MENTAL RADIO

If you were born as long as fifty years ago, you can remember a time when the test of a sound, common-sense mind was refusing to fool with “new-fangled notions.” Without exactly putting it into a formula, people took it for granted that truth was known and familiar, and anything that was not known and familiar was nonsense. In my boyhood, the funniest joke in the world was a “flying machine man”; and when my mother took up a notion about “germs” getting into you and making you sick, my father made it a theme for no end of domestic wit. Even as late as twenty years ago, when I wanted to write a play based on the idea that men might some day be able to make a human voice audible to groups of people all over America, my friends assured me that I could not interest the public in such a fantastic notion.

Among the objects of scorn, in my boyhood, was what we called “superstition”; and we made the term include, not merely the notion that the number thirteen brought you bad luck, not merely a belief in witches, ghosts and goblins, but also a belief in any strange phenomena of the mind which we did not understand. We knew about hypnotism, because we had seen stage performances, and were in the midst of reading a naughty book calledTrilby; but such things as trance mediumship, automatic writing, table-tapping, telekinesis, telepathy and clairvoyance—we didn’t know these long names, but if such ideas were explained to us, we knew right away that it was “all nonsense.”

In my youth I had the experience of meeting a scholarly Unitarian clergyman, the Rev. Minot J. Savage of New York, who assured me quite seriously that he had seen and talked with ghosts. He didn’t convince me, but he sowed the seed of curiosity in my mind, and I began reading books on psychic research. From first to last, I have read hundreds of volumes; always interested, and always uncertain—an uncomfortable mental state. The evidence in support of telepathy came to seem to me conclusive, yet it neverquite became real to me. The consequences of belief would be so tremendous, the changes it would make in my view of the universe so revolutionary, that I didn’t believe, even when I said I did.

But for thirty years the subject has been among the things I hoped to know about; and, as it happened, fate was planning to favor me. It sent me a wife who became interested, and who not merely investigated telepathy, but learned to practice it. For three years I watched and assisted in this work, day by day and night by night, in our home. So I could say that I was no longer guessing. Now I really know. I am going to tell you about it, and hope to convince you; but regardless of what anybody can say, there will never again be a doubt about it in my mind. IKNOW!

Telepathy, or mind-reading: that is to say, can one human mind communicate with another human mind, except by the sense channels ordinarily known and used—seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting and touching? Can a thought or image in one mind be sent directly to another mind and there reproduced and recognized? If this can be done, how is it done? Is it some kind of vibration, going out from the brain, like radio broadcasting? Or is it some contact with a deeper level of mind, as bubbles on a stream have contact with the water of the stream? And if this power exists, can it be developed and used? Is it something that manifests itself now and then, like a lightning flash, over which we have no control? Or can we make the energy and store it, and use it regularly, as we have learned to do with the lightning which Franklin brought from the clouds?

These are the questions; and the answers, as well as I can summarize them, are as follows: Telepathy is real; it does happen. Whatever may be the nature of the force, it has nothing to do with distance, for it works exactly as well over forty miles as over a few feet. And while it may be spontaneous and may depend upon a special endowment, it can be cultivated and used deliberately, as any other object of study, in physics and chemistry. The essential in this training is an art of mental concentration and auto-suggestion, which can be learned. I am going to tell you not merely what you can do, but how you can do it, so that if you have patience and real interest, you can make your own contribution to knowledge.

Starting the subject, I am like the wandering book-agent or peddler who taps on your door and gets you to open it, and has to speak quickly and persuasively, putting his best goods foremost. Your prejudice is against this idea; and if you are one of my old-time readers, you are a little shocked to find me taking up a new and unexpected line of activity. You have come, after thirty years, to the position where you allow me to be one kind of “crank,” butyou won’t stand for two kinds. So let me come straight to the point—open up my pack, pull out my choicest wares, and catch your attention with them if I can.

Here is a drawing of a table-fork. It was done with a lead-pencil on a sheet of ruled paper, which has been photographed, and then reproduced in the ordinary way. You note that it bears a signature and a date (Fig.1):

Fig. 1

This drawing was produced by my brother-in-law, Robert L. Irwin, a young business man, and no kind of “crank,” under the following circumstances. He was sitting in a room in his home in Pasadena at a specified hour, eleven-thirty in the morning of July 13, 1928, having agreed to make a drawing of any object he might select, at random, and then to sit gazing at it, concentrating his entire attention upon it for a period of from fifteen to twenty minutes.

At the same agreed hour, eleven-thirty in the morning of July 13, 1928, my wife was lying on the couch in her study, in our home in Long Beach, forty miles away by the road. She was in semi-darkness, with her eyes closed; employing a system of mental concentration which she has been practicing off and on for several years, and mentally suggesting to her subconscious mind to bring her whatever was in the mind of her brother-in-law. Having become satisfied that the image which came to her mind was the correct one—because it persisted, and came back again and again—she sat up and took pencil and paper and wrote the date, and six words, as follows (Fig.1a):

A day or two later we drove to Pasadena, and then in the presence of Bob and his wife, the drawing and writing were produced and compared. I have in my possession affidavits from Bob, his wife, and my wife, to the effect that the drawing and writingwere produced in this way. Later in this book I shall present four other pairs of drawings, made in the same way, three of them equally successful.

Fig. 1a

Second case. Here is a drawing (Fig.2), and below it a set of five drawings (Fig.2a):

Fig. 2

Fig. 2a

The above drawings were produced under the following circumstances. The single drawing (Fig.2) was made by me in my study at my home. I was alone, and the door was closed before the drawing was made, and was not opened until the test was concluded. Having made the drawing, I held it before me and concentrated upon it for a period of five or ten minutes.

The five drawings (Fig.2a) were produced by my wife, who was lying on the couch in her study, some thirty feet away from me, with the door closed between us. The only words spoken were as follows: when I was ready to make my drawing, I called, “All right,” and when she had completed her drawings, she called “All right”—whereupon I opened the door and took my drawing to her and we compared them. I found that in addition to the five little pictures, she had written some explanation of how she came to draw them. This I shall quote and discuss later on. I shall also tell about six other pairs of drawings, produced at this same time.

Third case: another drawing (Fig.3a), produced under the following circumstances. My wife went upstairs, and shut the door which is at the top of the stairway. I went on tip-toe to a cupboard in a downstairs room and took from a shelf a red electric-light bulb—it having been agreed that I should select any small article, of which there were certainly many hundreds in our home. I wrapped this bulb in several thicknesses of newspaper, and put it, so wrapped, in a shoe-box, and wrapped the shoe-box in a whole newspaper, and tied it tightly with a string. I then called my wife and she came downstairs, and lay on her couch and put the box on her body, over the solar plexus. I sat watching, and never took my eyes from her, nor did I speak a word during the test. Finally she sat up, and made her drawing, with the written comment, and handed it to me. Every word of the comment, as well as the drawing, was produced before I said a word, and the drawing and writing as here reproduced have not been touched or altered in any way (Fig.3a):

Fig. 3a

The text of my wife’s written comment is as follows:

“First see round glass. Guess nose glasses? No. Then comes V shape again with a ‘button’ in top. Button stands out from object. This round top is of different color from lower part. It is light color, the other part is dark.”

To avoid any possible misunderstanding, perhaps I should state that the question and answer in the above were my wife’s description of her own mental process, and do not represent a question asked of me. She did not “guess” aloud, nor did either of us speak a single word during this test, except the single word, “Ready,” to call my wife downstairs.

The next drawings were produced in the following manner. The one at the top (Fig.4) was drawn by me alone in my study, and was one of nine, all made at the same time, and with no restriction upon what I should draw—anything that came into my head. Having made the nine drawings, I wrapped each one in a separate sheet of green paper, to make it absolutely invisible, and put each one in a plain envelope and sealed it, and then took the nine sealed envelopes and laid them on the table by my wife’s couch. My wife then took one of them and placed it over her solar plexus, and lay in her state of concentration, while I sat watching her, at her insistence, in order to make the evidence more convincing. Having received what she considered a convincing telepathic “message,”or image of the contents of the envelope, she sat up and made her sketch (Fig.4a) on a pad of paper.

Fig. 4

Fig. 4a

The essence of our procedure is this: that never did she see my drawing until hers was completed and her descriptive words written; that I spoke no word and made no comment until after this was done; and that the drawings presented here are in every case exactly what I drew, and the corresponding drawing is exactly what my wife drew, with no change or addition whatsoever. In the case of this particular pair, my wife wrote, “Inside of rock well with vines climbing on outside.” Such was her guess as to the drawing, which I had meant for a bird’s nest surrounded by leaves; but you see that the two drawings are for practical purposes identical.

Many tests have been made, by each of the different methods above outlined, and the results will be given and explained in these pages. The method of attempting to reproduce little drawings was used more than any other, simply because it proved the most convenient; it could be done at a moment’s notice, and so fitted into our busy lives. The procedure was varied in a few details to save time and trouble, as I shall later explain, but the essential feature remains unchanged: I make a set of drawings, and my wife takesthem one by one and attempts to reproduce them without having seen them. Here are a few samples, chosen at random because of their picturesque character. If my wife wrote anything on the drawing, I add it as “comment”; and you are to understand here, and for the rest of this book, that “comment” means the exact words which she wrotebeforeshe saw my drawing. Often there will be parts of this “comment” visible in the photograph. I give it all in print. Note that drawings 1, 2, 3, etc. are mine, while 1a, 2a, 3a, etc., are my wife’s.

In the case of my drawing numbered five, my wife’s comment was: “Knight’s helmet.”

Fig. 5

Fig. 5a

On figure 6, the comment was: “Desert scene, camel, ostrich, then below”—and the drawing in figure 6a. On the reverse side of the page is further comment: “This came in fragments, as if I saw it being drawn by invisible pencil.”

Fig. 6

Fig. 6a

And here is a pair with no comment, and none needed (Figs.7,7a):

Fig. 7

Fig. 7a

On the following, also, no comment was written (Figs.8,8a):

Fig. 8

Fig. 8a

Fig. 9

Fig. 9a

I drew Figure 9, and my wife drew 9a, a striking success, and wrote the comment: “May be elephant’s snout—but anyway it is some kind of a running animal. Long thing like rope flung out in front of him.”

Next, a series of three pairs, which, as it happened, were done one after the other, numbers three, four and five in the twenty-third series of my drawings. They are selected in part because they are amusing. First, I tried to draw a bat, from vague memories of boyhood days when they used to fly into the ball-rooms at Virginia springs hotels, and have to be massacred with brooms, because it was believed that they sought to tangle themselves in the hair of the ladies (Figs.10,10a):

Fig. 10

Fig. 10a

My wife’s comment on the above reads: “Big insect. I know this is right because it moves his legs as if flying. Beetle working its legs. Legs in motion!”

And next, my effort at a Chinese mandarin (Figs.11,11a):

Fig. 11

Fig. 11a

The comment reads: “More beetles, or legged bugs”—and she draws the mustaches of the mandarin and his hair. “Head ofdragon with big mouth. See also a part of his body—in front, or shoulders” The association of mandarins with dragons is obvious.

And finally, my effort at a boy’s foot and roller-skate, which undergoes a strange telepathic transformation. I have put it upside down for easier comparison (Figs.12,12a):

Fig. 12

Fig. 12a

The comment, complete, reads: “Profile of head and neck of animal—lion or dog—a muzzle. Maybe pig snout.”

The above are samples of our successes. Altogether, of such drawings, 38 were prepared by my secretary, while I made 252, a total of 290. I have classified the drawings to the best of my ability into three groups: successes, partial successes, and failures. The partial successes are those drawings which contain some easily recognized element of the original drawing: such as, for example, the last one above. The profile of a pig’s head is not a roller skate, but when you compare the drawings, you see that in my wife’s first sketch the eyes resemble the wheels of the roller-skates, and in her second sketch the snout resembles my shoe-tip; also there is a general similarity of outline, which is what she most commonly gets.

In the 290 drawings, the total of successes is 65, which is roughly 23 per cent. The total of partial successes is 155, which is 53 per cent. The total of failures is 70, which is 24 per cent. I asked some mathematician friends to work out the probabilities on the above results, but I found that the problem was too complicated. Who could estimate how many possible objects there were, which might come into my head to be drawn? Any time the supply ran short, I would pick up a magazine, and in the advertising pages find a score of new drawings to imitate. Again, very few of the drawings were simple. We began with such things as a circle, a square, a cross, a number or a letter; but soon we were doing Chinese mandarins with long mustaches, and puppies chasing a string. Each of these drawings has many different features; and what mathematician could count the number of these features, and the chances of reproducing them?

It is a matter to be judged by common sense. It seems to me any one must agree that the chances of the twelve drawings so far shown having been reproduced by accident is too great to be worth considering. A million years would not be enough for such a set of coincidences.

Much of the evidence which I am using rests upon the good faith of Mary Craig Sinclair; so, before we go further, I ask your permission to introduce her. She is a daughter of the far South; her father a retired planter, bank president and judge, of Mississippi. The fates endowed his oldest child with the blessings of beauty, health, wealth and wisdom—and then spoiled it, by adding a curse in the shape of a too tender heart. The griefs of other people overwhelm Craig like a suffocation. Strangers take one glance at her, and instantly decide that here is one who will “understand.” I have seen her go into a store to buy a piece of ribbon, and come out with tears in her eyes, because of a tragic story which some clerk was moved to pour out to her, all in a moment, without provocation. She has always said that she “gets” the feelings of people, not by their words, but by intuition. But she never paid any attention to this gift; never associated it with “psychic” matters. She was always too busy, first with eight younger brothers and sisters, and then with the practical affairs of an unpractical author-husband.

Early in childhood, things like this would happen: her mother would say to a little negro servant, “Go and find Miss Mary Craig”; but before the boy could start, Craig would know that her mother wanted her, and would be on the way. This might, of course, have been coincidence; if it stood alone, it would have no value. But the same thing happened with dreams. Craig dreamed there was a needle in her bed, and woke up and looked for it in vain; in the morning she told her mother, who slept in another room. The mother said: “How strange! I dreamed the same thing, and I woke up and really found one!”

Of her young ladyhood, Craig told this story, one of many: Driving with a girl friend, miles from home, she suddenly remarked: “Let’s go home; Mr. B is there.” Now this was a place to which Mr. B had never come; it was three hundred miles fromhis town. But Craig said: “I have just had an impression of him, sitting on our front porch.” Going home, they found him there.

Another instance, of more recent date. Shortly after our coming to California, my wife all at once became greatly worried about Jack London; she insisted that he was in terrible mental distress. As it happened, George Sterling had told us much about Jack’s troubles, but these were of old standing, and there was nothing to account for the sudden notion which my wife took up on a certain day. We had a lot of conversation about it; I offered to take her to the London ranch, but she said she would not attempt to meddle in the affairs of a married man, unless at his wife’s request. I made the laughing suggestion that she go alone, in the guise of a gypsy fortune-teller—a rôle which in her young ladyhood she had played with social éclat. Two days later we read that Jack London was dead, and very soon came letters from George Sterling, telling us that he had taken his own life. This, again, might be coincidence; if it stood alone I would attach no importance to it. But taken with this mass of evidence, it has a share of weight.

When we were married, seventeen years ago, we spent some time in England, and there we met a woman physician, interested in “mental healing,” and full of ideas about “psychic” things. Both Craig and I were in need of healing, having been through a siege of trouble. Craig was suffering with intense headaches, something hitherto unknown in her life; while I had an ancient problem of indigestion, caused by excess of brain work and lack of body work. We began to experiment with healing by the “laying on of hands”—without knowing anything about it, just groping in the dark. I found that I could cure Craig’s headaches—and get them myself; while she found that she could take my indigestion, a trouble she had never known hitherto. Each of us was willing to take the other’s pains, but neither was willing to give them, so our experiments came to a halt.

We forgot the whole subject for more than ten years. I was busy trying to reform America; while Craig was of the most intensely materialistic convictions. Her early experiences of evangelical religion had repelled her so violently that everything suggestive of “spirituality” was repugnant to her. Never was a woman more “practical,” more centered upon the here and now, thethings which can be seen and touched. I do not go into details about this, but I want to make it as emphatic as possible, for the light it throws upon her attitude and disposition.

But shortly after the age of forty, her custom of carrying the troubles of all who were near her resulted in a breakdown of health. A story of suffering needless to go into: suffice it that she had many ills to experiment upon, and mental control became suddenly a matter of life and death. In the course of the last five or six years Craig has acquired a fair-sized library of books on the mind, both orthodox scientific, and “crank.” She has sat up half the night studying, marking passages and making notes, seeking to reconcile various doctrines, to know what the mind really is, and how it works, and what can be done with it. Always it was a practical problem: things had towork. If now she believes anything, rest assured that it is because she has tried it out in the crucibles of pain, and proved it in her daily regimen.

She was not content to see psychic phenomena produced by other persons. Even though authorities warned her that trances might be dangerous, and thatrapportwith others might lead to dissociations of personality—even so, she had to find out for herself. A hundred times in the course of experiments of which I am going to tell, she has turned to me, saying: “Can you think of any way this can be chance? What can I do to make it more sure?” When I said, the other night: “This settles it for me. I am going to write the story,” her reply was, “Wait a while!” She wants to do more experimenting; but I think that enough is enough.

Two years ago Craig and I heard of a “psychic,” a young foreigner who was astounding physicians of Southern California, performing feats so completely beyond their understanding that they were content to watch without trying to understand. We went to see this young man, and befriended him; he came to our home every day, and his strange demonstrations became familiar to us. He had the ability to produce anaesthesia in many parts of his body, and stick hatpins through his tongue and cheeks without pain; he could go into a deep trance in which his body became rigid and cold; and I put his head on one chair and his heels on another, and stood in the middle, as if he were a two-inch plank. We have a motion picture film, showing a 150-pound rock being broken with a sledge-hammer on his abdomen while he lay in this trance. The vital faculties were so far suspended in this trance that he could be shut up in an airtight coffin and buried underground for several hours; nor was there any hocus-pocus about this—I know physicians who got the coffins and arranged for the tests and watched every detail; in Ventura, California, it was done in a ball park, and a game was played over the grave.

In our home he gave what appeared to be a demonstration of levitation without contact. I do not say that it really was levitation; I merely say that our friends who witnessed it—physicians, scientists, writers and their wives, fourteen persons in all—were unable even to suggest a normal method by which the event could have happened. There was no one present who could have been a confederate, and the psychic had been searched for apparatus; it was in our home, where he had no opportunity whatever for preparation. His wrists and ankles were firmly held by persons whom I know well; and there was sufficient light in the room so that I could see the outline of his figure, slumped in a chair. Under these circumstances a 34-pound table rose four feet into the air and moved slowly a distance of eight feet over my head.

We saw this; our friends saw it; yet, in my mind, and likewise in theirs, the worm of doubt would always creep in. There are so many ways to fool people; so many conjuring tricks—think of Houdini, for example! I was unwilling to publish what I had seen; yet, also, I was unwilling not to publish it—for think of the possible importance of faculties such as this, locked up in our minds! Here was my wife, ill, suffering pain; and these facilities might perhaps be used in healing. If by concentration and auto-suggestion it was possible for the mind to control the body, and put a veto upon even a few of its disorders, certainly it was worth while for us to prove the fact. I could not escape the moral obligation to probe these matters.

This “psychic” claimed also to possess and demonstrate the power of telepathy, or mind-reading. He would go out of the room while one of us selected mentally some object in the room, not revealing the choice to any one else. The “psychic” would then come back, and tell us to stand behind him and concentrate our thoughts upon that object, and follow close behind him, thinking of it. He would wander about the room for a while, and in the end pick up the object, and do with it whatever we mentally “willed” him to do.

We saw him make this test not less than a hundred times, in California, New York, and Boston; he succeeded with it more than half the time. There was no contact, no word spoken, nothing that we could imagine as giving him a clue. Did we unconsciously make in our throats some faint pronunciation of words, and did the young man have a super-acuity of hearing? Again, you see, the worm of doubt, and we never could quite decide what we really believed about this performance. After puzzling over it for a year or more, my wife said: “There is only one way to be certain. I am going to learn to do these thingsmyself!”

This young man, whom I will call Jan, was a peculiar person. Sometimes he would be open and frank, and again he would be mysterious and secretive. At one time he would agree to teach us all he knew, and again he would hold on to his arts, which he had had to go all the way to India to get. Was it that he considered these forces too dangerous for amateurs to play with? Or was it merely that he was considering his means of livelihood?

Jan was a hypnotist; and my wife had come to realize that all illness is more or less amenable to suggestion. She had had the idea of being hypnotized and given curative suggestions; but she did not know enough about this stranger, and was unwilling to trust him. After she got to know him better, her purposes changed. Here was a fund of knowledge which she craved, and she put her woman’s wits to work to get it. She told him to go ahead and hypnotize her—and explained to me her purpose of trying to turn the tables on him. Jan fixed his eyes upon hers in the hypnotic stare, and made his magnetic passes; at the same time his patient stared back, and I sat and watched the strange duel of personalities.

An essential part of Jan’s technique, as he had explained it, was in outstaring the patient and never blinking his eyes. Now suddenly he blinked; then he closed his eyes and kept them closed. “Do your eyes hurt?” asked his patient, in pretended innocence. “No,” he replied. “Are you tired?” she asked. “No, thank you,” said he. “What was I thinking?” she asked. “To hypnotize me,” he replied, sleepily. But Craig wanted further proof, so she closed her eyes and willed that Jan should get up and go to the telephone. “Shall I go on treating you?” he asked. “Yes,” said she. He hesitated a moment, then said, “Excuse me, I have to telephone to a friend!”

I am telling about these matters in the order of time, as they came to us. I am sorry that these stories of Jan come first, because they are the strangest, and the least capable of proof. In the hope of taking part of the onus from our shoulders, let me quote from a book by Charles Richet, a member of the Institute of Medicine in France, and a leading scientist; he is citing Pierre Janet, whose name is known wherever in the world the human mind is studied. The statement reads:

“P. Janet, a most eminent French psychiatrist, and one of the founders of the famous Salpetriere school of psychology in Paris, and a careful and sceptical observer, has verified that a patient of his, Leonie B., being put into hypnotic sleep by himself, or his brother (from whom Leonie in her hypnotic sleep was unable to distinguish him), could recognizeexactlythe substance that he placed in his mouth—sugar, salt, pepper. One day his brother, J. Janet, in an adjoining room, scorched his right arm above the wrist. Leonie, who could have known nothing about it normally, gavesigns of real pain, and showed to P. Janet (who knew nothing of the occurrence), the exact place of the burn.”

Or let me cite the late Professor Quackenbos, of Columbia University, who wrote many books on hypnotism as a therapeutic agency, and tells of numerous cases of the same kind. He himself would sometimes go involuntarily into hypnotic sleep with his patient, and so, sometimes, would the nurse. Frequently between the hypnotist and the subject comes what is calledrapport, whereby each knows what is in the other’s mind, and suggestions are taken without their being spoken. You may believe this, or refuse to believe it—that is your privilege. All I want to do is to make clear that my wife is claiming no special achievement, but merely repeating the standard experiences of the textbooks on this subject.

Thisrapportbetween Craig and her protégé was developed to such an extent that she could tell him what was in his mind, and what he had been doing; she told him many stories about himself, where he had been and what he had done at a certain hour. This was embarrassing to a young man who perhaps did not care to have his life so closely overseen; also, possibly, he was wounded in hisamour propre, that a mere amateur—and a woman at that—should be coming into possession of his secret arts.

The trick depends upon a process of intense concentration, which will later be described in detail. After this concentration, Craig would give to her subconscious mind the suggestion, or command, that it should bring to her consciousness a vision of what Jan was doing. This giving an order to the subconscious mind is much the same sort of thing that you do when you seek to remember a name; whether you realize it or not, you order your subconscious mind to get that bit of information and bring it to you. Whatever came to Craig, she would write it out, and when next she met Jan, she would use her woman’s wits to verify it without Jan’s knowing what was happening. At times it would be very amusing—when he would find himself accused of some youthful misdemeanor which his preceptress was not supposed to know about. In his efforts to defend himself, he would fail entirely to realize the telepathic aspects of the matter.

Please let me repeat, I am not telling here a set of fairy tales and fantasies; I am presenting a record of experiments, conducted in strict scientific fashion. All the results were set down day by day in writing. For an hour or two every day for the past three years my wife has been scribbling notes of her experiments, and there are eight boxes full in her study, enough to fill a big trunk. No statement in all the following rests upon our memories; everything is taken from memoranda now in my hands. Admitting that new facts can be learned about the mind, I do not see how any one can use more careful methods than we have done.

My wife “saw” Jan carrying a bouquet of flowers, wrapped in white paper, on the street, and she wrote this down. She later ascertained that at this hour Jan had carried flowers to a friend in a hospital in Los Angeles, and she telephoned this friend and verified the facts. On another occasion when Jan was in Santa Barbara, a hundred miles from our home, she “saw” him escorting a blonde girl in a blue dress from an auto to a hotel over a rainy pavement; she wrote this down, and later ascertained that it had actually been happening. The details were verified, not merely by Jan, but by another member of the party. I ought to add that in no case did my wife tell the other persons what she had “seen” until after these persons had told her what had happened. No chance was taken of their making up events to conform to her records. Always Craig kept her cold-blooded determination to know what wasrealin this field where so much is invented and imagined.

Again, she “saw” Jan preparing to commit suicide, dressed in a pair of yellow silk pajamas; then she “saw” him lying dead on the floor. She was much disturbed—until Jan reminded her that he had been seven times publicly “buried” in Southern California before she met him. Several weeks later she learned that in one of these “burials” he had worn yellow silk pajamas. Jan had forgotten this, but Dr. Frank Sweet, of Long Beach, who had overseen the procedure,remembered the pajamas, and how they had been ruined by mud.

Craig saw a vision of a bride, at a time when Jan, in his room in a far part of the city, was awakening from sleep with a dream about a friend’s wedding. On two occasions, while “concentrating,” she got the impression that Jan and a friend of his had returned unexpectedly from Santa Barbara to Hollywood. In both cases she made careful record, and it turned out to be correct; I have a written statement of the two young men, confirming the second instance, and saying that it could not have been normally known to my wife.

I have also a detailed record—some twenty pages long—of a “clairvoyant” vision of Jan’s movements about the city of Long Beach, including his parking of a car, carrying something over his arm, visiting a barber-shop and a flower-shop, and stopping and hesitating and then going on. The record includes a detailed description of the streets and their lay-out, a one-story white building, etc. Jan had been doing all this at approximately the time specified. He had carried his trousers to a tailor-shop, with a barber-shop directly opposite; he had stopped in front of a flower-shop and debated whether to buy some flowers; he had taken a letter to be copied by a typist, and had stopped on the street, hesitating as to whether to wait for this copying to be done. All these details he narrated to my wifebeforehe knew what was in her written record.

Another curious experience: I took Jan to the home of Dr. John R. Haynes of Los Angeles, to give a demonstration of his mind-reading. Jan said he felt ill, and would not be successful. Only one or two of the tests succeeded. But meanwhile my wife was at home, concentrating, and ordering her subconscious mind to show her what Jan and I were doing. When I returned I found that she had written a detailed description of Dr. Haynes’ home, including a correct ground plan of the entrance hall, stairs and drawing-room, and a description of the color and style of decorations, furniture, lamps, vases, etc., in good part correct. Craig has never been in this house.

Jan goes into one of his deep states—a cataleptic trance, he calls it—in which his body is rigid and cold. He has the power to fix in advance the time when he will come out of the trance, and his subconscious mind apparently possesses the power to keep track oftime—days, hours, minutes, even seconds. I have seen him amaze a group of scientists by coming out on the second, while they held stop-watches on him.

But now my wife thinks she will vary this procedure. Jan goes into the trance in our home and Craig sits and silently wills, “Your right leg will come out; you will lift it; you will put it down again. You will sit erect”—and so on. Without speaking a word, she can make him do whatever she pleases.

Another incident, quite a long one. I ask you to have patience with the details, promising that in the end you will see what it is all about. I am in the next room, and I hear Jan and my wife having one of their regular evening arguments, because he will not tell her how he does this or that; at one moment he insists that he has told her—and the next moment he insists that he does not know. My wife finally asks him to concentrate upon an object in the room, and she will see if she can “get” it. He selects the gas stove, in which a fire is burning; and Craig says, “I see a lot of little flames.” Jan insists that is “no good,” she didn’t get the stove; which annoys her very much—she thinks he does not want to allow any success to a woman. He is a “continental male,” something she makes fierce feminist war upon.

Craig is suffering from neuralgia in neck and shoulder, and Jan offers to treat her. He will use what he calls “magnetism”; he believes there is an emanation from his finger-tips, and so, with his two forefingers he lightly traces the course of the nerves of her neck and shoulder and arm. For ten or fifteen minutes his two fingers are tracing patterns in front of her.

Then it is time for him to go home, and he is unhappy, and she succeeds in drawing the explanation from him—he has to walk, and his shoes are tight and hurt him. He has to have them stretched, he tells her. She offers him a pair of my big tennis shoes to wear home, and then she scolds him because he has the fashionable notion that white canvas tennis shoes are not proper footwear for eleven o’clock in the evening. Finally he puts them on and departs; and my wife lies down and makes her mind a blank, and orders it to tell her what Jan is doing.

She has a pencil and paper, and presently she is writing words. They are foreign words, and she thinks they must be in Jan’s nativelanguage; they come drifting through her mind for several minutes. Next day comes Jan for the daily lesson, and she shows him this record. He tells her that the words are not in his language, but German—which he knows, but never uses. My wife knows no German; except possibly sauerkraut and kindergarten. But here she has written a string of German and near-German words. I have the original sheet before me, and I give it as well as I can make out the scrawl: “ei einfinen ein-fe-en swenfenz fingen sweizzen czie ofen weizen ofen fingen swienfen swei fingern efein boden fienzen meifen bogen feingen Bladen Meichen frefen eifein.”

Some of this is nonsense; but there are a few German words in it, and others which are guesses at German words, such as might be made by a person hearing a strange language, and trying to set down what he hears. Part of the effort seems to be concentrated on getting one expression, “zwe Fingern”—two fingers! You remember the two fingers moving up and down over Craig’s neck and shoulder! And “Ofen”—the argument about the stove! And “bladen”—to stretch shoes over a block of wood. Where these ideas came from seems plain enough. But where did the German come from—unless from the subconscious mind of Jan?

A further detail, especially curious. Jan gave my wife the meaning for the word “bladen”: “to stretch shoes over a block of wood”; I have the memo which he wrote at the time. But looking up the word in the dictionaries, I do not find it, nor can I find any German who knows it. Apparently there is no such word; and this would clearly seem to indicate that my wife got her German from Jan. If so, it was by telepathy, for he spoke no word of it that evening.

It is the fashion among young ladies of the South to tease the men; and Craig found in this episode a basis for tormenting her psychic instructor. He had assured his patient that during the treatment he was sending her “curative thoughts.” But what kind of telepathic healer was it who sent gas-stoves and shoe-blocks into a neuralgic shoulder? Jan, missing the humor, and trying to save his reputation, declared that he hated the German language so greatly, he did not even allow himself to think in it! Germany was associated in his mind with the most painful memories, and all that previous day he had been fighting depression caused bythese memories. You see, in this blundering defense, a significant bit of evidence. Jan had really had the German language in his thoughts at the time Craig got them!

I have before me a letter from Jan to my wife, postmarked Santa Barbara, October 19, 1927. He says: “May these lovely Cosmos bring you such peace and contentment as they have brought me.” He has cut a double slit in the paper, and inserted cosmos blossoms and violets. Prior to the receipt of this letter, my wife was making the record of a dream, and here is what she wrote down: “I dreamed Jan had a little basket of flowers, pink roses and violets, shaped like this.” (A drawing.) “He lifted them up and said they were for me, but a girl near him took them and said, ‘But I want them.’” When Jan came to see us again, my wife asked about the circumstance, and learned the following: a woman friend, who had given Jan the flowers, had accused him of meaning to send them to a girl; but he had answered that they were for “a middle-aged and distinguished lady.”

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