Her experience was a duplicate of my own. Then the microphone was turned on so that I would be able to talk to her from the outside. Here was the ideal opportunity: a completely relaxed subject, not moving, not even breathing. I could hardly wait.
Then when we were ready to undertake the experiment, the microphone refused to function.
It was a tremendous disappointment. We tinkered with the mike for several minutes but we finally had to give up. I’m still looking forward to taking another try at that experiment.
All my effort to become a good hypnotic subject should at least help to establish one point—not everyone can be readily hypnotized. And good subjects, so far as I know, cannot be distinguished by their behavior, their appearance, or their disposition.
It is generally agreed that there are certain factors which definitely affect susceptibility to the trance. Ordinarily, as has been stated, normal, happy individuals make the best subjects. As one hypnotist put it, the very best subjects seem to be the same ones who would be most likely to avoid the psychiatrist’s couch.
I found that very anxious and nervous people are frequently difficult subjects, as are skeptics and “know-it-alls.” There is little difference between the sexes or races, but some operators do contend that women generally make the best subjects. As to age, children are definitely easier to hypnotize than elderly people. In fact, susceptibility seems to diminish as the years go by. It is for this reason that one hypnotherapist has put forth the suggestion that all children be given instruction in trance induction before the age of fifteen.
Oddly enough, hypnotists and others having a fair degree of knowledge about hypnotism are usually poor subjects. Probably the people in this group cannot prevent themselves from criticizing or evaluating the technique of the operator who is trying to help them. Likewise, close friends and relatives of the hypnotist are usually not impressed by someone they know so well. A total stranger will generally obtain more effective results.
Alcoholics are generally easy to hypnotize, and so are those who stutter or stammer. (One respected authority, referring to hypnosis, declares that it is amazing that so many continue to suffer from stuttering when such a potent remedy is readily available.) Insomnia sufferers, on the other hand, are somewhat more difficult to help.
Contrary to my preconceived notions, real will power, if anything, would tend to make a subject better, because the will power could be utilized to co-operate with the hypnotist. Weak-minded or insane people, on the other hand, are extremely difficult, often impossible, to hypnotize.
My own conviction is that this major drawback of hypnosis—the fact that not everyone can be quickly hypnotized to an impressive depth—can be, and will be, overcome. Just as soon as a rapid, universal method of inducing a deep trance is developed, hypnosis will automatically become a therapeutic instrument of paramount importance.
And whether the key be psychological, mechanical, or electrical, the men of science will eventually spring open the lock. So far the big barrier has been the shocking absence of funds devoted to the scientific investigation of hypnosis. I was unable to find any record of a single grant ever having been made for the study of hypnosis itself.8
Meanwhile the experimentation is carried on by individuals. Many confine themselves to the therapeutic aspects of hypnosis; some explore the infinite potential of age-regression phenomena; and a few incessantly seek the perfect technique.
But there is still another facet of hypnosis, probably the most fascinating of all. It is concerned with probing the unknown realms of the mind, with the mysteries that have surrounded man for ages. I had never involved myself in this phase. Fate, however, had other plans; I was soon to take another step on the long bridge.
1Summer 1951
2Leslie Le Cron (ed.), Experimental Hypnosis (New York: Macmillan, 1952)
3See additional material in Appendix C
4See Appendix C
5Moery was kind enough to give me permission to use his real name in this book
6See Appendix G for additional information on post-hypnotic suggestion
7The doctor who originated this therapy is quoted as saying, “The effect of cessation on the central nervous system is of considerable interest. The impulse for movement in the voluntary muscles in the extremities is strikingly diminished. The patient may lie in the chamber for hours without moving his hands or changing his position. The desire to smoke disappears when voluntary respiration stops, even in patients who have been accustomed to smoke two packages of cigarettes daily. In many instances the relaxation is of such a nature that the patient does not require amusement.” Then again at a later date the doctor added that the machine not only rests the lungs but also the entire body and apparently the mind too. He said that the heart has its work decreased by a third. “Our subjects stop worrying. None feel bored.”
8There has been one grant for hypno-analysis, but none for hypnosis itself
PART TWO
Another Step across the Bridge
CHAPTER 4
My wife and I were driving to Colorado Springs. It was a beautiful April day of Colorado sunshine, and giving a special touch of grandeur to the whole scene was the majestic Pikes Peak off to the northwest. Silently engulfed by this beauty, we had not spoken a word for fifteen minutes.
Suddenly I found myself humming a tune; oddly enough, my wife at that precise moment began to hum the very same tune. We had gone through several verses before we realized what was taking place. The same tune had occurred to both of us simultaneously, and we had been in perfect synchronization up to the point when, aware of the curious coincidence, we turned toward each other to register our surprise.
Hazel laughed. “Do you think that was telepathy?”
“No, not a chance,” I assured her. “We were both simply affected by the same stimuli; these generated a similar chain of thoughts in our minds, finally creating the response, which in this case happened to be a certain tune.”
“Husband gives wife the scientific treatment,” mocked Hazel. “And perhaps the scientist can also explain why the response to the stimuli in this case was a tune called ‘Once in a While’ and why we hit upon it at the exact same instant, and also tell me just what every thought was in the chain leading to the final response.”
“That’s just where a lot of people get thrown off the track,” I remarked. “After all, it might well be impossible to explain all these tiny details. Keep in mind that there are more than two billion people in the world, and the number of circumstances involving these people is infinite—astronomical! It would be even more astonishing, considering all these people and circumstances, all the accidents, crosscurrents, and intertwinings, if, out of this maelstrom, there didn’t occur once in a while a few striking coincidences. It’s nothing to get excited about.
“No,” I added, “I can’t buy telepathy.”
“You didn’t believe hypnotism was real either,” she reminded me.
“Hypnosis is one thing. This telepathy stuff is another. And as for telepathy’s first cousin, clairvoyance, that’s strictly for the lunatic fringe!
“So I was wrong about hypnosis; that doesn’t mean I have to be wrong all the time.”
But once again, as though signaled forth by our little debate, events began to gang up on me. I was forced to scratch my head in wonder.
It all began with a dream. I dreamed that Mr. Haines, the general manager of Bernstein Brothers, came striding into my office in his usual brisk fashion and, just as I was about to speak into the mouthpiece of my dictaphone, shoved a stack of papers between me and the dictaphone. At the top of the papers was a check; he asked whether the check was made out in the right amount. When I nodded, he turned to go. But he spotted something on my desk. “I’ve been looking for this,” he said. It looked like a letter; he took it and walked out.
Aside from the fact that it was a particularly clear dream, I paid no attention to it other than to comment about it to Hazel.
The
following week, as I was about to start dictating, in came Mr. Haines, the general manager. He thrust his papers under my nose, asked whether the check on top was satisfactory, then started toward the door with his customary swiftness. But as he turned he saw a customer’s order on my desk. “Hey, I’ve been looking for this,” he said, picking up the order and taking it with him.
I reflected about this for a few moments, then I answered it with my old “necessity-of-coincidence” argument and got back to my dictation.
Within ten days I had another dream concerning our company and its general manager. This one was also crystal-clear, and more involved than the previous one. I dreamed that I walked into my office one morning and found my mother waiting for me. Before I even had a chance to express my surprise at this unexpected visit, the ubiquitous Mr. Haines swept into my office. He looked at my mother and then at me. He went back to the door, still having said nothing, and looked out of the doorway as if surveying the whole situation, apparently making sure that no one was listening. Then he slammed the door tightly shut.
As he turned from the door he reached into his inside coat pocket and took out a letter. He walked toward me, holding the letter out for me. There the dream ended.
A week later I was discussing both of these dreams with my wife and a visitor from Denver. I explained how the first dream had subsequently materialized. “But if this second one comes to pass,” I admitted, I’ll have to give some real thought to this whole business. The first one, after all, could have been nothing more than an accident. The manager is always popping into my office, and he frequently brings papers and occasionally a check.
“But this second dream. That won’t happen. In the first place my mother wouldn’t be sitting in my office early in the morning. And there would be no business at my office which would require the secrecy of closed doors. There haven’t been any secrets at that office for more than sixty years. I can’t possibly imagine what kind of letter the manager would be hiding in his inside coat pocket and why he would take the precaution to make certain that nobody overheard us discussing it.”
The very next morning it happened.
As I turned into my office, there was my mother sitting by my desk. Somehow this failed to trigger the recollection of the dream; I wasn’t thinking about it. We had scarcely had time to greet each other when Mr. Haines burst into the office and proceeded to reenact all the details of my dream. As he shut the door and turned, the dream scenes vividly came alive in my mind and I knew exactly what would happen next. He would reach into his inside coat pocket, pull out a letter which was still in an envelope, and walk toward me with his right hand outstretched, holding the letter. He did precisely that.
At any rate, I would finally learn what was in the letter. Prior to taking it out of the envelope, however, I exclaimed, “Wait! Wait a minute! Before I even look at this letter I’ll have to explain how I already witnessed this whole scene last week!”
They stared at me for a few moments; my mother seemed genuinely alarmed at this weird comment. I finally managed to throw some light on what I was talking about. Then I read the letter.
It was a medical report on my father. Our manager, it seems, had referred him to a physician for a medical check-up, and afterward Mr. Haines had asked the doctor for a report in order that our family might know the facts. All the ritual about shutting the door and making certain that nobody was listening was to insure against my father’s overhearing his own report.
“Why are you afraid to let him know about this?” I asked after finishing the letter.
“Because it says that he’s got something—a hiatus something,” answered our worried manager.
“Hiatus hernia,” I said. “That’s not very serious. I was fearing the worst after the way you sealed the door.”
Here it was again—a precognitive dream, one that predicted events which as yet had no existence. In this case the dream concerned a letter—one which had not even then been written. But these isolated cases by themselves would never have led me to a personal investigation. The incidents, however, kept right on piling up.
Next in the plot came Hazel’s mother, Mrs. Higgins. She stopped at our house one Sunday morning just long enough to ask Hazel to join her. She was on her way to the ranch, she explained, to get a calf which had been missing for almost a week. “While I was working in the garden this morning,” she went on, “your grandfather suddenly appeared to me in a sort of dream, even though I was wide awake. He told me that the calf would be found in a hole that had been washed out by floods at the edge of the big arroyo running through the ranch.” Hazel’s grandfather had been dead for more than two years.
Mrs. Higgins announced all of this in a matter-of-fact way, as though she actually expected to find the calf as the result of this incident. Hazel put on her jacket and left with her mother, but not before I scoffed at their willingness to waste their time.
When they returned within a few hours, the calf had been found in the exact spot that had been indicated. It had apparently been dead for several days. I muttered something to Hazel about her mother’s probable use of deduction to decide where the animal was likely to be—and then attributing it to a “vision.” Hazel didn’t bother to answer.
Then even Hazel’s cat got into the act. It’s a Siamese cat named Tai. Somewhere along the line the cat had a litter of kittens; and through an indiscretion on Tai’s part, the kittens were not exactly thoroughbreds. So Hazel’s mother encountered no argument when she asked permission to take the kittens to her ranch about sixteen miles south of Pueblo.
The second day after Mrs. Higgins had left with the kittens, Hazel told me that Tai was missing; we couldn’t find her anywhere. But the next afternoon the mystery was solved. Mrs. Higgins came to the house and told us that when she had gone out that morning to give the kittens their milk, who should be there on the doorstep, also awaiting breakfast, but the old gal, Tai herself.
Now Tai had never at any time been to the ranch. And if it makes any difference, she had never been in Mrs. Higgins’ car, nor had she possibly been able to see even the direction in which Mrs. Higgins drove off that day with the kittens; Tai had been locked in the basement. Nevertheless, she had promptly found the way to her kittens, sixteen miles distant. No dope, this cat!
I learned never to relate these incidents to others, because they would inevitably respond with episodes which made my own look pretty slim. Very few people have had any experience with hypnotism, but it seems that almost everyone has encountered some form of extrasensory perception, whether it concerned animal stories or the death of a relative, which cannot be explained by ordinary principles. The complacent manner in which others accepted these things never failed to amaze me—it still does to this very day.
Meanwhile odd phenomena began to enjoy a current boom in newspapers, magazines, and books. Readers Digest, for instance, printed an article entitled “Tales of the Supernatural,” and later followed it up with “The Man Who Dreamed the Winners.”Newspapers were telling the story of Lady, the Wonder Horse, an old mare who was demonstrating telepathic ability, finding missing people, and generally performing in a manner most unusual for both horses and people.
But the last straw, the final push that started me digging into the problem of extrasensory perception, came about accidentally and as a result of a hypnotic session. With a deep trance subject Bill Moery and I were conducting an experiment in age regression. When we were almost through, but before the subject had been awakened, I unconsciously toyed with a book on the shelf behind our subject. As I prepared to speak I inadvertently took the book into my hand.
“You have a book in your hand.” This came from our hypnotized subject. Then he told me the name of the book.
Bill and I stared at each other, wondering who had asked him and—what was more important—who was giving him the answers. Since, however, the books had been in view before the subject had been hypnotized, I tried something else, something he could not have see
n.
“What do I have in my hand now?”
“Newspaper,” he answered.
“What’s the name of it?” I asked. I was standing behind him; his eyes, of course, were closed, and there was little possibility that he had seen this paper before the session or on any previous visits, With little hesitation he answered, “Wall Street Journal.”
I looked at Bill across the room as I said to our subject, “Bill will hold up a certain number of fingers on his right hand; tell me how many fingers he is holding up.” Taking the cue, Bill put up his right hand (out of the subject’s sight). He held up four fingers.
“Four!” shouted our subject.
After a few more striking demonstrations he abruptly announced, “That’s all I know!”
When I inquired as to what he meant, he explained that when he knew something he simply knew it. “Then all of a sudden I don’t know and it’s all over,” he said.
Bill and I relentlessly closed in; we wanted to get at the mechanics of this thing. What sort of signal tells you that you do know? Describe what takes place. Can you actually “see” these things, or are you picking up our thoughts? By what method can the mind be trained to do what you have just done? What is the sensation when this ability leaves you? We wanted any possible clue that we could extract.
But our subject’s parlor performance was finished for that night. And during the few sessions we had with him at later dates, he was never again able to duplicate it. “When I know, I just know. Then all of a sudden it’s all over.”
Even after putting all these incidents together I could not be positive that they added up to anything. On the other hand, no genius was required to realize that here, at the very least, was a matter worthy of investigation.
The Search for Bridey Murphy Page 5