Voices in the Ocean Page 16

  Later, Marino would e-mail me in response to queries, and I took every exchange as an opportunity to probe further into her thoughts about other creatures, how their brains might inform their worlds. My longing to know more about animal minds was far from academic. Recently, my two cats, Mouse and Georgia, had both died suddenly of a virulent disease. Losing them felt like life’s sucker punch, and returning home to my apartment after they were gone, I was devastated by its emptiness. Attachments with animals run deeply through our bedrock, and we have no reason to think that creatures with different brains than our own feel any less connected than we do. This is especially true of dolphins. In fact, their elaborate limbic system might make them feel the loss of another even more acutely.

  On my last night in Vegas, sleep came quickly but strangely. In my dreams I found myself adrift in a stormy sea at twilight, wind howling and waves battering rocks, while all around me the black dorsal fins of dolphins rose and fell in the tumult, coming precariously close to shore. On a cliff above, shadowy figures lurked: it was important to escape them. To avoid the pounding surf I dove, and for some reason I could see perfectly underwater, as though I were wearing goggles. Below the surface, the dolphins were trying to get my attention. They were excited, gathered around a doorway under the ocean. The door was bright turquoise and quite small, as though built for hobbits (or dolphins). They pushed their beaks against it and nudged me forward. I opened the door and swam through. On the other side, the water was darker, the color draining from marine blue to inky navy to a blackness that felt absolutely still. Then I realized I wasn’t in water any longer, but in space. The medium was rich, as viscous as oil, suffused with grandeur and an almost unbearable sorrow. I swam deeper and deeper, beyond anything I could recognize but the fast sweep of dolphins moving around me in the beautiful, terrible void, my own heartbeat, and the winking of the luminescent stars.

  I was in Los Angeles when Joan Ocean e-mailed, inviting me back to Hawaii. If I could come to Kona the following week, she wrote, I could be her guest at a sold-out gathering she was hosting, a five-day workshop called “Dolphins, Teleportation, and Time Travel.” During the day, we would swim with wild dolphins along the coast. In the evenings, we would listen to lectures about dolphins. Throughout the week, the group would remain in “dolphin consciousness,” which Ocean described as an “active, relaxed, hyper-aware state of high intelligence.” There would be guided meditations, fire circles. “The dolphins have been amazing lately,” she added. “I don’t like to always use that word, but it definitely applies here.”

  I packed enthusiastically. I was still curious about why dolphins were such key players in the New Age movement; why the words “teleportation,” “time travel,” and “dolphins” might appear in the same sentence. When I’d been to Dolphinville previously, I had only dipped into Ocean’s world. This would be more like a dunking, in which I’d be surrounded by people with extraordinary—some would say zany—beliefs. In their lexicon, dolphins are not mere animals. They are beings from another dimension, visitors from faraway stars, wise elders here to teach us vital lessons. At Ocean’s seminar, my fellow attendees would be people who see these animals not as a scientific challenge—where is that Level 4 in their neocortex?—but as one great big existential riddle.

  Can dolphins swim through space and time? Can they show us how to love? Do they know something about life that we do not? (The dolphins in Douglas Adams’s novel So Long and Thanks for All the Fish certainly did, zipping off the planet just before an imminent doomsday, leaving behind only a fruit basket and a thank-you note.) As far-fetched as these questions may seem, ever since humans met dolphins we have felt a compelling attraction to them, a kinship we can’t entirely explain. This is the connection John Lilly tapped into; it was the source of his immense public popularity and also what spun him out, and whatever you want to call it, this inkling or feeling or hope that dolphins are some kind of aquatic oracles is widespread. It’s common. To scientists’ dismay, it verges on conventional wisdom. What Ocean was convening was the opposite of an academic gathering. It was a fantasy camp for imaginative dolphin lovers, a sort of Dolphin Comic Con. Which, to me, seemed like a wonderful reason to go.

  My plan was to keep an open mind. I would be an amiable but neutral observer. To a point, anyway: convincing me that dolphins come from another solar system, or that anyone, to date, has time traveled, would be an uphill battle. But already, to a less astral degree, I had been forming my own strong feelings about dolphins. There is something singular about them, and I’ve felt it every time I’ve been in their presence. I have heard this chalked up to recognition—that we detect the same spark of higher intelligence in them that we find in ourselves— but orangutans are wicked smart too, and you don’t find people gathering to teleport with them.

  Dolphins are enigmas. Maybe we’re hoping they do have helpful intergalactic know-how; some secrets to living in harmony would be timely right about now. Maybe we have no idea who dolphins are or what they’re up to or what they’re capable of, so we make up stories to soothe ourselves; maybe our own brains need to bake for another fifty or sixty million years before we can relate to them fully. Or maybe, as some researchers assert, dolphins are nothing special. Maybe they’re overrated and only about as clever as parrots, and in a well-intentioned but misguided way, we project our spiritual longing onto them. Maybe we are hardwired to love any animal that looks like it’s always smiling.

  The dolphin-as-dullard idea has been vigorously refuted by all but a few scientists, but I include it as a reminder that we don’t have everything figured out. We reckoned only four centuries ago that the Earth revolved around the sun; as recently as 1850, no one believed that germs cause disease. The cycle goes like this: we’re sure of something—and then we’re not. We correct ourselves and carry on. If you could plot on a graph our attempts to catalog our world, it would be a series of short, sharp zigzags running all over the place. “Earth, to put the matter succinctly, is a little known planet,” E. O. Wilson wrote. The question I was turning over and over in my mind was this: What don’t we know about dolphins? For that matter, what don’t we know about ourselves? What don’t we know about everything? The answer to all of the above is: plenty.

  You might be pleased to learn, for instance, that rather than the five senses you think you possess—plus a “sixth sense” if you count intuition—humans have at least twenty-one means of perception. Our biological toolkit includes proprioception (the position of one’s body in space), chronoception (a sense of the passage of time), nociception (the awareness of pain), equilibrioception (if you’ve ever had vertigo, you know what it means to lose this), and thermoception (a sense of hot and cold), among others. There are internal sensors throughout our bodies—in our brains, hearts, blood, skin, cells—registering even the most ethereal cues. One recently discovered sense is magnetoreception, or the ability to track the planet’s magnetic fields. We may have this sense, weakly. Or we may not. Dolphins definitely have it. Sharks, birds, sea turtles, bats, butterflies, and honeybees, to name just a few animals, use it to navigate. No one knows exactly how it works, but scientists think that magnetite crystals in the creatures’ heads might subtly pull them in one direction or another, guiding them across great distances with surreal precision.

  In other superpower news, people and monkeys have managed to move objects using only their thoughts. Dolphins communicate through their foreheads. Birds can feel earthquakes coming hours in advance. Prayer has healed people. Brain surgery patients placed into temporary comas were able to recall—in astonishing detail—conversations that occurred in the operating room while they were technically dead. Neurologist Allan J. Hamilton, quoted on Harvard Medical School’s Web site, recounted one of these incidents, asking: “What, I wondered, should those of us in the medical field do with such unsettling disturbances, such seeming ripples of the supernatural? Ignore them? Or should we declare them simply to be a puzzling mixture of science and spirit? C
an we now allow ourselves to entertain the possibility that the supernatural, the divine, and the magical may all underlie our physical world?” So what other exquisite senses and abilities might humans—or dolphins—have that we don’t even realize? The zigzags continue.

  “Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine,” the British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington famously declared. I knew those would be worthwhile words to keep in mind while attending sessions with titles like “The Parallel Worlds of Our Multiverse.” “Dolphins play with the energies they attract,” Ocean writes in her book Dolphins into the Future. “Maybe they are playing with past, future and parallel lives, with fourth-dimensional ghosts, the energies of the cetaceans in the Arctic, the inner earth, human auric fields, colorful rainbows, or music or entities living on other planets. They can access it all. What a fun way to live! No wonder they seem so joyful.”

  It’s easy to dismiss what you don’t understand. It’s unnerving to think that the world might be weirder than advertised. Daily, we forget how miraculous everything is, down to the teeniest subatomic speck. According to quantum theory, the universe is a seething field of potential, constantly creating itself—and what we consider reality is only a slightly more convincing type of dream. If you swap-in a different brain, your reality changes too. And these are findings that we have proven. Why should anything surprise us?

  “I know many of you have been here before and have heard the basic dolphin information,” Ocean said, surveying the packed room, people staked out in chairs, on the floor, anywhere they could find a seat. “So tonight I thought I’d talk about the far-out stuff.” She beamed; the crowd whooped. “We can take it, Joan!” a man wearing a Sasquatch T-shirt shouted. “We’re ready!” a woman with a magenta streak in her hair yelled. A crystal dolphin sculpture, leaping from its pedestal, cast light patterns on the wall behind her.

  It was Day 3 of the workshop and I had just arrived, pulling into Sky Island Ranch as the evening’s program began. I wedged myself into the room and looked around. There were at least seventy people here, slightly more women than men, a wide span of ages and nationalities. There were Australians, Brits, and Germans. A South African and a New Zealander. Several Canadians. A handful of kids under ten. Dolphinville was well represented: I recognized a local divemaster, an underwater photographer, and a boat captain. It was an attractive crowd, not a scruffy hippy or burnt-out necromancer in the house. They’d spent the morning on the water, Ocean said, and swum nonstop with the spinners.

  Ocean leaned back in her chair, a white swivel lounger. Earlier, she had told me that she calibrated her talks according to who was in the audience, “to know how much to share.” In this room, there was no need to hold anything back. She could lob out phrases like “holographic communication” and “fourth-dimensional beings” and know that nobody would scoff. “There is a longing in people to have contact with dolphins,” she began. “It’s not some whim. We have a deep soul connection.”

  Her own dolphin experiences began in 1978, at a workshop with John Lilly about out-of-body experiences. “I liked his sense of humor,” she said. “Oh, boy. You just never knew what he was going to do next.” Lilly played tapes of dolphin vocalizations for the group, day and night, at top volume. “So maybe that’s where everything started,” Ocean mused. “Maybe they were saying things and I was picking it up.” Not long after that, she started receiving messages from the dolphins themselves. For the past thirty-five years, she said, she’d been in close communication with them, swimming with twenty-eight species of dolphins and whales in twenty countries. The spinners in Hawaii were the ones who had divulged the most. “We are here to teach you to move beyond the limits of the five senses,” Ocean felt the dolphins tell her as she swam in Kealake’akua Bay. “We encourage you to communicate with us in the unexplored domains of the sixth sense and beyond.” Plus, the dolphins added, it was possible to merge the senses together: “You will begin to smell images, hear feelings, and see sounds.”

  Though such a mash-up might sound uncanny, it actually exists, and is referred to by scientists as “synesthesia.” People with this neurological condition—and there are a fair number of them—experience such bizarrities as feeling colors, tasting shapes, scenting emotions, and viewing numbers as structures. It’s even more common if you canvas the creative fields: the artist David Hockney has synesthesia, and so did writers Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, and Vladimir Nabokov. The inventor Nikola Tesla was said to possess it; musicians as diverse as Franz Liszt and Pharrell Williams have claimed it too. Research has suggested that we all have this vibrant cross-wiring at birth, but for reasons unknown, most of us shed it fairly quickly. Others maintain it throughout their lives, and dwell in a far more textured world; my readings about the syndrome made me wish that I had it.

  As the room digested Ocean’s revelations, she continued. “I was swimming with the dolphins for about two months before they included me in their pod,” she said. “The pod field of energy can be very wide. Remember, they can communicate over long distances to each other, so they don’t need to be side-by-side like we do.” As Ocean glided among them in a relaxed state, she would ask questions and then wait for images to pop into her mind, which she took as answers. Among the unexpected things the spinners told her was that she should pay more attention to opera.

  Ocean bought recordings of the great sopranos and listened to them constantly, trying to hit some of the high notes herself. Compared to dolphins, however, we are all baritones. They hear sounds up to 160 kHz, eight times higher than we do. Dolphins’ ultrasonic capabilities, Ocean believes, are not just a means for the animals to navigate and hunt fish. She describes their sonar as an advanced form of expression that can alter reality, opening up portals into other dimensions. “These tones can transform all things,” she has written. “They can heal and change our bodies and our environments. They can dematerialize and materialize matter, and even change the physical structure of objects (demonstrated in the third dimension by sound that can shatter glass).”

  The New Age world is full of references to frequency and vibration, the idea being that higher vibrations represent love and transcendence, and lower vibrations are the dull and sluggish stuff of negativity and disease. Even if you cringe from talk of “chakra balancing” or “harmonic healing,” you’re probably aware that everything around us is oscillating at all times, even the heaviest solid objects, and that energy waves can have exceptional force, even if we can’t see them or hear them (think earthquake, laser, microwave oven). Sound as treatment is a fast-growing field: at frequencies far above what dolphins can generate, ultrasound has destroyed tumor cells, healed broken bones, and cauterized wounds. It can wipe out toxic algal blooms in lakes and oceans, and cause drops of alcohol, plastic beads, matchsticks—and in one boisterous experiment, the ingredients in a caprese salad—to levitate. Blasts of high-frequency sound waves can, as Ocean claims, change the physical property of a substance. Liquid can turn to jelly. Bacteria can disintegrate. Water can be zapped into mist.

  Even at lower frequencies, sound has intense effects. A major study at London’s Chelsea and Westminster Hospital found that when lovely music was piped into their rooms, patients healed faster. Also, the staff was happier, neonatal infants thrived, everyone’s blood pressure was lowered, and surgeons performed more effectively. When the results of this experiment came in, the hospital recruited Brian Eno, a musician who has worked with David Bowie, U2, and Coldplay—to help compose its emergency room’s playlists. On the flip side, the imaginative folks at Raytheon devised an acoustic riot shield that uses low-frequency sound waves to interfere with the respiratory tract, incapacitating protesters by making it hard for them to breathe.

  None of this proves, of course, that dolphins are using their echolocation to “stop time” or “transport themselves into other realities,” as Ocean believes; if they are, then bats must be doing it too, because their frequency range is
even higher, up to 212 kHz. But sound is powerful, and to imagine that dolphins, maestros of underwater acoustics, might have some abilities in this realm that we haven’t guessed is not an unreasonable stretch.

  One side effect of the notion that dolphins’ sonar has transformative powers is that a shady industry promising “dolphin therapy” has sprung up to capitalize on it, charging astronomical fees. Marketed to parents of kids with autism, cerebral palsy, and a host of other afflictions ranging from quadriplegia to bed-wetting, it costs about $3,500 per week. I’d talked to Lori Marino about dolphin therapy when I was in Utah; she had coauthored a paper that investigated its healing claims and showed them to be scientifically unsupported. Any benefits are short-lived, she found, fading fast when the family returns home—adopting a puppy would have more enduring results. “It’s the worst type of snake oil you can imagine,” Marino said, “taking advantage of desperate people who have a sick child and telling them, ‘Yeah, if you give me enough money and the dolphins swim with your kid for a half hour every day, that child is going to be helped.’ It’s a global sham.”

  Ocean had another perspective. “It’s not that dolphins heal people,” she told the group. “It’s that being with them helps people regain their natural healthy state.” They lead us beyond our limitations, she explained, into “a universal field of energy that is the source of all possibilities.” To her mind, they don’t fix us so much as take us into a place where we don’t need fixing. One time, she recalled, a dolphin swam up to her and loudly sonared her ear, which happened to be infected. “I wasn’t even paying attention,” she said. “He came right at me and…” She imitated a high-pitched dolphin whistle: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!” The dolphin’s treatment worked, she said: “I felt the ear open up.” She urged us to ask the spinners for help if we needed it. But the request had to be made from the heart, she stressed. “What carries the communication are your feelings of love. Feelings of caring. And you know that feeling when it comes over you. You think of the dolphins and you just feel so…much…love.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “When you’re feeling that love in your heart—that’s when you’re communicating.”