Dreaming With The Lights On: June 5, 1968

Toronto psychotherapist Adam Crabtree has written extensively on hypnosis, trance, multiple personality and synchronicity. In 2020, he published The Land of Hypnagogia, an exploration of the psychological liminal state we experience between sleeping and waking.

In the introduction to the book, Adam shared the following anecdote:

“It happened on June 5, 1968, to be exact. I was a young psychotherapist working in Toronto and living with a Therafields group [a therapeutic community in the Annex neighbourhood of the city]. The time was shortly after 3:00 a.m. I had been asleep for some time, when I suddenly and instantaneously woke into what seemed like full waking awareness and immediately sat up in my bed. I was startled because I had never awakened so abruptly before in my life.

I looked around, trying to discover what had roused me. I found nothing that could explain it: no noise (it was very quiet), no pain, no bad dream, nothing. Still completely puzzled, I automatically reached over to the bedside table where I had my little transistor radio. It was off. Without thinking, I turned it on. It was tuned to AM 1050, as it always was: my station to listen to the latest popular music.

But what came out of the radio was not music, but someone talking. I immediately realized that being the middle of the night, and with radio waves bouncing all over the place, I was getting a station with the same frequency somewhere far away.

It was a news reporter. I quickly found out that he was in Los Angeles, traveling with the Bobby Kennedy campaign. The results of the California Democratic primary were now in and Kennedy had won. The reporter said he had just given an acceptance speech and was heading through the hotel kitchen to a different part of the building for a news conference.

I was delighted because I was a great Kennedy fan. The reporter kept talking as they moved through the kitchen. As I listened, I heard sounds of mayhem. The reporter was obviously confused, and when he got his wits together, he said, terribly shaken, that Kennedy had been shot I then realized that I had heard something like gunshots in the mayhem. I was devastated and glued to that station until we were given the news sometime later that Kennedy had died in hospital.

Beginning as it did with a sudden arousal from sleep, I now retrospectively put this experience in the category of the hypnagogic. But in this case, the borderline state did not show itself in feelings or impressions of that kind, but in actions. Actions that were completely unpremeditated and done without much thought.

The first was the sudden awakening. Next immediately sitting up in bed. Then my reaching for the radio and turning it on. Next my staying with the unexpected program and not changing the dial. None of these actions were unusual, but they were, as it tums out, terribly significant. I should add that the time that elapsed between my sudden awakening and the firing of the shots was less than five minutes.

There was no significant mental activity going on in me (what we usually associate with hypnagogia); what was significant were the compulsive/automatic actions I performed. Although the actions were pedestrian and ordinary, their combination and results were anything but. Certain elements from within me combined with certain elements in the ordinary world to create this extraordinary personal incident: the extraordinary manner of my sudden awakening (which had never happened before and has not happened since); the fact that I immediately reached for my radio and that it was tuned to the frequency of that particular California station; the fact that the assassination occurred within five minutes of my awakening, and the fact that when I had awoken nothing had happened yet.

I am sure that anyone might see this whole incident as mere coincidence, or choose to categorize it as what Carl Jung called synchronicity. But for me, and for my experience of it, it had all the features of occurring on the borderline between the Land of Hypnagogia and the Land of the Ordinary. I also consider that the necessary precision of the simple actions I took, each leading to the wholly unexpected result, had the features of some kind of involvement from an intelligence from within-below my ordinary awareness and beyond anything I could have ever predicted. For me personally, it has the overall feeling of the hypnagogic.”

As I read Adam’s words, I felt an uncanny sense of familiarity, as if I had heard this particular story before. I racked my brains all day, but I couldn’t place it. But after a night’s sleep, the lightbulb turned on: “Of course -- Nick Smith!”

Eight years earlier, in 2012, I had interviewed Nick Smith as part of my research on my memoir, Dreaming Sally: A True Story of First Love, Sudden Death and Long Shadows. In the summer of 1968, Nick was the leader of a student tour of Europe, known as “The Odyssey”, that formed the narrative spine of my book, eventually published in 2018, five decades years after the trip.  My book explores the theme of synchronicity through the true story of my 18 year old girlfriend, Sally, whose accidental death that summer in Europe was foretold in a dream.

Digging up the transcript of my 2012 interview with Nick, I found the following anecdote, matching the details of the above passage in Adam Crabtree’s book:

“I watched the Bobby Kennedy primary till about 11pm on that June night in 1968. I didn’t see his speech at the Roosevelt Hotel, so I went to bed at midnight. I woke up around 3 in the morning, bolt upright, and felt compelled to turn on the radio. Almost instantaneously, I heard the news that RFK had been shot.

I’d never had that kind of experience in my life. I just knew that something had happened. I was with my sisters in my parent’s house, who were in Boston. Maybe our dreaming brains can intercept radio waves, like whales communicating? It was so vivid, then I’m wide awake. I think we experience it more often as kids.”

Both young men sitting up “bolt upright” at 3am – that fact alone sent my free associations into overdrive. The energies of Eros and the paranormal, some argue, are inextricably bound. Science says: prove it. Art says: love it.

I sent a copy of Nick’s memory to Adam and a copy of Adam’s to Nick, but neither replied.

I must add that all three of us – Adam, Nick and myself -- were Bobby Kennedy enthusiasts. When he visited Toronto in the spring of 1967, RFK attended a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game – the last year they won the Stanley Cup -- and my brother and I happened to be sitting 10 rows behind his bushy head; as he was introduced on the PA system, he turned around, flashed that chiclet grin, and waved in our general direction. That same spring, Adam bumped into Kennedy on the street and shook his hand.  RFK’s election in 1968 would have likely changed the course of history – no Nixon, no escalation of the Vietnam War, no Watergate, no RFK Junior going mad. Or just half-mad.

 As an accidental bridge between the testimonies of Adam and Nick, an obvious question arose in my mind. How many other people across the world may have had a similar precognitive experience of RFK’s death on June 5, 1968? Surely it was not limited to two random (and gifted) guys in Toronto. But only if a critical mass of people had written down their experiences would we have any way of collecting compelling evidence of such “psi” phenomena; alas, most of us are conditioned to dismiss such “whoo-whoo” spookiness as “crazy” and zip the lip. A sample of two would not pass a test of scientific rigour – but two million?

I can dream, can’t I?

Postscript: On June 5, 1968, the artist Andy Warhol, an icon of the 1960s, was shot by the actress Valerie Solanas. As he recovered in his hospital room, he heard in a hypnagogic state the news of the RFK assassination on TV.

On November 22, 1963, as Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception, dropped acid as he lay dying, the last thing he heard was the news of the assassination of JFK on TV.

 Just sayin’.