My bookshelf·Index No. 0405

Encounters

D.W. Pasulka·Saint Martin’s Essentials·2023·256 pages
Read

Pasulka’s follow-up to American Cosmic, and she opens the aperture wide. Nonhuman intelligence here doesn’t just mean whatever’s flying around — it covers angels, demons, animals, AI, the things people meet in dreams, and the possibility that some of it is us, later, coming back. She talks to scientists building machines to decode animal language, to a Nobel laureate who swears a glowing raccoon spoke to him, to experiencers whose stories she treats as data instead of symptoms. The best chapters are the ones about growing up around secrecy — a friend whose father worked in classified intelligence and the strange domestic weather that creates — and about how different cultures have handled dreaming. She’s still a religion scholar first, so the question is never whether any of it is real. It’s what people do with contact, and how belief gets built out of it.

Encounters
By D.W. Pasulka. Saint Martin’s Essentials, 2023. 256 pages.