by Colin Wilson
It hardly matters whether the dream really involved the last moments of a man who had been killed: what is interesting here is Priestley’s feeling that it was all totally real and not the usual disconnected fantasy we experience in dreams. Everyone has experienced something of the sort: a dream that seems so real and alien that it seems to be an intrusion into our minds from elsewhere.
I personally find that most of these ‘intrusions’ happen when I am hovering on the point of sleep, or as I am waking up in the morning. Strange images float through my mind, voices make extraordinary but meaningless statements, people I have never seen before introduce themselves and vanish. Such voices and visions are known technically as ‘hypnagogic phenomena’* (or hypnopompic if they occur on waking), and they often leave behind a powerful sense of their independent reality.
The American psychiatrist Wilson Van Dusen came to believe that the hypnagogic states can be a vital key to self knowledge. He observed that ‘even very average people who explore this region can run into strange people and strange symbolic conversations that look like visitations from another world.’ He taught himself to fall into these semi-waking trances and was often startled and amused by the comments he heard. On one occasion a voice commented, ‘I didn’t want anything to happen to my sphere so I read Chekhov. Your sphere will have a repair letter on it.’ This is typical of those authoritative yet apparently meaningless statements made by hypnagogic voices. Yet the hypnagogic stranger could also give sensible answers. On another occasion Van Dusen asked him (or it) whether he should change his job and circumstances. He received an image of a river that had worn a deep gorge over the centuries, and the words, ‘Wear down like a river.’ He took this as a clear indication that he should stay where he was — that moving from place to place would only reduce his long-term effectiveness. On yet another occasion, about to ‘wake’ himself out of the hypnagogic state, he heard a voice ask, ‘Don’t you like my sister?’ He asked, ‘Who is your sister?’, and received the reply, ‘Heaven. Talk to me now.’ He asked, ‘Tell me of your nature,’ and was told, ‘Handsome breath.’ This seemed meaningless, but on reflection Van Dusen saw that ‘handsome breath’ could mean noble spirit, and that the notion of noble spirit, whose sister is heaven, made good sense — perhaps profound sense. His feeling that the hypnagogic states were capable of revealing something of importance was increased when, awakening from the trance, he saw the gigantic image of a mandala, intricately carved of wood, with a four-fold design representing the four-fold nature of the real self. The centre of the design was ‘an empty hole through which the fearsome force of the universe whistled’. Jung believed that the mandala is one of the great ‘archetypal’ images of the psyche.
As a psychiatrist working in a state mental hospital (Mendocino), Van Dusen came to believe that hypnagogic hallucinations could help him to understand the delusions of the insane. And here again he experienced that baffling sense of the ambiguity of this unknown region — the feeling that it may after all possess its own independent reality. One of his patients was a woman who had murdered ‘a rather useless husband’. She had a hallucination of the Virgin Mary which told her to drive to southern California and stand trial for murder. By way of authentification, the Virgin revealed that there would be an earthquake at Mendocino on the day she left and another at her destination when she arrived. On the evening she left Van Dusen was talking to the chaplain when an earth tremor made the brick building sway. He later read in the newspaper that there had been an earthquake in the south at the time the woman was due to arrive.
Van Dusen was also greatly intrigued by the hallucination of a schizophrenic gas-pipe fitter. He saw, quite clearly, a spritely little woman describing herself as ‘An Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine’, and, through him, Van Dusen could carry on conversations with the lady. One of her more charming habits was to hand over her panties when Van Dusen or the fitter said something she approved of. But if this seemed to be a proof of her dreamlike insubstantiality, her intellectual acuteness suggested otherwise. The fitter was far from bright but the lady’s knowledge of religion and myth seemed to be considerable. The fitter described a Buddhist wheel mandala made of intricately woven human bodies that rolled through the office. Van Dusen spent an evening studying Greek myths, paying special attention to their more obscure parts, and asked her about them the next day. He records, ‘She not only understood the myth, she saw into its human implications better than I did.’ Van Dusen asked her to write Greek letters, and the lady obliged. Van Dusen couldn’t see them of course, but the fitter — whose sparse education had not included Greek — was able to copy the letters, which were the real thing. When Van Dusen engaged her in a discussion on religion he became aware that her understanding was greater than his own and that she seemed to have a considerable knowledge of history. After his conversation the gas-pipe fitter turned round as he was leaving the room and asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.
Experiences like this seem to confirm the uneasy feeling that what goes on inside our heads may not be as personal as we think. Another American psychologist, Dr Jean Houston, has recorded a similar experience. One of her subjects lay on a settee wearing an eye-mask, and recorded what he ‘saw’ as a result of a dose of LSD. He said that he was on the Athens water-front having a conversation with Socrates. ‘What does he have to say?’ asked Dr Houston. ‘I don’t know. He’s talking in Greek and I don’t understand Greek.’ ‘I do,’ said Dr Houston, who had studied it for six years. ‘Repeat the words.’ Whereupon the patient proceeded to repeat classical Greek.
Thomson Jay Hudson would have no difficulty in explaining this: in fact he does so in the fourth chapter of The Law of Psychic Phenomena, citing a peculiar case described by the poet Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria. An illiterate servant girl who was suffering from ‘nervous fever’ began to speak quite clearly in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. Whole sentences were noted down, and they made sense. Some of the Hebrew came from the Bible; other things seemed to be from Rabbinical texts. A young doctor became so fascinated by the mystery that he set out to uncover the girl’s past life. At her birthplace he traced an uncle who was able to tell him that she had been taken in by an old Protestant pastor. He then tracked down the pastor’s niece, who had also been his housekeeper, and learned that the old man was in the habit of walking up and down a corridor outside the kitchen reading aloud in Greek, Latin and Hebrew. The girl’s ‘subjective mind’ had ‘recorded’ what she had heard, although she had no conscious memory of these languages, and the words had come back to her in her delirium.
In the case of Jean Houston’s patient this explanation sounds reasonable enough — perhaps he had spent some time in childhood in the house of a pastor who read aloud Plato’s dialogues in Greek. But where Van Dusen’s Emanation of the Feminine Aspect of the Divine is concerned, the explanation seems dubious. Perhaps the gas-pipe fitter had learned the Greek alphabet unconsciously. Perhaps he had also ‘absorbed’ volumes on religious myth and symbolism without realizing it. But since he was perfectly conscious while Van Dusen was ‘conversing’ with the erudite lady it is hard to understand why he was unaware that all this knowledge originated in his own mind … .
The most thorough research so far conducted into hypnagogic states was carried out at Brunel University by Dr Andreas Mavromatis. He managed to teach himself — and his students — to relax deeply, then to drift in the state between sleeping and waking without relaxing into sleep. This seems to be the most difficult part of the technique but can be achieved by practice. I myself achieved it by accident after reading Mavromatis’s book Hypnagogia. Towards dawn I half woke up, still drifting in a pleasantly sleepy condition, and found myself looking at a mountain landscape inside my head. I was aware of being awake and of lying in bed, but also of looking at the mountains and the white-coloured landscape, exactly as if watching something on a television screen. Soon after that I drifted off to sleep again. The most interestin
g part of the experience was the sense of looking at the scenery, being able to focus it and shift my attention, exactly as when awake.
Mavromatis’s most interesting experience occurred when he was half dozing in a circle of students, one of whom was ‘psychometrizing’ some object which he held in his hand — trying to describe its history. As the student began to describe his impressions Mavromatis also began to ‘see’ various scenes. Soon after this he became aware that he was seeing the scenes that were being described by the student. Mavromatis then began to alter his hypnagogic vision — a faculty he had acquired by practice — and discovered that the student began to describe these altered visions.
As far as Mavromatis was concerned this established beyond all doubt that hypnagogic states encourage telepathy. He verified this conclusion at evening classes with students by asking them to ‘pick up’ various scenes he envisaged. Although the results were mixed, some were too accurate to be dismissed as mere chance. All this finally led him to the amazing conclusion (which he hides away modestly in the last sentence of an appendix) that ‘some seemingly “irrelevant” hypnagogic images might … be meaningful phenomena belonging to another mind.’
Now this is an immensely exciting conclusion, for it suggests that deliberately-induced hypnagogia might be the open sesame to the whole field of the paranormal. The real problem with psychical research is that it is almost impossible to ‘do’ it in the laboratory. In the late 1930s Professor J. B. Rhine made an important breakthrough when a gambler told him that he could will the dice to make him win. Rhine tested him and found that his score was far above average, and that many other people could achieve the same high scores by concentrating on the dice and willing double sixes to appear. But once Rhine had proved that dice can be influenced by the mind it was difficult to think of where to go next. Like Uri Geller’s demonstrations of his ability to bend keys by stroking them, Rhine’s experiment was interesting but induced the response, ‘So what?’ If, as Mavromatis believes, the hypnagogic experience is a kind of gateway into the world of paranormal powers, it could well be the breakthrough that psychical research has been hoping for since the 1880s.
In fact Mavromatis’s suggestion has already been anticipated many times in this book — for example by Thomson Jay Hudson, who believed that the best time for ‘healing’ experiments was when falling asleep or when first waking up in the morning. Hudson recognized that the real problem is that the ‘objective mind’, with its inborn scepticism, seems to block the powers of the ‘subjective mind’. And the findings of split-brain research bring us an even clearer insight into the problem. One of its most significant discoveries is that the left brain (the ‘you’) works much faster than its non-dominant partner. The left is always in a hurry; the right takes its time. And in civilized society the problem is compounded by the sheer pace of the rat race.
Yet it is perfectly obvious that when we are in a hurry experience turns into a kind of ‘non-experience’. If I swallow my food too fast, it is difficult to taste it. If I watch television or read a book in a state of impatience, I fail to take half of it in. Yet in the course of the past five thousand years man has come to accept this over-stressed consciousness as the real thing. And the result of the non-stop stress is Proust’s feeling of being ‘mediocre, accidental, mortal’. Why should a cake dipped in tea bring a feeling of ecstatic happiness? After all it only had the effect of reviving Proust’s childhood, and he already knew he was once a child in Combray. The real significance of the experience is that the taste of the madeleine slowed him down and made him suddenly aware of the sheer delight of living at a much slower pace. And Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, describing a similar experience, uses the significant phrase, ‘Suddenly I could breathe again … .’ The most important thing that modern man could possibly learn is how to genuinely relax. It has the effect of opening up a whole new mode of consciousness, a consciousness that ‘spreads out sideways’ instead of rushing forward at a breakneck speed. And it is this mode of consciousness that offers access to paranormal experience.
In the early 1920s the wife of the American novelist Upton Sinclair began to go through a ‘middle-age crisis’ in the course of which she started to develop telepathic powers. In fact she had been telepathic in childhood, when she would feel instinctively that her mother wanted her and be on her way home before the negro servant could set out to find her. Upton Sinclair found it a little uncomfortable that his wife should know exactly what he was doing when he was away from her. In a book called Mental Radio he described a series of experiments in the transmission of drawings which demonstrate beyond all doubt that his wife could read other people’s minds. In the eighteenth chapter of that book May Sinclair described how she achieved the state in which she became telepathic. First, she said, she needed to be in a state of concentration — not concentration on anything in particular, but simply in a high state of mental alertness. And at the same time she had to go into a state of complete relaxation. The relaxation would bring her into a state of hovering on the verge of sleep. And once she had achieved this state she was ready to begin telepathy.
Obviously May Sinclair and Mavromatis are talking about precisely the same thing. And the same conclusion can be drawn: that when we can relax into this broad, unhurried type of consciousness, we can begin to exercise our ‘hidden powers’.
The distinguished psychical investigator Guy Playfair had the same experience. When in Rio de Janeiro in the early 1970s he accidentally stumbled on the trick of sinking into hypnagogic states. The nights were so hot that it was extremely hard to get to sleep, and he often lingered in a ‘borderline’ state. In these states he experienced visions, ‘as though a colour slide had been projected on an invisible screen in the darkness in front of my closed eyes’. The ‘slide shows’ became an almost nightly event and, like other ‘hypnagogic dreamers’, he was fascinated by the apparent reality of the scenes that floated in front of his eyes. He later found that a good method of inducing such states was to ‘think blue’, until his whole field of vision was a sheet of blueness. (May Sinclair also began by inducing a ‘blank state of consciousness’.) Playfair later learned that experimenters in the paranormal were using this same method to induce telepathy. They would slice billiard balls in half and place the halves over the eyes of the subject so that he could see nothing but a field of blank whiteness. (A pair of goggles with white paper on the lenses is equally effective.)
Playfair began to take part in experiments with a Cambridge researcher, Dr Carl Sargent. One day, as he was returning to London, he and Sargent agreed to try a telepathic experiment around midnight that night. He lay in bed and induced a ‘blank’ state, then waited. Quite suddenly he ‘saw’ a picture. It was a man standing on a pedestal with a halo of light around him — Playfair thought it might be a statue of Mao Tse Tung. The next day he checked with Sargent to ask what kind of picture Sargent had been trying to ‘send’. It was a picture by William Blake called ‘Glad Day’ in which a man with outstretched arms stands on a pinnacle of rock, with a halo of light behind him. Playfair’s hypnagogic vision was unmistakably a ‘hit’.
On a later occasion Playfair decided to try telepathy with a whole audience. He began by filling the room with white noise by turning a radio on to an unused wavelength and picking up the typical hissing noise, and telling his audience to relax — even to fall asleep if they wanted to. Then he selected one of four postcards at random — it was of Chatsworth House — sat behind a screen, and tried to ‘broadcast’ the picture to his audience. He did this by staring intently at the picture and mentally repeating the words, ‘castle, bridge, river, trees’. Finally he turned off the radio and asked the audience what they had ‘picked up’. Among the first replies were ‘trees, river, bridge’. Then he.passed the four cards round the audience and asked them to take a vote on which of them he had tried to ‘send’. Chatsworth House received by far the largest vote — 35 per cent. The next largest vote was for a Flemish painting of a cast
le with trees (25 per cent.) The remaining two pictures received a mere 10 and 12 per cent respectively. It seemed again a fairly conclusive demonstration that telepathy is natural to us when we are relaxed.*
In his book The Paranormal the psychologist Stan Gooch cites an even more remarkable example. It concerned a chemist named Marcel Vogel, who also happened to be a psychic. In 1974 Gooch was present at a lecture given by Vogel, and when Vogel told his audience that he intended to project an image into their minds Gooch’s reaction was, ‘No, don’t attempt that.’ He felt that Vogel was putting his head on the block. They were asked to close their eyes, and Vogel announced that he was beginning the transmission of an image. At this point Gooch ‘saw’ in his mind’s eye ‘a triangle on which seemed to be superimposed a rather less clear circle’. Vogel then said he was giving the image colour: Gooch’s mental image became blue, then red. Vogel now told them to open their eyes and asked how many had seen an image. When the first person to raise his hand said that he had seen a triangle, Gooch almost fell off his chair. Vogel then told them that he had projected the image of a triangle enclosed in a circle, and that he had first coloured it yellow, then red. (Blue is the ‘complementary’ colour of yellow: if you stare fixedly at a bright yellow object, then look at a blank wall, a blue after-image will appear.) Gooch comments, ‘I spent the rest of that lecture in what I can only describe as a state of joy. At the close the audience clapped enthusiastically. But why did they only clap? We should have stamped and shouted and broken the chairs in honour of this world-beater.’