This column is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue. You can buy the individual issue, or subscribe and get 4 issues delivered to your door each year.
I had just finished listening to a podcast on Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain at work, cutting grass at a local district council cemetery in Essex, England. I was beginning to mull the contents of the discussion as I was walking back to my car when I looked up and saw a headstone for two young siblings, one of whom had been named ‘Thomas Man.’
My initial reaction was one of gentle surprise. It was only after a while that the timing and brute simplicity of the coincidence hit me. However, despite feeling as though something meaningful had happened, I eventually had to admit defeat: I had no idea as to its significance.
Coincidences for most people are easily dismissed as mere happenstance; of the manifold events that make up a person’s day, one or two details are bound to converge occasionally. It isn’t hard to explain away what I’d witnessed. For instance, perhaps I had subconsciously registered the boy’s name on the gravestone before choosing what to listen to as I pushed the mower between rows of the dead, only becoming aware of how I’d been influenced afterward.
Perhaps. Pinning this on the subconscious is the only kind of causal relationship that most people would accept. The Cartesian coding that is the default, now, in most of our materialist society—based on the supremacy of the rational, and a belief that mind is one thing and matter another thing entirely—could not and would not sanction there to be any deeper meaning to it.
But seeing is believing, and I have often felt as though something else must be at play in life.
Another example. I used to be in a band with a few guys who worked at a notorious East London dive bar back in the day, and would regularly turn up out of hours to meet them there before heading off to a local rehearsal room.
On this occasion I was first to arrive, and was let in by one of the barmen who was setting up for the evening. We were the only people in the venue. I sat at the main bar and we chatted as he sliced lemons and limes and stocked the fridges. I can’t remember the entirety of what we spoke about, but we had gotten onto the subject of ghosts, and it was at this point that a shadowy though fairly solid-looking figure rushed past my right shoulder, actually creating the kind of cold draught you so often hear about in horror films. I heard a sound from behind and to the left, the direction the shadow entity had been traveling in, as if a coin had been thrown from across the room and landed on the floor. I turned my head in response, first right and then left. The barman reacted, too. Yet what we had both seen had vanished. We gazed at each other in disbelief.
Over the following days, the skeptical part of my brain kicked in to rationalize what had happened—had it been infrasound from a passing lorry on the road above? Some bad acid simultaneously dislodging itself from both of our brains in a moment of shared delusion? Or a piece of masonry falling loose from the ceiling? No explanation my mind could offer really felt satisfying. There had been too many sensorial inputs, providing information in a way that was too well coordinated—a phantom corroborated by two people at once. Don’t tell Descartes, but it really felt as though by talking about it, we had conjured it.
I have more anomalous experiences to relay besides these—I can talk to you about pattern-painting UAPs and spontaneously exploding pint glasses another time—but what I think I’m getting at is at its core a kind of heresy against Cartesian dualism. Because both of these stories illustrate instances where the mind seems to have had a direct or indirect influence over the physical world.
At this point, I’ve changed the assumptions with which I approach daily life. To me, it feels more correct on an instinctive level to operate by the belief that what we call the material realm is really just the mind vibrating at a different speed.
I had an appointment to have my ears vacuumed at home on the afternoon of the Thomas Mann coincidence, and my partner’s family were visiting, which meant there were eight people in our small house. My daughter burst into tears when she saw the procedure being carried out by the audiologist in our kitchen. So, after the whole thing was finished, I retreated to my bedroom, stuck on my headphones, and put on a Gateway Experience recording.
A declassified document on the CIA website entitled Analysis and Assessment of the Gateway Process suggests that this protocol—which combines elements of hypnosis, biofeedback, and transcendental meditation—can radically alter the way the human subject interfaces with reality. Effects range from the vague and fairly innocuous—an increased sense of creativity, intuition, and general well-being—to the far more outlandish: things like astral travel and remote viewing.
“For the whole 37 minutes, I was phasing in and out of the death-like state of unconsciousness that Gateway Experience recordings are designed to produce”
As a lifelong devotee of the woo-woo and a persistent seeker of the trip, it was only a matter of time before I gave the Gateway Process a whirl myself. It essentially involves listening via headphones to a series of guided visualization practices and affirmations, voiced by the creator Robert Monroe, set against a background of carefully crafted binaural noise. These noises present the brain with two subtly different audio inputs, one in each ear, which trick the brain into attempting to reconcile them by creating its own, third sound.
The CIA document lays out the effects of coaxing the mind into fabricating this third sound: it synchronizes the neural waves of the left and right brain hemispheres to unlock higher levels of human functioning. The CIA document used the analogy of “lamp vs. laser,” saying that the untrained brain of the average individual gives off an energy level akin to a dull lightbulb. The hemispherically synchronized individual, however, is capable of bringing to bear energetic brain power that burns with a laser-like intensity.
This time, the binaural wave sounds felt entirely different to how they’d ever done before, probably owing to the ratshit-sized pieces of earwax that had just been removed from my head. Even as I was running through the preliminaries, I began to lose consciousness. This had never happened before. I usually remain awake even after the main visualization stage has passed. However, this time, for the whole 37 minutes, I was phasing in and out of the death-like state of unconsciousness that Gateway Experience recordings are designed to produce. Towards the end, it was only the sound of my daughter laughing in the front garden coming through the open window that brought me back.
The late David Lynch spoke often of his use of transcendental meditation as a means of “diving into an ocean of pure consciousness,” and it was the surface of these waters that I was skimming across during those 37 minutes—trying to tune into an existential radio station on a very narrow bandwidth that never stops shifting around. In dictionary definition terms, catching it is a matter of coincidence—the mind and the bandwidth happening to line up for a moment in time. Ultimately, I feel, the whole thing is about vibration and frequency—brainwaves, consciousness, matter, coincidences involving the gravestones of dead brothers, phantoms that sound like thrown coins… Everything.
I put my headphones back on charge and went downstairs to prepare dinner for kiddo.
This column is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine: The Reasons to Be Cheerful Issue. You can buy the individual issue, or subscribe and get 4 issues delivered to your door each year.
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