Part Two

The ability of the brain to recall past impressions is demonstrated by lan Wilson in his book "Mind Out of Time".

He says "What Penfield seems to have found surgically ..[is].. a sort of recording track of all past experiences which can be reactivated under certain conditions. The existence of this mechanism is independently attested by a number of peculiar case histories from medical journals. One example is that of a well-bred elderly English woman, who in the year 1902, having been saved by her physician Dr. Henry Freeborn from a near fatal bronchial attack, suddenly astounded him and the attendant nurse by beginning to declaim loudly in a language eventually identified by a visitor as perfect Hindustani. The woman seemed to be asking to go to the bazaar to buy sweets, and reciting complete Hindustani poems. When, after a week, she had sufficiently recovered from the delirium the woman was able to explain that while consciously she had no recollection of any Hindustani, and indeed had forgotten she had ever learned the language, she had spent the first three years of her life in India when she had been in the care of ayahs or nursemaids and had spoken nothing but Hindustani. During her delirium her recording track of this time, irretrievable to normal consciousness, seems somehow to have been reactivated."

Wilson goes on to tell us of a similar incident in 1970 recorded by the widely respected University of Chicago psychologist. Professor Erika Fromm. A twenty-six year old Califorian man, Don, was hypnotically regressed to the age of three. He then spoke fluent Japanese for fifteen to twenty minutes. It transpired that as an American war measure, Don had been interned with his parents at a relocation centre for those of Japanese blood. At the camp, Japanese was the predominant language spoken. Later, after the hypnotic regression was over and the tape of his Japanese oration was played back to him, Don was unable to understand most of what he had said under hypnosis. Which goes to show how incredible the human brain is and that material can be locked away in the subconscious without our being aware of it.

Hallucinations Among Primitive People

John Allegro in "Lost Gods" gives an excellent picture of emotional extravagances which can lead to hallucinatory trances.

"Primitive people in their religious festivals, set out to disorientate their minds by such methods of mass hypnosis as dancing to a point of exhaustion, monotonous repetition of words and phrases, rhythmic drumming or stamping, uncontrolled jerking, twisting or head shaking. They thereby induce in themselves, and their companions, a "hypnoid" or trance state in which the conscious mind is opened up to the "inspiration" or suggestion of its subconscious levels. At the same time, free reign is also given to suppressed emotions in a socially acceptable way, thus forestalling more dangerous explosions."

E.R. Hilgard in his book "Divided Consciousness" adds further light.

"Dreams and hallucinations are products of imagination in which memories are temporarily confused with external reality.....inter-preted by the hallucinator as perceptions; a convenient way of describing them is, be-lieved-in imagination."

At the B.B.C. Television Studios in Bristol in 1376 an experiment was conducted to induce a volunteer to see a ghost of her own mental fabrication by the use of post-hypnotic suggestion. lan Wilson tells the story:

"A volunteer - a housewife who was known to be a good hypnotic subject - was placed under hypnosis by a doctor. She was told that when she awakened she would be taken to another place, where I Colin Wilson [brother of lan] would approach her (followed by a television camera). As I spoke to her she would "see" the sinister figure of a seventeenth-century clergyman standing nearby; the man's appearance was described in detail. She was awakened and taken to the Bristol Docks, where I was waiting. As I walked toward her she smiled at me, then her eyes strayed across the water to an abandoned wharf. Her smile vanished and she asked me with amazement "Where did he go?" "Who?" "That man" She pointed to the dock and described the unpleasant, sallow-looking man dressed in old-fashioned clothes, who had been standing on the wharf then vanished. Even when the hypnotist explained that she had been responding to a suggestion made under hypnosis she was obviously only half convinced. Several times during the rest of the afternoon she tried to persuade us to admit that it had been a joke and she had seen a real man. She said there was nothing "ghostly" about him; he looked quite solid and normal.

The fascinating aspect of this particular experiment is that although the woman subject was given only verbal information about what she would see, quite unconsciously she invented a pictorial image so convincing that the conscious part of her not only failed to recognized it as her creation, but even when given a logical explanation she remained convinced that the ghost was real."