Entities Posing as People
September 15, 2017 • Los Angeles
In Carlos Castaneda’s books about his excursions in Mexico, there are several instances where he runs across people, even cars, that aren’t what they seem. Don Juan tells him that some of the people Castaneda has met and who acted strangely weren’t really people. He doesn’t actually explain what they were, however, beyond generalizing about how Castaneda needed to look harder. Writing for Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer talks about a similar experience, encountering entities who tried to get into his car at an isolated rest stop in the middle of the night, and then managed to pace the car at 40 mph as he drove away to escape them.
Terrifying as such experiences would be, it evokes a couple of things for me. One is the phenomenon of the black-eyed children, who try to get into cars or houses and act aggressively, but—they’re not really children. The whole zombie phenomenon might be psychologically related to this too: people who aren’t people. Zombies seem to take things one step farther; not only are they not human, it’s OK—in fact, it’s a requirement of one’s own survival—to destroy them.
What does this nonhuman-people thing mean? Castaneda and Swancer experienced a paranormal phenomenon about entities from somewhere else, but the whole zombie trope in fiction seems like a psychological construct to assuage our guilt about dehumanizing others.
