The science-fiction writer and novelist Whitley Strieber and I wrote this book together. It is a conversation on the page (with alternating chapters) toward a particular suggestion or big idea, namely, that all kinds of “impossible” things, from extra-dimensional beings to bilocation to bumps in the night, are not impossible at all. Rather, they are part of our natural world, a natural world that is immeasurably weirder, more wonderful, and probably more populated than we have so far imagined with our current categories and cultures, which are what really make these phenomena seem “impossible.” Our natural world, it turns out, may well be a super natural world. For a full chapter essay on Whitley and his remarkable life and work, see chapter 7 of Mutants and Mystics. See also my foreword to Whitley’s recent book A New World (2019), entitled ‘This Book Is Contact.’ The short latter text captures especially well my paranormal understanding of reading and writing.

This book is about a near-death experience of a Jewish woman named Elizabeth Krohn, who was struck by lightning in the fall of 1988 and subsequently experienced both a life-changing near-death experience and an entire spectrum of real-world paranormal effects, from the seeing of auras and a haunted necklace to precognitive nightmares about plane crashes and earthquakes. Elizabeth and I met at a public event in the Houston Medical Center, where we were both speaking in the fall of 2015. We became friends and eventually decided to write a book together. Changed in a Flash is in two parts. In the first part, Elizabeth tells her story in her own words. In the second part, I employ the critical, comparative, and speculative tools of the history of religions to make some intellectual sense of her near-death experience and its paranormal aftermath, much of it kabbalistic in structure and origin.

This book is about the extraordinary experiences of scientists and medical professionals that “flip” them from a materialist worldview to one in which mind is fundamental, even cosmic in nature and scope. Fantastic stories pointing to the cosmic nature of consciousness are literally everywhere, from the global history of religions, through the modern near-death literature, to the popular cultural fascination with the paranormal. Scientists and medical professionals have tried to cordon these off by labeling them anecdotal or by declaring them hallucinatory or unscientific. But what happens when such epiphanies of mind happen to the scientists and doctors themselves? What happens when such professionals are “flipped” from a materialist worldview to one in which mind is fundamental, even cosmic in scope, nature, and intention? Welcome to The Flip. For an interview on these ideas, some wonderful new material (new to me, anyway) on the psychedelic revelations of the comedian Bill Hicks, and a discussion of why I wrote the book, see my chat with Katharine Shilcutt of Rice Media here: https://news.rice.edu/2019/06/03/stranger-things-kripals-newest-book-demands-deeper-study-of-stories-of-universally-shared-human-experiences/ The book was re-released in a new edition by Penguin in April of 2020 with this new cover.”