblance between the experience Sam had - and new better than to take at face value - and the alleged "astral projections" that some have seen such significance in.
"Of course, the supernatural explanation is way more fun", Sam would add, laughing. And fun, as we would find out soon enough, or more to the point, the unrelenting pursuit of fun, meant far more to many in the community than reality. And which, really, is more fun - to be able to believe that one is a sorcerer who has travelled to other planes of existence and commands supernatural forces while thwarting dastardly schemes, or that one is just another ineffectual, untalented high school or college dropout who has been stuck in the middle of a dingy, decaying Midwestern US industrial town so devoid of anything remarkable, that when tourists ask the locals where a romantic place to visit is, those who have grown up here can't think of even a single place? Escapism is very understandable in a cheerless place like Chicago, but then, so is alcoholism. All the same, neither is a healthy choice.
That which was truly bizarre in the community was not limited to fixations about demonically possessed Geminis and sex-crazed Mediterraneans. We had a number of the elders in the community make us all look like fools on the local news by visiting Wrigley field with "ghost detecting equipment" (ie. a collection of wheatstone bridges, with which they detected the thermal variations in their equipment caused by the drafts in that cavernous place, which they then took as proof of the paranormal). The neighborhood papers, apparently, had a field day with that one shortly before the notion of Paganism first occured to one of us, which did not help one bit as we tried to discuss Polytheism on a serious, adult level a few weeks later.
There was (and is) the leader of an Egyptian Traditionalist group, who became convinced that she was the living incarnation of the Egyptian god Horus ("Heru" in Egyptian), and appeared before the community dressed as the queen of the Nile, with her followers fanning her while in suitable attire, a few years before our arrival. This scandalised the community because, after all, she had attained demi-godhood without prior permission of the elders, one of whom was fond of incarnating the goddess Hecate each Samhain. (Hecate could not be reached for comment on this). Elsewhere on our site, contrary to the beliefs of some who though we were being sarcastic, we mention the people who were convinced that they could turn milk into pearls, if they "did it with enough love", and the usual multitude of people who were supposed to be reincarnations of Atlantean nobles, sacred prostitutes in Phoenician temples, etc., ad nauseum.
To sum it up, a general loss of contact with reality and with common sense. "If Death showed up in this coffeehouse, I'd say 'come here, take me death'" - so said one of the regulars in deadly, humorless earnestness. When one can't even remember to have a survival instinct something has gone very, very wrong. The word for such a state is "psychosis", and so Sam was not entirely surprised to find himself in the middle of this bizarre debate about whether or not he was doing some great wrong, by not wanting to date the psychologically unbalanced. More than a few of those present would be among those that the saner people in their midst, would have just as soon walked away from. As Sam would have said, "live the cliche": these were the 1990s, and the ranting people he found himself surrounded by were illustrating what their unhappy era was all about, all too well.