How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

The Lincolns in fact cite the ethnographic case that moved me so while reading the late American anthropologist Mai Lan Gustafsson. It involves an American GI, an ex-marine named Sam who was having nightmares and speaking eerily fluent Vietnamese in his sleep: “Give it to me. Give it to me. Give it to me. . . . Motherfucker, you give it to me or I will eat your mother’s soul.” A Vietnamese medium Sam visited determined the voice was that of a Vietcong soldier who had been killed and whose bloodied name tag Sam had secretly kept as a souvenir. The medium had the soldier’s name (Hoc Van Nguyen) and the nature of his gory death (a landmine). Sam found the dead man’s mother, performed a ritual at the family altar, and sent the mother a monthly stipend. No nightmarish hauntings followed. They were gone.69 That is impossible thinking.