hypnosis, dreams, and the credibility of memory

Phil Farrand, in The Nitpicker’s Guide to The X-Files has pointed out the disparities between the story of Samantha’s abduction that Mulder tells in the pilot episode and the flashback of that night in “Little Green Men” (2X01). In the pilot, Mulder claims she “disappeared out of her bed one night,” the later version of the evening shows that Mulder was awake and present at the time of the abduction, home alone with his sister, waiting to watch The Magician and playing Stratego. This scene recurs throughout the series, but it is unclear whether this memory actually represents reality.

In fact, the memory is initially presented as a dream. However, the series later takes it at face value as representative of the night Samantha was abducted. The fourth season episode “Paper Hearts” draws heavily on what we assume are Mulder’s recovered memories, repressed due to the trauma of the incident, and uses the “Little Green Men” memory throughout. However, it later becomes clear that this is only because John Lee Roche is acutally able to manipulate Mulder’s dreams. Mulder is never entirely certain of the accuracy of his memories, and, despite his attempts to accesss them, the surreality of Mulder’s recollections erodes their validity.

However, because of episodes like “Paper Hearts” or “Demons” (in which Mulder undergoes some very questionable pseudo-lobotomizing procedures in order to fully access memories) which use that memory as a springboard, the “Little Green Men” narrative becomes standard. Even by the middle of the second season, when clone-Samantha asks, “Is it too late for a game of Stratego?”, it becomes clear that the details that clone-Samantha relates coincide with Mulder’s dream-memory from “Little Green Men.”

Similar narrative confusion arises with Scully’s abduction in the second season. Mulder first imagines Scully’s abduction in “Ascension” (2X06), but this image is later corroborated by Scully’s memories in “Nisei” (3X09). Again, a hypothetical image, constructed primarily from cultural assumptions and constructions of alien abduction, becomes verified through repetition The image of Scully’s swollen stomach becomes emblematic of her abduction, along with the isolated image of the drill that recurs throughout abduction narratives in the series, especially creating a parallel between Mulder’s abduction in the eighth season of the series with Duane Barry’s in the second.

Episodes like “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space” explicitly question the validity of subjective memory, and especially memory that is accessed through hypnosis. This skepticism, paired with narratives that appear to accept such memories creates uncertainty as to what can be taken as truth within the show.