MENTAL RADIO — 1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5 — 6 — 7 — 8 — 9 — 10 — 11 — 12 — 13 — 14 — 15 — 16 — 17 — 18 — 19 — 20 — 21 — 22 — 23 — 24 — 25 — 26
3
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 called
Trilby; 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 never
4quite 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. I KNOW!
5
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,” but
6you 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):
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 writing
7were 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.
Second case. Here is a drawing (Fig. 2), and below it a set of
five drawings (Fig. 2a):
8The 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):
9
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,”
10or image of the contents of the envelope, she sat up and made her
sketch (Fig. 4a) on a pad of paper.
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 takes
11them 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 wrote before she 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.”
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.”
12And here is a pair with no comment, and none needed (Figs.
7, 7a):
On the following, also, no comment was written (Figs. 8, 8a):
13I 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):
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):
The comment reads: “More beetles, or legged bugs”—and
she draws the mustaches of the mandarin and his hair. “Head of
14dragon 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):
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.
15In 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.
16
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 from
17his 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, the
18things 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 to work. 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 that rapport with 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.
19
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.
20We 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 things myself!”
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?
21Jan 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 recognize exactly the 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, gave
22signs 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 called rapport, 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.
This rapport between 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 his
amour 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.
23
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 was real in 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,
24remembered 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 wife before he 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 of
25time—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 native
26language; 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 by
27these 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.”
28I present here the basket of “pink roses and violets” which my
wife drew, and then the spray of pink double cosmos and violets
which met her eyes when she opened the young “psychic’s” letter a
day or two later. I explain that my wife’s drawing (Fig. 13) is partly
written over by the words of her notes; while in Jan’s letter the
violets had to be at once traced in pencil, as they would not last. My
wife drew pencil marks around them and wrote the word “violet”
in three places, to indicate what the marks meant. The cosmos
flowers, pressed and dried, are still exactly as Jan stuck them into
position and as they remained until I took them to be photographed
(Fig. 13a).
29
As I have said, I hesitate to tell about incidents such as these.
They are hard to believe, and the skeptic may say that my wife
was hypnotized by Jan, and made to believe them. But it happens
that Craig has been able to establish exactly the same rapport with
her husband, who has never had anything to do with hypnosis,
except to watch it a few times. A Socialist “muck-raker,” much
wrapped up in his job, the husband sits and reads, or revises manuscript,
while the wife works her white magic upon his mind. Suddenly
his train of thought is broken by an exclamation; the wife
has “willed” him to do such and so—and he has done it! Or maybe
she has been asleep, and come out with the tail end of a dream, and
has written down what appears to be a lot of rubbish—but turns
out to be a reproduction of something the husband has been reading
or writing at that very moment! Hear one or two instances of
such events, all written down at the time.
Colonel Lindbergh has flown to France, but Craig does not
know much about it, because she is not reading the papers, she is
asking, “What is life?” A year passes, and in the mail I receive a
monthly magazine, the Lantern, published by Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers
in Boston. I open it, and find an article by a young radical,
assailing Lindbergh because he does not follow in his father’s footsteps;
his father was a radical congressman, but now the son allows
himself to be used by the army and navy people, and by the capitalist
press, to distract the minds of the masses from social justice. So
runs the charge; and before I am through reading it, my wife comes
downstairs from a nap. “What are you reading?” she asks, and I
answer: “Something about Lindbergh.” Says my wife: “Here are
my notes about a dream I just had.” She hands me a sheet of paper,
I have it before me now as I write, and I give it with misspelling
and abbreviations exactly as she wrote it in a hurry, not anticipating
that it would ever become public:
“‘I do not believe that Lindberg flew across the ocean in order
30to take a ransome from a foreign gov as well as from his own. Nor
in order to induce the nations of the earth to a war in the air.’
Words which were in my mind as I awoke from nap on aft May 25.”
I should add that my wife had had no opportunity to look
at the Boston magazine, whether consciously or unconsciously. She
tells me that Lindbergh had not been in her conscious mind for a
long time, and she had no remotest idea that the radicals were
attacking him.
Another instance: I am reading the latest “book of the month,”
which has just come in the mail, and to which my wife has paid no
attention. She interrupts me with a question: “Are there any
flowers in what you are reading?” I answer, “Yes,” and she says:
“I have been trying to concentrate, and I keep seeing flowers. I
have drawn them.” She hands me two drawings (Figs. 14a, 14b):
The book was Mumford’s Herman Melville, and I was at page
346, a chapter entitled, “The Flowering Aloe.” On this page are
six lines from a poem called “The American Aloe on Exhibition.”
On the preceding page is a discussion of the habits of this plant.
While my wife was making the left-hand drawing (Fig. 14a), I had
been reading page 344: “the red clover had blushed through the
fields about their house”; and “he would return home with a handful
of clover blossoms.”
Of experiences like this there have been many. Important as
the subject is, I find it a bother, because I am called upon to listen
to long narratives of dreams and telepathy, while my mind is on
Sacco and Vanzetti, or the Socialist presidential campaign, or whatever
it is. Sometimes the messages from the subconscious are complicated
and take patience to disentangle. Consider, for example,
a little drawing (Fig. 15)—one of nearly three hundred which this
31long-suffering husband has made for his witch-wife to reproduce
by telepathy: a football, you see, neatly laced up. In her drawing
(Fig. 15a) Craig gets the general effect perfectly, but she puts it on
a calf. Her written comment was: “Belly-band on calf.”
While Craig was making this particular experiment, her husband
was reading a book; and now, wishing to solve the mystery,
she asks, “What are you reading?” The husband replies, wearily:
“DeKruif’s Hunger Fighters, page 283.” “What does it deal with?”
“It is a treatise on the feeding of cows.” “Really?” says Craig.
“Will you please write that down for me and sign it?”
But why did the cow become a calf? That, too, is something
to be explained. Says Craig: “Do you remember what I used to tell
you about old Mr. Bebb and his calves?” Yes, the husband knows
the story of the half-crazy old Welshman, who thirty or forty years
ago was the caretaker of the Kimbrough summer home on the
Mississippi Sound. Old Mr. Bebb made his hobby the raising of
calves by hand, and turning them into parlor pets. He would teach
them to use his three fingers as a nursing bottle, and would make
fancy embroidered belly-bands for them, and tie them up in these.
So to the subconscious mind which was once little Mary Craig
Kimbrough of Mississippi, the idea of a calf sewed up like a football
is one of the most natural in the world.
Since my wife and I have no secrets from each other, it does
not trouble me that she is able to see what I am doing. While I am
away from home, she will “concentrate” upon me, and immediately
afterwards write out what she “sees.” On one occasion she described
to me a little red book which I had got in the mail at the office.
By way of establishing just what kind of book she had “seen,” she
had gone to my bookcase and picked out a French dictionary—and
it happened that I had just received the Italian dictionary of that
32same series, uniform in binding. On another occasion, while making
a study of dream-material, she wrote out a dream about being
lost in long and involved concrete corridors—while I was trying to
find my way through the locker-rooms of a Y. M. C. A. basement,
running into one blind passage after another, and being much annoyed
by doors that wouldn’t open.
Dreams, you understand, are products of subconscious activity,
and to watch them is one method of proving telepathy. By practice
Craig has learned to lie passive, immediately after awakening, and
trace back a long train of dreams. Here is one of the results, a story
worth telling in detail—save that I fear you will refuse to believe it
after it is told.
On the afternoon of January 30, 1928, I was playing tennis on
the courts of the Virginia Hotel, in Long Beach, California, and
my wife was taking a nap. She did not know that I was playing
tennis, and has no knowledge about the places where I play. She
takes no interest in the game, regarding it as a foolish business
which will some day cause her husband to drop dead of heart failure—and
she declines to be present on the occasion. When I entered
the house, she said: “I woke up with a long involved dream, and
it seemed so absurd I didn’t want to write it out, but I did so.”
Here are the opening sentences verbatim:
“Dreamed I was on a pier, watching a new kind of small, one
or two seated sport-boat, a little water car into which a woman got
and was shot by machinery from the pier out to the water, where
she skidded around a minute or two and was drawn back to the pier.
With us on the pier were my sister and child, and two young men
in white with white caps. These appeared to be in charge of this
new sport-boat. This boat is not really a boat. It is a sort of miniature
car. I’ve never seen anything like it. Short, so that only one
or two people could sit in it. An amusement thing, belonging to
the pier. The two young men were intensely interested, and stood
close together watching it out on the water,” etc., etc.
Understand that this dream was not supposed to have anything
to do with me. It was before Craig had come to realize the
state of rapport with me; she had not been thinking about me, and
when she told me about this dream, she had no thought that any
33part of it had come from my mind. But here is what I told her
about my afternoon:
The Virginia Hotel courts are close to what is called “The
Pike,” and there is an amusement pier just across the way, and on
it a so-called “Ferris wheel,” with little cars exactly like the description,
which go up into the air with people in them. That afternoon
it happened that the tennis courts were crowded, so my partner and
I waited out a set or two. We sat on a bench, in white tennis suits
and hats, and watched this wheel, and the cars which went up in
the air, and at a certain point took a slide on long rods, which made
them “skid around,” and caused the women in them to scream with
excitement. Underneath the pier was the ocean, plainly visible
along with the little cars.
(Footnote, 1962: The hotel and the Pike no longer exist, so
do not waste your time trying to verify all this.)
I should also mention the case of our friend, Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz,
with whom there is a rapport which my wife does not tell her
about. My wife will say to me, “Mrs. Gartz is going to phone,” and
in a minute or two the phone will ring. She will say, “Mrs. Gartz
is coming. She wants me to go to Los Angeles with her.” Of course,
a good deal of guessing might be possible, in the case of two intimate
friends. But consider such guessing as this: My wife had a
dream of an earthquake and wrote it down. Soon thereafter occurred
this conversation with Mrs. Gartz. I heard it, and my wife
recorded it immediately afterwards, and I quote her written record:
“Mrs. Gartz dreamed of earthquake. ‘Wasn’t it queer that I
dreamed of swaying slowly from side to side.’”
“‘I dreamed the same,’ I said. ‘But I was in a high building.’”
“‘So was I,’ she replied.”
Craig calls attention to the word “slowly,” as both she and Mrs.
Gartz commented on this. They didn’t believe that an earthquake
would behave that way; but I pointed out that it would happen just
so with a steel-frame building.
34
I come now to a less fantastic and more convincing series of
experiments; those made with the husband of my wife’s younger
sister, Robert L. Irwin. Eight years ago the doctors gave Bob only
a few months to live, on account of tuberculosis. Needless to say,
he has much time on his hands, waiting for the doctors’ clairvoyance
to be verified. He proved to be a good “subject”—the best of all in
the tests with Jan. One day in our home, a series of five tests were
made, with Bob holding an object in mind, while sitting several
feet away from Jan. The latter found the object, and made the correct
disposition of it, as willed by Bob, in four out of the five trials.
This included such unlikely things as picking up a striped blanket
and wrapping it about my shoulders.
Bob and Craig made the arrangement that at a certain hour
each day, Bob, in his home in Pasadena, was to take pencil and paper
and make a drawing of an object, and sit and concentrate his mind
upon that drawing. At the same hour Craig, in our home in Long
Beach, forty miles away, was to go into her state of “concentration,”
and give orders to her subconscious mind to find out what was in
Bob’s mind. The drawings were to be dated, and filed, and when
the two of them met, they would compare the results, in the presence
of myself and Bob’s wife. If there should turn out to be a correspondence
between the drawings, greater than could be attributed
to chance, it would be evidence of telepathy, as good as any that
could be imagined or desired.
The results were such as to make me glad that it was another
person than myself, so as to afford a disinterested witness to these
matters, so difficult of belief. I repeat that Bob is a young American
business man, priding himself on having no “crank” ideas; he has
had a Socialist brother-in-law for ten years or more without being
in the slightest degree affected in manners, morals, or convictions.
Here is his first drawing, done on a half sheet of green paper. The
word “CHAIR” underneath, and the date, were written by Bob,
35while the words “drawn by Bob Irwin” were added for purposes of
record by Craig (Fig. 16):
And now for Craig’s results. I give her report verbatim, with
the two drawings which are part of her text:
“At 10 o’clock or a little before, while sewing (without effort)
I saw Bob take something from black sideboard—think it was the
glass candlestick. At 11:15 (I concentrate now) I saw Bob sitting
at dining room table—a dish or some small object in front of him
(on N. E. corner table). I try to see the object on table—see white
something at last. I can’t decide what it is so I concentrate on seeing
his drawing on a green paper as it is about 11:20 now and I think
he has made his drawing. I try hard to see what he has drawn—try
to see a paper with a drawing on it, and see a straight chair. Am
not sure of second drawing. It does not seem to be on his paper.
It may be his bed-foot. I distinctly see a chair like 1st on his paper.”
(Fig. 16a.)
When Bob and my wife discussed the above test, she learned
that he had sat at the northeast corner of the table, trying to decide
what to draw, and facing the sideboard on which were silver candlesticks.
Later he went to his bedroom and lay down, gazing through
the foot of his bed at the chair which he had taken as his model for
the drawing. The bed has white bars running vertically, as in my
36wife’s second drawing. The chair, like Bob’s drawing, has the strips
of wood supporting the back running crossways, and this feature is
reproduced in Craig’s first drawing. Her report goes on to add
that she sees a star and some straight lines, which she draws; they
are horizontal parallel lines, as in the back of the chair. The back
of the chair Bob had looked at had a carved star upon it.
The second attempt was the next day, and Bob drew his watch
(Fig. 17). Craig first drew a chair, and then wrote, “But do not
feel it is correct.” Then she drew the following (Fig. 17a):
The comment was: “I see this picture. Later I think it is not
flower but wire (metal, shining). The ‘petals’ are not petals but
wire, and should be uniform. This is hasty drawing so not exact as
seen. What I mean is, I try to see Bob’s drawing and not what he
drew from. So I see no flower but shape of one on paper. Then decide
it is of wire, but this may be merely because I see drawing,
which would have no flower color. However, I see it shining as
if it is metal. Later a glass circle.” Drawings then show an ellipse,
and then a drinking glass and a glass pitcher. It is interesting to
note that Bob had in front of him a glass bowl with goldfish.
The next day Bob drew a pair of scissors (Fig. 18):
37
The drawings of Craig follow without comment (Figs. 18a,
18b):
Three days later Bob drew the table fork, which has already
been reproduced (Fig. 1), and Craig made the report which has
been given in facsimile (Fig. 1a): “See a table fork. Nothing else.”
One more test between Bob and Craig, the most sensational
of all. It is quite a story, and I have to ask your pardon for the
medical details involved. So much vital knowledge hangs upon
these tests that I have asked my brother-in-law to forget his personal
feelings. The reader will please consider himself a medical student
or hospital nurse for the moment.
38The test occurred July 11, 1928. My wife made her drawing,
and then told me about the matter at once. Also she wrote out all
the details and the record is now before me. She saw a feather, then
a flower spray, and then she heard a scream. Her first thought in
case of illness or danger is her aged parents, and she took it for her
mother’s voice, and this so excited her that she lost interest in the
experiment. But soon she concentrated again, and drew a series
of concentric circles, with a heavy black spot in the center. Then
she saw another and much larger spot, and this began to spread and
cover the sheet of paper. At the same time came a feeling of intense
depression, and Craig decided that the black spot was blood, and
that Bob had had a hemorrhage. Here is her drawing (Fig. 19a):
Two or three days later Bob’s wife drove him to our home,
and in the presence of all four of us he produced the drawing he
had made. He had taken a compass and drawn a large circle; making,
of course, a hole in the center of the paper. “Is that all you
thought of during the time?” asked my wife. “No,” said Bob, “but
I’d hate to have you get the rest of it.” “What was it?” “Well, I discovered
that I had a hemorrhoid, and couldn’t put my mind on anything
else but the thought, ‘My God, my lungs—my kidneys—and
now this!’”
A hemorrhoid is, of course, apt to be accompanied by a hemorrhage;
and it seems clear that my wife got the mood of depression
39of her brother-in-law, his thoughts of blood and bodily breakdown,
as well as the circle and the hole in the paper. There is another
detail which does not appear in the written record, but is fixed in
my memory. My wife said: “I wanted to draw a little hill.” Upon
hearing that, I called up a physician friend who is interested in
these tests, and asked him what a drawing of a hemorrhoid would
look like, and he agreed that “a little hill” was about as near as
one could come. I hope you will note that this particular drawing
test is supported by the testimony of four different persons, my
wife, her sister, the sister’s husband, and myself. I do not see how
there could possibly be more conclusive evidence of telepathic
influence—unless you suspect all four of us of a series of stupid and
senseless falsehoods. Let me repeat that Bob and his wife have
read this manuscript and certified to its correctness so far as concerns
them. The comment written by my wife reads: “All this
dark like a stain—feel it is blood; that Bob is ill—more than usual.”
(Note: Bob Irwin died not long afterwards.)
40
The experiments just described were all that were done with
Bob, because he found them a strain. Craig asked me to make some
drawings for her, and I did so, sitting in the next room, some thirty
feet away, but always behind a closed door. Thus you may verify my
assertion that the telepathic energy, whatever it may be, knows no
difference between thirty feet and forty miles. The results with
Bob and with myself were about the same.
The first drawings made with me are those which have already
been given (Figs. 2, 2a), but I give them again for the sake of convenience.
I explain that in these particular drawings the lines have
been traced over in heavier pencil; the reason being that Craig
wanted a carbon copy, and went over the lines in order to make it.
This had the effect of making them heavier than they originally
were, and it made the whirly lines in Craig’s first drawing more
numerous than they should be. She did this in the case of two or
three of the early drawings, wishing to send a report to a friend. I
pointed out to her how this would weaken their value as evidence,
so she never did it again.
After my wife and I had compared the above drawings, she
wrote a note to the effect that just before starting to concentrate, she
had been looking at her drawing of many concentric circles, which
she had made in a test with Bob the previous day (Fig. 19a). So her
first vision was of a whirl of circles. This turned sideways, and then
took the shape of an arrowhead, and then of a letter A, and finally
evolved into a complete star. As the agent in this test, I wish to
repeat that I made my drawing in my study with the door closed,
that I kept the drawing before my eyes the entire time, and that
the door stayed closed until Craig called that she was through.
I do not find it easy to concentrate on a drawing, because my
active mind wanders off to side issues. If I draw a lighted cigarette,
I immediately think of the odious advertising now appearing in the
papers; or I think: “Will Craig get this right, and what does it
41mean, and will the world accept evidence on this subject from me?”—and
so on. Several times my wife has “got” such thoughts, and so
we took to noting them on the record. On July 29, I drew a cigarette,
with two little curls for smoke, each running off like a string
of the letter “eeeee,” written by hand. Underneath I wrote as
follows: “My thought: ‘cigarette with curls of smoke.’ I said to
myself these words: ‘she got the curls but not the cigarette.’” This
would appear to be telepathy coming from Craig to me, for her
drawing was found to contain a lot of different curves—a curly
capital S, several other half circles twisted together, and three ???
one inside the other. She added the following words: “I can’t draw
it, but curls of some sort.”
42Again, here is a work of art from my facile pen, dated July 21,
and having underneath my notation: “Concentrated on bald
head” (Fig. 20).
My wife’s note was: “Saw Upton’s face.” Then she drew a line
through the words, and wrote the following explanation: “Saw
two half circles. Then they came together making full circle. But
I felt uncertain as to whether they belonged together or not. Then
suddenly saw Upton’s profile float across vision.”
July 20 I drew a three-pronged fork, and made the note that I
was not sure if it was a hay-fork or an oyster-fork, and decided it was
the latter, whereupon my mind went off to “society” people and
their many kinds of forks. Craig wrote: “I thought it was an animal’s
head with horns and the head was on a long stick—a trophy
mounted like this”—and she drew a two-pronged fork.
July 17 I drew a large round stone with a smaller stone on top:
at least so I thought, and then decided they were two eggs. Craig
drew two almost tangent circles, and wrote: “I see two round
things, not one inside the other, as in Bob’s drawing of circles. Then
the above vanished and I saw as below”—and she drew four little
oblongs, tangent, which might be a cluster of fish-eggs or fly-eggs.
July 20 I drew two heavy straight lines making a capital letter
T, and Craig drew a complete cross or square X, which is, of course,
the T with vertical arm prolonged. July 14 I drew a sort of jack-lantern.
It is on next page (Fig. 21). I looked at this drawing and
thought of the eyes of M.C.S., and said mentally, “I should have
drawn the curves over eyes.” Afterwards I told Craig about this,
43and she noted it down on the drawing. On the reverse side of the
sheet she added the following: “I told U. it was shaped like a half
moon with something in center—I supposed it must be a star,
though I did not see it as star but as indistinct marks.” Her drawing
follows, turned upside down for greater convenience (Fig. 21a):
44
A new method of experiment invented itself by accident;
and makes perhaps the strangest story yet. There came a letter from
a clergyman in South Africa, saying that he was sending me a copy
of his wife’s novel dealing with South African life. I get many letters
from strangers, and answer politely, and as a rule forget them
quickly. Some time afterwards came two volumes, entitled,
“Patricia, by Marcus Romondt,” and I did not associate them with
the clergyman’s letter. I glanced at the preface, and saw that the
work had something to do with the religious cults of the South
African natives. I didn’t read more than twenty lines—just enough
to classify the book as belonging in Craig’s department. Everything
having to do with philosophy, psychology, religion and medicine is
first read by her, and then fed back to me in her eager discourses.
I took the volumes home and laid them on her table, saying, “This
may interest you.” The remark attracted no special attention, for
the reason that I bring her a book, or a magazine, or some clippings
at least once a day. She did not touch these volumes, nor even glance
at the title while I was in the room.
I went into the kitchen to get some lunch, and when it was
ready I called, “Are you going to eat?” “Let me alone,” she said,
“I am writing a story.” That also is a common experience. I ate
my lunch in silence, and then came into the living room again, and
there was Craig, absorbed in writing. Some time later she came to
me, exclaiming, “Oh, I have had the most marvelous idea for a
story! Something just flashed over me, something absolutely novel—I
never heard anything like it. I have a whole synopsis. Do you
want to hear it?” “No,” I said, “you had better go and eat”—for it
was my job to try to keep her body on earth. “I can’t eat now,” she
said, “I am too excited. I’ll read a while and get quiet.” So she
went to her couch, and there was a minute or two of silence, and
then an exclamation: “Come here!”
Craig had picked up one of the two volumes from South
45Africa, and was staring at it. “Look at this!” she said. “Look what
I opened to!” I looked at a page in the middle of the book—she has
the devilish habit of reading a book that way—and in the center of
the page, in capital letters, I read the words: “THE BLACK
MAGICIAN.” “What about it?” I said. “Did you ever hear of that
idea?” asked Craig. I answered that I had, and she said, “Well, I
never did. I thought it was my own. It is the theme of the ‘story’
I have just been writing. I have made a synopsis of a whole chapter
in this book, and without ever having touched it!”
So Craig had a new set of experiments to try all by herself,
without bothering her busy husband. She would go to one of my
bookcases, with which she had hitherto had nothing to do, since
her own books are kept in her own place. With her back to the
bookcase, she would draw a book, and take it to her couch and lie
down, placing the book upon her solar plexus, and taking every precaution
to make sure that it never came into her line of vision. Most
of the books, being new, were in their paper jackets, so there was
no lettering that could be felt with her fingers. This, you note, is
not a test of telepathy, for no human mind knew what particular
book Craig’s hand had fallen upon. If she could tell anything about
the contents of that book, it would appear to be clairvoyance, or
what is known as “psychometry.”
My books are oddly varied in character. There are new novels,
and works of history, biography, travel and economics. In addition,
there are what I call “crank books”; the queerly assorted volumes
which are destined by donors all over the world to convert me to
vegetarianism, antivivisection, anarchism, Mormonism, Mohammedanism,
infanticide, the abolition of money, or the doctrine
that alopecia is caused by onanism. Believe me, the person who
sets out to guess the contents of the books that come to me in the
course of a month has his or her hands full!
But Craig was able to do it. She did it on so many occasions
that she would sit and stare at me and exclaim, “Now what do you
make of that?” She would insist that I sit and watch the process, so
as to be able to state that she never had the book in her line of vision.
In my presence she picked out a volume, and, keeping it hidden
from both of us, she said, “I see a blue cover, with a rising sun and
46a bare landscape.” It happened to be a volume circulated by the
followers of “Pastor Russell,” and as the preface tells me that 1,405,000
have been sold, it may be that you too have it in your library.
The title is Deliverence, by J. F. Rutherford, and it has a blue
cloth cover, with a gold design of a sun rising behind a mass of
clouds and a globe.
On another occasion Craig wrote: “One big eye, with nothing
else distinct—then lines or spikes came around it, or maybe these
project from the head like stiff long hairs, or eye-lashes. Can’t tell
what kind of head—but feel it must be a tropical something, tho
the eye looks human,” etc. The book was Mr. Blettsworthy on
Rampole Island, by H. G. Wells, and in this book is a chapter
headed, “The Friendly Eye,” with the following sentences: “I
became aware that an Eye observed me continually.... It was a
reddish brown eye. It looked out from a system of bandages that
also projected a huge shock of brown hair upward and a great chestnut
beard ... the eye watched me with the illuminating but expressionless
detachment of a head-lamp.... Polyhemus, for that was
my private name for the man.”
A long string of such surprises! Craig picked up a book and
wrote: “Black wings—a vampire flying by night.” The title of
the book was The Devil’s Jest. She picked up one and wrote: “A
Negro’s head with a light around it.” It is a German volume, called
“Africa Singt,” and has a big startling design exactly as described.
She picked up a book by Leon Trotsky, and wrote the word
“Checkro”—which may not sound like Russian to Trotsky, but does
to Craig! And a book with Mussolini on the cover, wearing a black
coat and feeding a lion: she got the shape of the Duce’s figure, only
she labeled him “Black Bird.” And here is a part of the jacket
design of “wings” on the “Literary Guild” books—and below is
what Craig made of it. She added the comment: “Motion—the thing
is traveling, point first (Fig. 22, 22a).”
47
Another volume was described as follows: “A pale blue book.
Lonely prairie country, stretch of flat land against sky, and outlined
against it a procession of people. Had feeling of moving—wheeled
vehicle which seemed to be baby-carriage. This was
strange, because country was covered with snow.” Upon examination,
the book proved to be bound in mottled pale blue boards,
title, “I’m Scairt,” with subtitle, “Childhood Days on the Prairies.”
On the first page of the preface occurs the following: “It was in
those days that a company of Swedes left their beloved homeland
in the far North and came to make a home for themselves and their
children on the Kansas prairie.”
Finally, I have obtained the publisher’s consent to reproduce
the jacket design of a recent book, so that I may put Craig’s telepathy
alongside it, and give you a laugh or two. Observe the jolly
little tourists, and what they have turned into! And then the efforts
of Craig’s subconscious mind at French. They taught it to her in
a “finishing school” on Fifth Avenue, and you can see that it was
finished before it began (Figs. 23, 23a).
Yet another form of experiment invented itself under the
pressure of necessity. Impossible to have such a witch-wife without
trying to put her to use!
48
I have the habit of working out a chapter of a new book in
my head, and writing down a few notes on a scrap of paper, and
sticking it away in any place that is handy; then, next day, or whenever
I am ready for work, it is gone, and there is the devil to pay.
I wander about the house for an hour or two, trying to imagine
where I can have put that scrap of paper, and reluctant to do the
work all over again. On one occasion I searched every pocket, my
desk, the trash-baskets, and then, deciding that I had dropped it
outdoors, where I work with my typewriter, I figured the direction
49of the wind, and picked up all the scraps of paper I saw decorating
the landscape of our beach home. Then I decided it must be in a
manuscript which I had given to a friend in Los Angeles, and I
was about to phone to that friend, when Craig asked what the trouble
was, and said, “Come, let’s make an experiment. Lie down here,
and describe the paper to me.”
I told her, a sheet off a little pad, written on both sides, and
folded once. She took my hand, and went into her state of concentration,
and said, “It is in the pocket of a gray coat.” I answered,
“Impossible; I have searched every coat in the house half a dozen
times.” She said, “It is in a pocket, and I will get it.” She got up
off the couch, and went to a gray coat of mine, and in a pocket I
had somehow overlooked, there was the paper! Let me add that
Craig had had nothing to do with my clothing in the interim, and
had never seen the paper, nor heard of it until I began roaming
about the house, grumbling and fussing. Neither of us know of
any “normal” way by which her subconscious mind could have
got this information.
My secretary lost two screw-caps of the office typewriter, and
I said to my wife, “I will bring him over, and you see if you can
tell him where to look.” But my wife was ill, and did not want to
meet any one, so she said, “I will see if I can get it through you.”
Be it understood, Craig has not been in the office in a year, and
has met my secretary only casually. She said, “I see him standing
up at his typewriting.” That is an unusual thing for a typist to do,
but it happened to be true. Said Craig: “He has put the screw-caps
on something high. They are in the south room, above the level
of any table or desk.” I went to the phone to ask my secretary, and
learned that he had just found the screws, which he had put on
top of a window-sash in the south room.
The third incident requires the statement that, a few months
back, while my wife was away, our home had been loaned to friends,
and I had camped at the little house which I was using as an office.
Some medical apparatus had been left there; at least I had a vague
impression that I had had it there, and I said, “I’ll go and look.”
Said Craig: “Let’s try an experiment.” She took my hand, and
told me to make my mind a blank, and presently she said, “I see it
50under the kitchen sink.” I went over to the office, and found the
object, not under the sink, but under the north end of the bathtub.
I took it back to the house, and before I spoke a word, my wife
said: “I tried to get you on the phone. I concentrated again, and
saw the thing and wrote it out.” She gave me a slip of paper, from
which I copy: “Down under something, wrapped in paper—on
N. side of room—under laundry tub on floor or under bath tub
on floor in N. corner.”
You may say, of course, if you are an incurable skeptic: “The
man’s wife had been over to the office and seen the object; she had
been searching his pockets, and had seen the paper.” Craig is positive
that she did nothing of the sort; but of course it is conceivable
that she may have done it and then forgotten it. Therefore, I pass
on to a different and more acceptable kind of evidence—a set of
drawing tests, in which I watched and checked every step of the
proceedings at my wife’s insistence. Here again I am a co-equal
witness with her, and the skeptic has no alternative but to say that
the two of us have contrived this elaborate hoax, making nearly
three hundred drawings with fake reproductions, in order to get
notoriety, or to sell a few books. I really hope nobody will say that
is possible. Very certainly I could sell more books with less trouble
by writing what the public wants; and if I were a dishonest man,
I should not have waited until the age of fifty-one to begin such
a career.
51
Concerning these drawings, there are preliminary explanations
to be made. They were done hastily, by two busy people.
Neither is a trained artist, and our ability to convey what we wish
is limited. When I start on a giraffe, I manage to produce a pretty
good neck, but when I get to the body, I am disturbed to note it
turning into a sheep or a donkey. When I draw a monkey climbing
a tree, and Craig says, “Buffalo or lion, tiger—wild animal”—I have
to admit that may be so; likewise when my limb of a tree is called a
“trumpet,” or when Craig’s “wild animal” resembles a chorus girl’s
legs. I will let you see those particular drawings. Figure 24 is mine,
while 24a and 24b are my wife’s.
52Again, I draw a volcano in eruption, and my wife calls it a
black beetle, which hardly sounds like a triumphant success; but
study the drawings, and you see that my black smoke happens to
be the shape of a beetle, while the two sides of the volcano serve
very well for the long feelers of an insect (Figs. 25, 25a):
The tests began with four series of drawings, 38 in all, made
by my secretary. Following these were 31 series drawn by myself,
comprising 252 separate drawings. Each drawing would be
wrapped in an extra sheet of paper, and sealed in a separate
envelope, and the envelopes handed to my wife when she was ready
for the tests. She would put them on the table by her couch, and
lie down, putting the first envelope, unopened, over her solar
plexus, covered by her hand. Her head would be lying back on
a pillow, eyes closed, and head at such an angle that nothing but
the ceiling could be seen if the eyes were open. A dim light to
avoid sense stimulation; enough light to see everything plainly.
When she had what she judged was the right image, she would
take a pad and pencil and make the drawing or write the description
of what she “saw.” Then she would open the envelope and
compare the two drawings, and number both for identification.
This recording was, of course, an interruption of her passive
state, and made the task difficult. In a few cases she repeated a
number or forgot the number, and this leaves a chance for confusion.
I have done my best to clear up all such uncertainties, but
there is a margin of error of one or two per cent to be noted. This
is too small to affect the results, but is mentioned in the interest of
exactness.
Since I found the sealing of envelopes tiresome, and Craig
found the opening of them more so, we decided half way through
53the tests to abandon the sealing, and later we abandoned the
envelopes altogether. We reasoned that acceptance of the evidence
rests upon our good faith anyhow, and all that any sensible reader
can ask is that Craig make sure of never letting a drawing get
within her range of vision. She was doing this laborious work to
get knowledge for herself, and she certainly made sure that she was
not wasting her own time.
At present the practice is this: I make her a set of six or eight
drawings on little sheets of pad paper, and lay them face down
on her table, with a clean sheet of paper over them. She lies down,
and with her head lying back on the pillow and her eyes closed,
she reaches for one of the drawings, and slides it over and onto
her body, covered by her hand. It is always out of her range of
vision, even if the drawing were turned toward her eyes, which
it never is.
For the comfort of the suspicious, let me add that the relaxing
of the conditions caused no change in the averages. In the first four
series, drawn by my secretary, and sealed by him in envelopes,
there were only five complete failures in thirty-eight tests, which
is thirteen per cent; whereas in the 252 drawings made by me there
have been 65 outright failures, which is nearly twice as large a
percentage. Series number six, which was carefully sealed up,
produced four complete successes, five partial successes, and no
failures; whereas series twenty-one, which was not put in envelopes
at all, produced no complete successes, three partial successes, and
six failures. Perhaps I should explain that by a “series” I mean
simply a group of drawings which were done at one time. It is my
custom to make from six to a dozen and when Craig has finished
with them, they are put into an envelope and filed away.
I will add that Craig again and again begged me to sit and
watch her work, so that I might be able to add my testimony to
hers; I did so, watching tests both with envelopes and without,
and assure you she left no loophole for self-deception. There was
plenty of light to see by, and some of the most startling successes
were produced under my eyes. I will add that no one could take
this matter with more seriousness than my wife. She is the most
honorable person I know, and she has worked on these experiments
with rigid conscientiousness.
54
I shall give a number of the successful drawings, and some
of the partial successes, but none of the failures, for these obviously
are merely waste. When I draw a cow, and my wife draws a star or
a fish or a horseshoe, all you want is the word “Failure” and then
you want to know the percentage of failures, so that you can figure
the probabilities. Failures prove nothing that you do not already
believe; if your ideas are to be changed, it is successes that will
change them.
I begin with series three, because of the interesting circumstances
under which it was made. Late in the afternoon I phoned
my secretary to make a dozen drawings; and then, after dark, Craig
and I decided to drive to Pasadena, and on the way I stopped at
the office and got the twelve sealed envelopes which had been laid
on my desk. I picked them up in a hurry and slipped them into a
pocket, and a minute or two later I put them on the seat beside me
in the car.
After we had started, I said, “Why don’t you try some of the
drawings on the way?” We were passing through the Signal Hill
oil-field, amid thunder of machinery and hiss of steam and flashing
of headlights of cars and trucks. “It will be interesting to see if
I can concentrate in such circumstances,” said Craig, and took one
envelope and held it against her body in the darkness, while I went
on with my job of driving. After a few minutes Craig said, “I see
something long and oblong, like a stand.” She got a pad and pencil
from a pocket of the car, and switched on the ceiling light, and
made a drawing, and then opened the envelope. Here are the pictures;
I call it a partial success (Figs. 26, 26a):
55Here is the next pair, done on the same drive to Pasadena
(Figs. 27, 27a):
Then came a drawing of an automobile. Considering the
attendant circumstances, it was surely not surprising that Craig
should report it as “a big light in the end of a tube or horn.”
There were many such lights in her eyes.
Then a fourth envelope: she said, “I see a little animal or
bug with legs, and the legs are sticking out in bug effect.” When
she looked into the envelope, she was so excited that she tried to
get me to look—at forty miles an hour on a highway at night! Here
is the drawing, meant to be a skull and cross-bones, but so done that
a “bug with legs” is really a fair description of it (Fig. 28):
56After we arrived at our destination, my wife did some more
of the drawings, and got partial successes. On this telephone the
comment was: “Goblet with another one floating near or above it
inverted” (Figs. 29, 29a):
And then this arrow (Figs. 30, 30a):
Concerning the above my wife wrote: “See something that
suggests a garden tool—a lawn rake, or spade.” And for the next
one (Fig. 31) she wrote: “A pully-bone”—which is Mississippi
“darky” talk for a wish-bone of a chicken. I don’t know whether
it means a bone that you pull, or whether it is Creole for “poulet.”
Here is what my secretary had drawn (Fig. 31):
I had asked my secretary at the outset to make simple geometrical
designs, letters and figures, thinking that these would be
easier to recognize and reproduce. But they brought only partial
57successes; Craig would get elements of the drawing but would not
know how to put them together. There were seven in the first
series, and there is some element right in every one. An oblong
was drawn exactly, and then two fragments of oblongs added to it.
A capital M in script had the first stroke done exactly, with the
curl. A capital E in script was done with the curls left out.
And the same with the second series. Here is a square—but you
see that the two halves of it are wandering about (Figs. 32, 32a):
And here is a letter Y, but by telepathy it has been turned from
script into print (Figs. 33, 33a):
A quite different story began when my secretary allowed his
imagination a little play. He knows that my wife lives in part on
milk, and he knows that she is particular about the quality, because
he has to handle the bills. So he has a little fun with her, and you
58see that immediately she gets, not the form, but the color and feeling
of it (Figs. 34, 34a):
The comment reads: “Round white foamy stuff on top like
soap suds or froth.” As she drinks her milk sour and whipped, you
see that its foaminess is a prominent feature.
Then comes an oil derrick. We live in the midst of these
unsightly objects, and are liable to be turned out of house and
home by drilling nearby; moreover, I have written a book called
“Oil!” and the exclamation mark at the end has been justified by
the effect of it on our lives. My wife made a figure five with long
lines going out, and wrote: “I don’t know why the five should
have such a thing as an appendage, but the appendage was most
vivid, so there it is” (Figs. 35, 35a):
After she had opened the envelope and seen the original
drawing, the problem became, not why a figure five should have
an appendage, but why an oil derrick should have a figure five.
Craig puzzled over this, and then lay down and told her subconscious
mind to bring her the answer. What came was this: the
German version of my book, called “Petroleum,” has three oil
derricks on the front, and a huge dollar sign on the back of the
59cover, and this was what Craig had really “seen.” She had looked
at this book when it arrived, a year or more back, and it had been
filed away in her memory. Of course, this may not be the correct
explanation, but it is the one which her mind brought to her.
60
These drawing tests afford a basis for psycho-analysis, and
it is interesting to note some of the facts thus brought up from the
childhood of my wife. For example, fires! She was raised in the
“black belt,” where there are nine Negroes to one white, and the
former are still close to Africa. When Craig was a girl, a nurse in
the family, having been discharged, set fire to the home while the
adults were away, and the children asleep. Another servant, jealous
of an unfaithful husband, put her two babies into a barrel full of
feathers and burned them alive. Other fires occurred; so now, in
her home, Craig keeps an uneasy eye out for greasy rags, or overheated
stoves, or whatever else her fears suggest. When in these
drawing tests there has been anything indicating fire or smoke, she
has “got” it, with only one or two failures out of more than a dozen
cases. Sometimes she “got” the fire or smoke without the object;
sometimes she supplied fire or smoke to an object which might
properly have it—a pipe, for example. The results are so curious
that I assemble them together—a series of fire-alarms, as it were.
You recall the fact that in one of the early drawing tests—those
in which, instead of giving the drawings to my wife, I sat in
my study and concentrated upon them—I drew a lighted cigarette,
and thought of the curls of smoke. Craig filled up her drawing
with curves, and wrote: “I can’t draw it, but curls of some sort.”
At this time the convention that “curls stood for smoke” had not
been established. But now, in the series drawn by my secretary,
appeared a little house with smoking chimney, and you will see
that my wife got the smoke better than the house (Figs. 36, 36a):
61This apparently established in her mind the association of
curls with smoke. So when, in series six, I drew a pipe with smoke-curls,
my wife first drew an ellipse, and then wrote: “Now it begins
to spin, round and round, and is attached to a stick.” She then
drew (Figs. 37, 37a):
In series eight I drew a sky-rocket going up. My first impulse
had been to draw a bursting rocket, with a shower of stars, but
I realized that would be difficult, so I drew this instead (Fig. 38):
My wife apparently took my first thought, rather than my
drawing. Anyhow, she made half a dozen sketches of whirligigs
and light (Figs. 38a, 38b, 38c):
62
And here in series twenty-two is a burning lamp (Figs. 39, 39a):
And here in series thirty-four another, with comment: “flame and
sparks” (Figs. 40, 40a):
63I drew another pipe in series twenty-two, with the usual curls
of smoke; and Craig wrote: “Smoke stack.” I drew another in series
thirty-three with the result that, five drawings in advance of the
correct one, Craig drew a pipe with smoke. Of course, this may
have been a coincidence; but wait till you see how often such
coincidences happen! (Figs. 41, 41a):
In series twenty-one I drew a chimney, and Craig drew a chimney,
and added smoke. In thirty-four I drew an old-fashioned
trench-mortar; and here again she supplied the smoke (Figs. 42,
42a):
Cannons are especially horrible things to her, as you may note
again and again in her published war-sonnets:
The sharpened steel whips round, the black guns blaze,
Waste are the harvests, mute the songs of birds.
So when, in series eleven, I drew the muzzle half of an old-style
cannon, Craig’s imagination got to work one drawing ahead of
time. She wrote: “Fire and smoke—smoke—flame,” and then drew
as follows (Fig. 43a):
64
The next drawing was the cannon, and I give it, along
with the drawing Craig made to go with it. The comment she
wrote was: “Half circle—double lines—light inside—light is fire
busy whirling or flaming” (Figs. 44, 44a):
So much for fires, and things associated with fire. Now consider
another detail about life in the Yazoo delta, brought out in
the course of our psycho-analysis. In the days of Craig’s childhood,
poisonous snakes were an ever-present menace, and fear of them
had to be taught to children, and could hardly be taught too early.
There is a family story of a little tot crawling under the house
and coming back to report, “I see nuffin wiv a tail to it!” In the
swamps back of Craig’s summer home on the Mississippi Sound
I have counted a dozen copperheads and moccasins in the course of
65a half hour’s walk. Also, her father has some childhood complex
buried in his mind, which causes him to have a spell of nausea at
the sight of a snake. All this, of course, strongly affected the child’s
early days, and now it is in her mental depths. So when I drew a
hissing snake, just see the uproar I caused! She made no drawing,
but wrote a little essay. I give my drawing, and her essay following
(Fig. 45):
“See something like kitten with tail and saucer of milk. Now
it leaps into action and runs away to outdoors. Turns to fleeing
animal outdoors. Great activity among outdoor creatures. Know
it’s some outdoor thing, not indoor object—see trees, and a frightened
bird on the wing (turned sidewise). It’s outdoor thing, but
none of above seems to be it.”
In other words, little Mary Craig Kimbrough is back on the
plantation, seeing terror among birds and poultry, and not knowing
what causes it! Study the drawing, and you see that I got the action
of the snake, but didn’t get the coils very well, so they might be a
“saucer of milk”—and a sure-enough kitten’s tail sticking out from
it. Another childhood horror here! Craig was a fat little thing,
and she slipped and plumped down on her favorite pet kitten, and
exploded it.
66
The person whom we are subjecting to this process of psycho-analysis
has a strong color sense, and wanted to be a painter. So we
note that she “gets” colors and names them correctly. Here is my
drawing of what I meant to be a bouquet of pink roses (Figs. 46,
46a):
Or take this case of a lobster. Craig’s comment was: “Gorgeous
colors, red and greenish tinges.” Apparently I had failed to
decide whether I was drawing a live lobster or a boiled one! My
wife wrote further: “Now it turns into a lizard, camelian, reds and
greens.” When she sees this about to be made public, she is embarrassed
by her bad spelling; but she says: “Please do not overlook
the fact that a chameleon is a reptile—and so is a lobster.” I dutifully
quote her, even though her zoology is even worse than her
spelling! (Figs. 47, 47a):
67While we are on the “reptiles,” I include this menacing crab,
which may have got hold of little Mary Craig’s toe on the beach of
the Mississippi Sound (Fig. 48):
For the crab, Craig made two drawings, on opposite sides of
the paper (Figs. 48a, 48b):
The comments on the above read: “Wings, or fingers—wing
effect, but no feathers, things like fingers instead of feathers. Then
many little dots which all disappear, and leave two of them, O O,
as eyes of something.” And then, “Streamers flying from something.”
Another color instance: I drew the head of a horse, and Craig
drew a lot of apparently promiscuous lines, and at various places
wrote “yellow,” “white,” “blue,” “(dark),” and then a general description,
“Oriental.” Afterwards she said to me: “That looks like
a complete failure; yet it was so vivid, I can’t be mistaken. Where
did you get that horse?” Said I: “I copied it from a Sunday supplement.”
We got the paper from the trash-basket, and the page
opposite the horse contained what Craig described. We shall note
several other cases of this sort of intrusion of things I did not draw,
but which I had before me while drawing.
68Also anything with metal or shine seems to stand a good chance
of being “got.” For example, these nose-glasses (Figs. 49, 49a):
The comment reads: “Opalescent shine or gleam. Also peafowl.”
Or again, a belt-buckle; my wife writes the word “shines”
(Figs. 50, 50a):
Or this very busy alarm clock—she writes the same word
“shines” (Figs 51, 51a):
She has got at least part of a watch whenever one has been
presented. You remember the one Bob drew (Fig. 17). There was
another in series thirty-three; Craig made a crude drawing and
added: “Shines, glass or metal” (Figs. 52, 52a):
69
Also, on the automobile ride to Pasadena, series three, there
was a watch-face among the drawings, and Craig drew the angle of
the hands, and added the words, “a complication of small configurations.”
Having arrived in Pasadena, she took the twelve drawings
and tried them over again. This time, of course, she had a one in
twelve chance of guessing the watch. She wrote: “A white translucent
glimmering, or shimmering which I knew was not light but
rather glass. It was like heat waves radiating in little round pools
from a center.... Then in the center I saw a vivid black mark....
So it was bound to be the watch, and it was.”
And here is a fountain. You see that it appears to be in a tub,
and is so drawn by Craig. But you note that the “shine” has been
got. “These shine!” (Figs. 53, 53a):
Another instance, even more vivid. I made a poor attempt to
draw a bass tuba, as one sees them on the stage—a lot of jazz musicians
70dressed up in white duck, and a row of big brass and nickel
horns, polished to blind your eyes. See what Craig drew, and also
what she wrote (Figs. 54, 54a):
The comments, continued on the other side of the sheet, are:
“Dull gold ring shimmers and stands out with shadow behind it
and in center of it. Gleams and moves. Metal. There is a glow of
gold light, and the ring or circle is out in the air, suspended, and
moves in blur of gold.”
You see, she gets the feeling, the emotional content. I draw a
child’s express-wagon, and she writes: “Children again playing but
can’t get exactly how they look. Just feel there are children.” Or
take this one, which she describes as “Egyptian.” I don’t know if
my pillar is real Egyptian, but it seems so to me, and evidently to
my wife, for you note all the artistry it inspired (Figs. 55, 55a):
Sometimes Craig will embody the feeling in some new form
of her own invention; as for example, when I draw an old-fashioned
cannon on wheels, and she writes: “Black Napoleon hat and red
military coat.” I draw a running fox—well drawn, because I copy
it from a picture; she rises to the occasion with two crossed guns,
71and a hunting horn with a lot of musical notes coming out of it
(Figs. 56, 56a):
I draw an auto, and she replies with the hub and spokes of a
wheel. Not satisfied with this, she sets it aside, and tries again a
little later—without looking at the original drawing—and this time
she produces a horn, with indication of a noise. I give both her
drawings, which are on two sides of the same slip of paper (Figs.
57a, 57b):
72
An extraordinary incident occurred in connection with the
fourth series of drawings. While my secretary, E. M. Hart, was
making the drawings, there came into the office his brother-in-law,
R. H. Craig, Jr., a teller of the Security First National Bank of Long
Beach, a person entirely unknown to my wife. He heard what was
going on, and said, “I’ll give her some that’ll stump her.” He took
a pen and drew two pictures, which were duly wrapped in sheets of
green paper and sealed in envelopes, and put with the rest of the
series. I was not at the office, and nothing was said to me about
Mr. Craig having taken part in the matter.
My wife did this series under my eyes; and when she came to
the first of Mr. Craig’s two drawings, she wrote, “Some sort of grinning
monster,” and added an elaborate description. Then she
opened the envelope, and found a roller skate with a foot and leg
attached. This, naturally, was called a failure; but seven drawings
later in the same series came Mr. Craig’s other drawing, which was
as follows (Fig. 58):
Now read the amazing description which my wife had written,
seven drawings back, when the first of Mr. Craig’s drawings had
come under her hand:
“Some sort of grinning monster—see only the face and a vague
73idea of deformed neck and shoulders. It is a man, but it looks like
a cat’s face, cat eyes and whiskers. Don’t know just how I know it
is a man—it is a deformity. Not a cat. See color of skin which is
deep, flat pink, as of a colored picture. The face of the creature is
broad and weird. The flesh of neck, or somewhere, gives effect of
rolls or creases.”
I asked my secretary what this drawing was meant to be, and
he said “a Happy Hooligan.” My cultural backwardness is such
that I wasn’t sure just what a “Happy Hooligan” might be, but my
secretary told me it is a comic supplement figure, and I then looked
it up in the paper, and found that the face of the figure as printed
is a very pale pink, and the little cap on top is a bright red. I called
Mr. Craig on the phone and asked him this question: “If you were
to think of a color in connection with a ‘Happy Hooligan,’ what
color would it be?” He answered, “Red.”
Now I ask you, what chance do you think there is of a person’s
writing a description such as the above by guess work? To be sure,
my wife had eight guesses; but do you think that eight million
guesses would suffice? And if we call it telepathy, do we say that
my wife’s mind has the power to dip into the mind of a young man
whom she has never seen, nor even heard of? Or shall we say that
his mind affected his brother-in-law’s, the brother-in-law’s affected
mine, and mine affected my wife’s? Or, if we decide to call it clairvoyance,
or psychometry, then are we going to say there is some
kind of vibration or emanation from Mr. Craig’s drawing, so powerful
that when one of his drawings is handed to my wife, she gets
what is in another drawing which has been done at the same time?
Whatever may be the explanation, here is the fact: Again and
again we find Craig getting, not the drawing she is holding under
her hand, but the next one, which she has not yet touched. When
she picks up the first drawing, she will say, or write: “There is a
little man in this series”; or: “There is a snow scene with sled”; or:
“An elephant, also a rooster.” I am going to show you these particular
cases; but first a word as to how I have counted such “anticipations.”
Manifestly, if I grant the right to more than one guess, I am
increasing the chances of guesswork, and correspondingly reducing
74the significance of the totals. What I have done is this: where such
cases have occurred, I have called them total failures, except in a
few cases, where the description was so detailed and exact as to be
overwhelming—as in the case of this “Happy Hooligan.” Even so,
I have not called it a complete success, only a partial success. In
order to be classified as a complete success, my wife’s drawing must
have been made for the particular drawing of mine which she had
in her hand at that time; and throughout this account, the reader
is to understand that every drawing presented was made in connection
with the particular drawing printed alongside it—except in
cases where I expressly state otherwise.
Now for a few of the “anticipations.” In the course of series
six, drawn by me on Feb. 8, 1929, drawing number two was a daisy,
and Craig got the elements of it, as you see (Figs. 59, 59a):
Her mind then went ahead, and she wrote, “May be snow
scene on hill and sled.” The next drawing was an axe, which I give
later (Fig. 145); she got the elements of this very well, and then
added on the back: “I get a feeling again of a snow scene to come
in this series—a sled in the snow.” That was number three; and
when number five came Craig made this annotation: “Opened it
by mistake, without concentrating. It’s my expected sled and snow
scene.” Here is the drawing (Fig. 60):
Series number eight, on Feb. 10, brought even stranger results.
This is the series in which the laced-up football was turned into a
75calf wearing a belly-band (Figs. 15, 15a). But even while I was
engaged in making the drawings, sitting in my study apart, and
with the door closed, Craig’s busy magic, whatever it is, was bringing
her messages. She called out: “I see a rooster!” I had actually
drawn a rooster; but of course I made no reply to her words. She
at once drew a rooster and several other things, and after I had
brought my drawings into the room, but before she had started to
work with them, she wrote as follows:
“While Upton was making these drawings I sat before the fire
thinking how to dry felt slippers which I had washed. I had my
mind on them. Hung them on grating to see if they would hang
there without burning. Suddenly saw rooster crowing. Then
thought, ‘Can U be drawing rooster?’ Decided to make note of this.
Did so. Then saw”—and she draws a circle with eight radiating
lines, like spokes of a wheel.
In due course came drawing number eight, and before looking
at it, Craig wrote: “Rooster.” Then she added, “But no—it looks
like a picture of coffee-pot—see spout and handle.” This is hard
on me as an artist, but I give the drawing and let you judge for
yourself (Fig. 61):
What about the circle and the radiating spokes? That was,
apparently, a fore-glimpse of drawing number five. I give you that,
together with what Craig drew for that particular test when it came.
Her effort suggests the kind of humor with which the newspaper
artists used to delight my childhood; a series of drawings in which
one thing turns into some other and quite unexpected thing by
76gradual changes. You will see here how the hub of a wagon-wheel
may turn into the muzzle of a deer! (Figs. 62, 62a):
77
What are the principles upon which I have classified the
drawings, as between success, partial successes, and failures? I will
use this series, number eight, to illustrate. There are eight drawings,
and I have set them down as one success, six partial successes,
one failure. The success is the rooster (Fig. 61), called “a rooster,”
even though it “looks like a coffee pot.” The partial successes are,
first, an electric light bulb, very crudely imitated as to shape in
three drawings. Perhaps this was hardly good enough to be counted;
it was a border-line case, and probably the poorest that I admitted
to the classification of “partial successes” (Fig. 63a).
Second, the ascending sky-rocket, already printed as fig. 38,
giving rise to six different drawings of whirligigs and light. Third,
the following drawing, for which Craig wrote: “See spider, or some
sort of legged pest. If this is not a spider, there is a spider in the lot
somewhere! This I know!” (Fig. 64):
78
The fourth partial success was a drawn bow, with arrow fitted,
ready to be launched. Craig wrote as follows: “Picked this up and
saw inside as it dropped on floor—so did not try it. Suddenly recall
I have already ‘seen’ it earlier.” Before starting the tests, along with
her written mention of “a rooster,” she had drawn a bow and crude
arrow, and the resemblance is so exact that it seems to me entitled
to be called a partial success (Figs. 65, 65a):
Fifth, the wagon hub (Fig. 60), which became the deer’s muzzle.
And finally the laced-up football (Fig. 15) which became a belly-band
on a calf (Fig. 15a).
As for the failure in this series, it is a cake of soap, which was
called “whirls.” There are a couple of other drawings in the series,
marked: “Too tired to see it,” and “Tired now and excited and
keep seeing old things”—meaning, of course, the preceding drawings.
I tried to avoid drawing the same object more than once, but
79now and then I slipped up. In series eleven I drew another rooster,
and there followed, not one “anticipation,” but several. Drawing
number one was a tooth; Craig wrote: “First see rooster. Then
elephant.” Drawing number two was an elephant; and Craig wrote:
“Elephant came again. I try to suppress it, and see lines, and a spike
sticking some way into something.” She drew it, and it seems clear
that the “spike” is the elephant’s tusk, and the head of the “spike”
is the elephant’s eye (Figs. 66, 66a):
Next, number three, was the rooster. But Craig had set
“rooster” down in her mind as a blunder, so now she wrote: “I don’t
know what, see a bunch, or tuft clearly. Also a crooked arm on a
body. But don’t feel that I’m right.” Here are the drawings, and
you can see that she was somewhat right (Figs. 67, 67a):
This series eleven, containing fourteen drawings, is marked:
“Did this lot rapidly, without holding (mind) blank. The chicken
80and elephant came at once, on a very earnest request to my mind to
‘come across.’” I have classified in this series two successes, five
partial, and five failures: throwing out numbers twelve and fourteen,
because Craig wrote: “Nothing except all the preceding ones
come—too many at once—all past ones crowding in memory”; and
again, “Nothing but everything in the preceding. Too many of
them in my mind.”
The anticipations run all through this series in a quite fascinating
way. Thus, for number four Craig wrote: “Flower. This is
a vivid one. Green spine—leaves like century plant.” She drew
Figure 68a:
And then again, for drawing number seven, she did more
flowers, with this comment: “This is a real flower, I’ve seen it
before. It’s vivid and returns. Century plant? Now it turns into
candle stick. See a candle” (Fig. 69a).
All this was wrong—so far. Number four was a table, and
number seven was the rear half of a cow. But now we come to
number eleven, the plant known as a “cat-tail,” which seems to
resemble rather surprisingly the lower of the two drawings in Figure
69a. My drawing is given as Figure 70, and the one Craig made for
it is given as 70a.
81
Comment on the above read: “Very pointed. Am not able to
see what. Dog’s head?”
Drawing five was a large fish-hook; and this inspired the
experimenter to a discourse, as follows: “Dog wagging—see tail in
air busy wagging—jolly doggie—tail curled in air.” And then:
“Now I see a cow. I fear the elephant and chicken got me too sure
of animals. But I see these.”
Now, a big fish-hook looks not unlike a “tail curled in air.”
But when we come to number seven, we discover what Craig was
apparently anticipating. It is the drawing of what I have referred to
as “the rear half of a cow.” It is badly done, with a cow’s hoof, but I
forgot what a cow’s tail is like, and this tail that I drew would fit
much better on a “jolly doggy,” you must admit (Fig. 71):
82
Drawing number six was a sun, as children draw it, a circle
with rays going out all round. Craig wrote: “Setting sun and bird
in sky. Big bird on wing—seagull or wild goose.” This I called a
partial success. Number nine was the muzzle end of an old-style
cannon, already reported in Figures 46, 46a.
I conclude the study of this particular series with drawing
thirteen, to which was added the comment: “Think of a saucer,
then of a cup. It’s something in the kitchen. Too tired to see”
(Figs. 72, 72a):
In series fourteen, drawing three, Craig wrote: “Man running,
can’t draw it.” She drew as follows (Fig. 73a):
83Next came my drawing four, as follows (Fig. 73):
In series thirty-five I first drew a fire hydrant, and Craig wrote,
“Peafowl,” and added the following drawing, which certainly constitutes
a partial success (Figs. 74, 74a):
My next drawing was the peafowl, as you see. For this Craig
wrote: “Peafowl again,” and apparently tried to draw the peafowl’s
neck, and a lot of those spots which I had forgotten are an appurtenance
of peafowls (Figs. 75, 75a):
84In series twenty-nine I drew an elevated railway. If you turn it
upside down, as I have done here, it looks like water and smokestacks.
Anyhow, Craig drew a steamboat (Figs. 76, 76a):
And then came my next drawing—a steamboat! Craig wrote:
“Smoke again,” and drew the smoke and the stack (Figs. 77, 77a):
She added two more drawings, which appear to be the wheel
of the boat in the water, and the smoke (Figs. 77b, 77c):
85In series thirty I drew a fish-hook with line, and you see it
turned into a flower (Figs. 78, 78a):
Then came an obelisk, and Craig got it, but with novel effects,
thus (Figs. 79, 79a):
Now why should an obelisk go on a jag, and have little circles
at its base? The answer appears to be: it inherited the curves from
the previous fish-hook, and the little circles from the next drawing.
You will see that, having used up her supply of little circles, Craig
did not get the next drawing so well (Figs. 80, 80a):
86In series twenty-two I first drew a bed, and Craig made two
attempts to draw a potted plant. My second drawing was a maltese
cross, and Craig turned it into a basket (Figs. 81, 81a):
But she could not give up her plant. She added: “There is a
flower basket in this lot, or potted plant.” The next drawing was
a fleur-de-lis, which looks not unlike a potted plant or hanging
basket (Fig. 82):
In drawing four she got the elements of a door-knob pretty
well, and added: “See head of bird, too—eagle beak.” Drawing
seven was a crane, with beak open.
87
I could go through all thirty-five of the series, listing such
“anticipations” as this: but I have given enough to show how the
thing goes. Such occurrences make it hard for Craig because, when
she has once drawn a certain object, she naturally resists the impulse
to draw it again, thinking it is nothing but a memory. Thus, in
series thirteen, my first drawing was a savage woman carrying a
bundle on her head, and Craig drew the profile of a head with a long
nose. My next drawing was the profile of a head, with a very conspicuous
nose, and Craig wrote: “Face again, but [I] inhibit this.
Then come two hands, and below”—and she draws what might be
a cross section of a skull, side view.
Yet sometimes she overcomes this handicap triumphantly. Series
twelve is marked: “Hastily done,” and she adds the general
comment: “Several times saw bristles on things of different shapes,
some flowers, some bristled brushes. Saw flower, also more than
once”—and then she appends a drawing of a four-leaf clover. As it
happened, this series contained a three-leaf clover, and it contained
another flower, and also a cactus-plant—more of one kind of thing
than it was fair to put into one set of drawings. Nevertheless, Craig
scored one of her successes with the cactus, setting it down as “fuzzy
flower” (Figs. 83, 83a):
Nor was she afraid to repeat herself when she came to another
“fuzzy flower” in this series (Figs. 84, 84a):
88
Frequently she will make a good drawing of an object, but
name it badly. In that same series twelve I drew a hoe, and she got
the shape of it, but wrote: “May be scissors, may be spectacles with
long stem ears” (Figs. 85, 85a):
Also in the same series these reindeer horns, which she calls
“holly leaves.” It is psychologically interesting to note that reindeer
and holly trees were both associated with Christmas in Craig’s
childhood (Figs. 86, 86a):
And in series eighteen, this fat baby bird of mine is hardly
recognizable when called “flounder” (Figs. 87, 87a):
89This very dim stalk of celery, drawn by me, I must admit looks
more like a fish-fork (Figs. 88, 88a):
Craig’s verbal description of the above reads: “Stone set in
platinum; may be diamond, as points seem to be white light—at
least it shines, not red shine of fire but white shine.” How does
a stalk of celery, which looks like a fish-fork, come to have a diamond
set in it? You may understand the reason when you hear
that three drawings later in the same series is a diamond set in a
stick. Just why it occurred to me to set a diamond thus I cannot
now recall, but the drawing is plain, and it led to a bit of fun. I
had been to lunch with Charlie Chaplin that day, and had come
home and told my wife about it; so here my sparkling diamond
undergoes a transfiguration! “Chaplin,” writes my wife, and adds:
“I don’t see why he has on a halo” (Figs. 89, 89a):
From the point of view of bad guessing, the most conspicuous
series is number twenty. In this I have recorded four successes,
seven partial, and one failure; yet there is hardly an object that
is correctly named. Here are the three which I call successes; there
may be dispute about any one of them, but it seems to me the
essential elements have been got. You may be surprised at a necktie
90which “began to smoke”—but not when you see that the next
drawing is a burning match! (Figs. 90, 90a; 90, 91a; 90, 92a):
As for the partial successes, I give six of them by way of samples.
For the first, Craig’s comment was: “The body is vague, but see
there is a body.” You will agree that my mountain landscape looks
oddly like a body (Figs. 93, 93a):
91
And the pedals of this harp make a charming pair of lady’s
feet (Figs. 94, 94a):
This balloon is described in my wife’s comment as: “Shines in
sunlight, must be metal, a scythe hanging among vines or strings.”
92This, which is called “front foot and leg of dog, though I
don’t see the dog,” is really drawn more like the spigot of my
drawing (Figs. 96, 96a):
A butterfly’s wings are “got” remarkably well (Figs. 97, 97a).
And the trade-marks on my little box are called “tiny stars, or
sparks” (Figs. 98, 98a):
93
I have referred to the fact that my wife’s drawings sometimes
contain things which are not in mine, but which were in my mind
while I was making them, or while she was “concentrating.” One
of the most curious of such cases came in series twenty-eight, which
was after we had given up, as too great a nuisance, all precautions
in the way of sealing the drawings in envelopes. I made eight
drawings, and laid them face down on my wife’s table, and then
went out and took a walk while she did them. So, of course, it
was easy for her to do what she pleased—and maybe she “peeked,”
the skeptic will say. But as it happens, she didn’t get a single one
right! Instead of reproducing my drawings, what she did was to
reproduce my thoughts while I was walking up and down on the
ocean front. It seems to me that in so doing, she provided a perfect
answer to those who may attribute these results to any form
of deception, whether conscious or unconscious.
There was a moon behind a bank of dark clouds, and it produced
an unusual effect—a well-defined white cross in the sky. I
watched it for nearly half an hour, and my continued thought was:
“If this were an age of superstition, that would be a portent, and
we should hear about it in history.” It was so strange that I finally
went home and called my wife out onto the street. I did not tell
her why. I wanted to see her surprise, so I purposely gave no hint.
I said: “Come out! Please come!” Finally she came, and her comment
was: “I just drew that!” We went back into the house, and
she handed me a drawing. I give it alongside my drawing of an
Indian club, which Craig had held while doing hers. You may see
exactly how much of her impulse came from that source (Figs. 99,
99a):
94The “comment” reads: “Light ‘fingers’—moonlight.” Also:
“black shadow.”
Let me add also that in the eight drawings I handed to Craig
there was neither moon, cloud, cross, nor light. Two of these eight
my wife failed to mark, and so I cannot identify them as belonging
to this series; but we examined all eight at the time, and made
sure of this point. Those which I now have are a flag, a bearded
man, a chiffonier, a cannon, a dirt-scraper, and the Indian club,
given above.
You will ask, perhaps, did Craig look out of the window. As
it happened, this sky effect was invisible from any window, and I
have her word that she had not moved from her couch. I should
add that she is nervous, and keeps the curtains tightly drawn at
night, and never goes out at night unless it is to be driven somewhere.
It was early in March, with a cold wind off the sea, and I
had to labor to persuade her to put a wrap over her dressing gown
and step out into the middle of the street to look up at the sky.
95
The casual reader may be bored by too many of these drawings,
but they are easy to skip, or to take in at a glance, and there
may be students who will want to examine them carefully. So I
will add a selection of the significant drawings, with only brief
remarks. I begin with what I have called partial successes, and
then add a few more of those I have called “complete.”
Let us return to the early drawings, made by my secretary. On
the automobile ride to Pasadena, there was an ash-can (Fig. 100):
For the above my wife wrote: “I see a chain dangling from
something—resembling little chimney pot on top of house.”
And here is design for which the comment was: “These somehow
belong together but won’t get together” (Figs. 101, 101a):
Here is a fan, with comment: “Inside seems irregular, as if
cloth draped or crumpled” (Figs. 102, 102a):
96
Here is a one-half success (Figs. 103, 103a):
Here is a broom, drawn by my secretary (Fig. 104), and several
efforts to reproduce it (Figs. 104a, 104b):
The comments accompanying these drawings read: “All I’m
sure of is a straight line with something curved at end of it; once
it came” (here is drawing of the flower). “Then it doubled, or reappeared,
I don’t know which. (Am not sure of curly edges.) Then
it was upside down.”
The next drawing was a heart, and my wife got the upper half
with what are apparently blood-drops added (Figs. 105, 105a):
97
The above is interesting, as suggesting that whatever agency
furnished the information knew more than it was telling. For if
Craig’s drawing, a pair of curves, constituted a crude letter N, or
had no significance, why add the blood-drops, which were not in
the original? On the other hand, if her subconscious mind knew it
was a heart, why not give her the whole heart, and let her draw it?
So much for the drawings of my secretary; and now for my own
early drawings. When I was a school boy, we used to represent
human figures in this way; and, as you see, Craig got the essentials
(Figs. 106, 106a):
Several weeks later, I drew a pair of such figures in action and
the comment was: “It’s a whirligig of some sort” (Figs. 107, 107a).
98After the following drawing, Craig asked me not to do any
more hands, for the reason that she “got” this, but thought it was
my own hand doing the drawing. She guessed something else, and
wrote: “Turned into pig’s head, then rabbit’s” (Figs. 108, 108a):
Next, this bat, with very striking comment.
“Looks like ear-shaped something,” and again:
“Looks like calla lily” (Figs. 109, 109a):
A butterfly net (Figs. 110, 110a).
A key (Figs. 111, 111a):
99This highly humorous sunrise (Figs. 112, 112a):
A carnation which came after the preceding drawing, and apparently
had been anticipated in the “sunrise” (Figs. 113, 113a).
Note that this camp-stool, as I drew it, really does appear to
be standing on water (Figs. 114, 114a):
For this little waiter, who follows, no drawing was made by
my wife. Her written comment was: “I see at once the profile of
human face. Am interrupted by radio tune. Something makes me
think of a cow. Now see two things sticking out like horns” (Fig.
115).
100
The following had no comment (Figs. 116, 116a):
Nor the next ones (Figs. 117, 117a):
The comment on this caterpillar was: “Fork—then garden
tool—lawn rake. Leaf.” I might add that we have a lawn-rake made
of bristly bamboo, which looks very much like my drawing (Figs.
118, 118a):
101In the following case I drew sixteen stars, and you may count
and see that Craig got twelve of them, and made up the difference
with a moon! (Figs. 119, 119a):
Comment on the following: “Looks like a monkey wrench,
but it may be a yardstick” (Figs. 120, 120a):
In the next one, the curve of the worm is amusingly reproduced
by the bird’s neck. The comment added: “But it may be a snake.”
Craig says this is an example of how one part of the drawing comes
to her, and then, in haste, her memory-trains and associations supply
what they think should be the rest (Figs. 121, 121a).
The umbrella brings up Craig’s reptile “complex” again. I
assure you that in her garden, she turns sticks into snakes when they
are far less snake-like than my drawing. Her comment was: “I
feel that it is a snake crawling out of something—vivid feeling of
snake, but it looks like a cat’s tail” (Figs. 122, 122a):
102
I drew a wall-hook to hang your coat on (Figs. 123, 123a):
A design, evidently felt as a design, though not well got (Figs.
124, 124a):
A screw, with comment: “light-house or tower. Too fat at
base.” If Craig’s drawing were made narrower at base, it would
reproduce the screw very well. Note that in the right-hand “tower”
the screw-like effect of the “set backs” is kept (Figs. 125, 125a):
103Here is a love story which seems to go wrong, the hearts being
turned to opposition (Figs. 126, 126a):
Here is the flag, made simpler—“e pluribus unum!” (Figs.
127, 127a):
Here is a cow, as seen by the cubists. Comment: “Something
sending out long lines from it” (Figs. 128, 128a):
Telegraph wires, apparently seen as waves in the ether (Figs.
129, 129a):
104Comment on the following: “Horns. Can’t see what they are
attached to” (Figs. 130, 130a):
And here is a parrot turned into a leaf, with comment. “See
veins and stem with sharp vivid bend in it”—which seems to indicate
a sense of the parrot’s beak (Figs. 131, 131a):
105
The border-line between successes and failures is not easy
to determine. Bear in mind that we are not conducting a drawing
class, nor making tests of my wife’s eyesight: we are trying to ascertain
whether there does pass from my mind to hers, or from my
drawing to her mind, a recognizable impulse of some sort. So, if
she gets the essential feature of the drawing, we are entitled to
call it evidence of telepathy. I think the fan with “crumpled cloth”
(Fig. 102), and the umbrella handle that may be a “snake crawling
out of something,” but that “looks like a cat’s tail” (Fig. 122), and
the screw that was called a “tower” (Fig. 126)—all these are really
successes. I will append a number of examples, about which there
seems to me no room for dispute, and which I have called successes.
The first is a sample of architecture (Figs. 132, 132a):
And here is an hourglass, with sand running through it. Not
merely did Craig write “white sand,” but she made the tree the
same shape as the glass. I have turned the hourglass upside down
so that you can get the effect better. It should be obvious that
“upside-downness” has nothing to do with these tests, as Craig is
as apt to be holding a drawing one way as another (Figs. 133, 133a):
106And these three circles, with comment: “Feel sure it is,”
written above the drawing (Figs. 134, 134a):
As to the next comment, “Trumpet flower,” let me explain
that we have them in our garden, whereas we do not have any
musical trumpets or horns (Figs. 135, 135a):
This strange object from my pencil tried to be a conch-shell,
but got a bad start, and was left unclassified. Craig made it “life
buoy in water,” which is good, except for the spelling. She insists
upon my pointing out that shells also belong in water (Figs. 136,
136a):
107This one, described in good country fashion, “Muley cow with
tongue hanging out” (Fig. 137):
This next one was described by the written word: “Goat”
(Fig. 138):
And this one is so striking that I give the words in facsimile
(Figs. 139, 139a):
For the following, my wife described a wrong thing, and then
added: “Now a sudden new thing, cone-shaped or goblet-like. This
feels like it” (Figs. 140, 140a):
108
This was correctly named: “2 legs of something running”
(Figs. 141, 141a):
This Alpine hat with feather seems to me no less a success
because it is called “Chafing dish” (Figs. 142, 142a):
Nor this wind-mill because the sails are left off (Figs. 143,
143a):
109These concentric circles are called “Horn (very curled), or
shell” (Figs. 144, 144a):
And here is a curious one, which came early in the tests. I
call attention to the comment about the handle, which ran off the
sheet of paper without any ending, just as she says. “Letter A with
something long above it. Key or a sword, there seems to be no
end to the handle. Think it’s a key” (Figs. 145, 145a):
110And finally, this still more astonishing one, to serve as a climax.
Let me explain that I am not so good an artist as this; I copied my
drawing from some magazine (Figs. 146, 146a):
You note that my wife “got,” not merely the whole top of the
drawing, but some impression of the arms, which are crossed in
a peculiar way. I ask her about this case—the drawing having been
made less than a month ago—and I find that she remembers it well.
She saw what she thought was a turban wound about the head, and
got the impression of color. She wrote the words “not hair” to
make this clear. The rest of the comment written at the time was:
“See back of head, ear, and swirling scarf tied around head.”
111
I have now given nearly all the 65 drawings which I call “successes,”
and about half the 155 which I call “partial successes.”
This, I think, is enough for any purpose. No one can seriously
claim that such a set of coincidences could happen by chance, and
so it becomes necessary to investigate other possible explanations.
First, a hoax. As covering that point, I prepared a set of affidavits
as to the good faith of myself, my wife, her sister, and her
sister’s husband. These affidavits were all duly signed and witnessed;
but friends, reading the manuscript, think they use up
space to no purpose, and that the reader will ask no more than the
statement that this book is a serious one, and that the manuscript
was carefully read by all four of the persons mentioned above, and
approved by them as representing the exact truth.
That a group of persons should enter into a conspiracy to
perpetrate a hoax is conceivable. Whether or not it is conceivable
of the group here quoted is something of which the reader is the
judge. But this much is clear: any reader who, having read the
above, still suspects us, will not be convinced by further protestations.
How about the possibility of fraud by one person? No one
who knows Mary Craig Sinclair would suspect her; but you who
do not know her have, naturally, the right to consider such an
hypothesis. Can she be one of those women who enjoy being
talked about? The broaching of this idea causes her to take the
pencil away from her husband, and you now hear her own authentic
voice, as follows:
“I happen to be a daughter of that once very living thing, ‘the
Old South,’ and there are certain ideals which are in my blood.
The avoidance of publicity is one of them. But even if I had ever
had a desire for publicity, it would have been killed by my actual
experiences as the wife of a social crusader. My home is besieged
by an endless train of persons of every description, who travel over
112the place, knocking on doors and windows, and insisting upon having
a hearing for their various programs for changing the nature
of the universe. I have been driven to putting up barriers and
fences around my garden, and threatening to flee to the Himalayas,
and become a Yogic mistress, or whatever a Yogic ‘master’ of my
sex is called.
“Jack London tried to solve this problem by putting a sign
on the front door which read, ‘Go to the back door,’ and on the
back door one which read, ‘Go to the front door.’ But when I tried
this, one seeker of inspiration took his seat halfway between the
two doors, and declared that he would remain there the rest of
his life, or until his wishes were acceded to. Another hid himself
in the swimming-pool, and rose up from its depths to confront me
in the dusk, when, as it happened, I was alone on the place, and
went out into the garden for a breath of air. A third announced
that he had a million dollars to present to my husband in person,
and would not be persuaded to depart until my brother invited
him to go downtown to supper, and so got him into a car. Having
faithfully fed the hungry millionaire, my brother drove him to the
police-station, where, after a serious talking-to by the chief, he
consented to carry his million dollars away. A fourth introduced
himself by mail as having just been released from the psychopathic
ward in Los Angeles, and intending to call upon us, for reasons not
stated. A fifth announced himself by telephone, as intending to
come at once and shoot my husband on sight. Yet another, seven
feet tall and broad in proportion, announced that he had a revelation
direct from God, and had come to have the manuscript revised.
When politely asked as to its nature, he rose up, towering over my
none too husky spouse and declaring that no human eye had ever
beheld it, and no human eye would ever be permitted to behold it.
Such experiences, as a continuing part of a woman’s life, do not
lead her to seek publicity; they tend rather to develop a persecution
complex.
“Speaking seriously, I consider that I have every evidence of
the effect of people’s thoughts on each other. And my distrust of
human nature, in its present stage of evolution, is so great, that
the idea of having many persons concentrate their attention on
me is an idea from which I shrink. I agree with Richet that the
113fact of telepathy is one of the most terrifying in existence; and
nothing but a deep love of truth has induced me to let this very
personal story be told in print.”
Next, what about the possibility of unconscious fraud? This
also is a question to be frankly met. All students of psychology
know that the subconscious mind has dubious morals. One has only
to watch his own dreams to discover this. A person in a trance is
similar to one talking or walking in sleep, or a drunken man, or
one under the influence of a drug. But in this case it must be
noted that my wife has never been in a trance. In these mind-reading
tests, no matter how intense the “concentration,” there
is always a part of her mind which knows what she is doing. If
you speak to her, she is immediately “all there.” When she has her
mental pictures, she sits up and makes her drawing, and compares
it with mine, and this is a completely conscious act.
Moreover, I point out that a great deal of the most impressive
evidence does not depend upon Craig alone. The five drawings
with her brother-in-law, Figures 1, 16, 17, 18, 19, constitute by
themselves evidence of telepathy sufficient to convince any mind
which is open to conviction. While it would have been possible
for Craig and Bob to hoax Dollie and me, it could certainly not
have been done without Bob’s connivance. If you suggest that my
wife and my brother-in-law may have been fooling me, I reply that
there is a still greater mass of evidence which could not have been
a hoax without my connivance. When I go into my study alone—a
little sun-parlor at the front of a beach-house, with nothing but a
couch, a chair and a table—I certainly know that I am alone; and
when I make a drawing and hold it before my eyes for five or ten
minutes, I certainly know whether any other person is seeing it.
This covers the drawings presented as Figures 2, 20, and 21, with
four others told about in the same series. It seems to me these
seven cases by themselves are evidence of telepathy sufficient to
convince any open mind.
Furthermore, there are the several score drawings which I
made in my study and sealed up in envelopes, taking them to my
wife and watching her lay them one by one upon her body and
write down more or less accurately what was in them. I certainly
know whether I was alone when I made the drawings, and whether
114I made the contents of the envelopes invisible, and whether my
wife had any opportunity to open the envelopes before she made
her drawings. Of course, I understand the familiar conjuring trick
whereby you open one envelope, and hide it in your palm, and
pretend to be describing the next one while really describing the
one you have seen. But I would stake my life upon the certainty
that my wife knows no sleight-of-hand, and anyhow, I made certain
that she did not open the first one; I sat and watched her, and after
each test she handed me the envelopes and drawings, one by one—the
envelopes having previously been numbered by me. She would
turn out the reading-light which was immediately over her head,
but there was plenty of light from other parts of the room, enough
so that I could look at drawings as they were shown to me. Often
these tests were done in the daytime, and then all we did was to
pull down the window-shades back of the couch.
It should be obvious that I stand to lose much more than I
stand to gain by publishing a book of this sort. Many have urged
me not to take the risk. It is the part of prudence not to believe
too many new and strange ideas. Some of my Socialist and materialist
friends are going to say—without troubling to read what I have
written: “Sinclair has gone in for occultism; he is turning into a
mystic in his old age.” It is true that I am fifty-one, but I think my
mind is not entirely gone; and if what I publish here is mysticism,
then I do not know how there can be such a thing as science about
the human mind.
We have made repeated tests to see what happens; we have
written down our observations as we go along; we have presented
the evidence carefully and conscientiously, without theories; and
what any scientist can do, or ask to have done, more than this, I
cannot imagine. Those who throw out these results will not be
scientists, but merely another set of dogmatists—of whom new crops
are continually springing up, wearing new disguises and new labels.
The plain truth is that in science, as in politics and religion, it is
a lot easier to believe what you have been taught, than to set out
for yourself and ascertain what happens.
Of course the thing would be more convincing if it were done
in the presence of strangers. That brings up a question which is
bound to be asked, so I will save time by answering it here. The
115first essential to success in these tests is a state of mind; and at
present my wife is a sensitive woman, at the stage of life described
as “glandular imbalance.” She has never tried these experiments
in the presence of a stranger, and has no idea whether she could get
the necessary concentration. She learned from her experiments
with her sick brother-in-law that the agent can send you pain and
fear, as well as chairs and table-forks, and she would certainly not
enter lightly into a condition of rapport with those whom she did
not know and trust.
She insists that the way for you to be really certain is to follow
her example. If you sat and watched her do it, you might go away
with doubts, as she did after her experiments with Jan. But when
you have done it yourself, then you know. One reason the thing
has not been proven to the public is that people depend on professional
mediums, many of whom are deliberate and conscious cheats.
Others are vain and temperamental, difficult to manage; and research
is hindered by their instability. That is why Craig set to
work and learned to do it, and she believes that others can do the
same, if they have the desire and the patience.
116
The next thing is to carry out our promise and tell you the
technique. My wife has, among her notes, a mass of writing on this
subject in the form of instructions to Bob, and others who were
interested. I tried to condense it, but found I could not satisfy her,
and in the end I realized that her point of view is correct. No one
objects to repetition of phrases in a legal document, where the one
essential is precision; and the same thing applies to descriptions of
these complicated mental processes. This was the most difficult
writing task she ever undertook, and the reason lies in its newness,
and the complexity of the mind itself.
If you want to learn the art of conscious mind-reading, this will
tell you how; and if you don’t want to learn it, you can easily skip
this section of the book. Here is Craig’s statement:
“The first thing you have to do is to learn the trick of undivided
attention, or concentration. By these terms I mean something
quite different from what is ordinarily meant. One ‘concentrates’
on writing a chapter in a book, or on solving a problem in
mathematics; but this is a complicated process of dividing one’s
attention, giving it to one detail after another, judging, balancing,
making decisions. The kind of concentration I mean is putting the
attention on one object, or one uncomplicated thought, such as joy,
or peace, and holding it there steadily. It isn’t thinking; it is inhibiting
thought, except for one thought, or one object in thought.
“You have to inhibit the impulse to think things about the
object, to examine it, or appraise it, or to allow memory-trains to
attach themselves to it. The average person has never heard of such
a form of concentration, and so has to learn how to do it. Simultaneously,
he must learn to relax, for strangely enough, a part of concentration
is complete relaxation.
“There seems to be a contradiction here, in the idea of simultaneous
concentration and relaxation. I do not know whether this
is due to a contradiction in the nature of the mind itself, or to our
117misunderstanding of its nature. Perhaps we each have several
mental entities, or minds, and one of these can sleep (be blankly
unconscious), while another supervises the situation, maintaining
the first one’s state of unconsciousness for a desired period, and
then presenting to it some thought or picture agreed on in advance,
thus restoring it to consciousness.
“Anyway, it is possible to be unconscious and conscious at the
same time! Almost everyone has had the experience of knowing,
while asleep, that he is having a bad dream and must awaken himself
from it. Certainly some conscious entity is watching the dream,
and knowing it is a dream; and yet the sleeper is ‘unconscious.’ Or
perhaps there is no such thing as complete relaxation—until death.
“All I can say is this: when I practice this art which I have
learned, with my mind concentrated on one simple thing, it is a
relaxation as restful, as seemingly ‘complete’ as when I am in that
state called normal sleep. The attention is not allowed to be on the
sensations of the body, or on anything but the one thing it is deliberately
‘concentrated’ on.
“Undivided concentration, then, means, for purposes of this
experiment, a state of complete relaxation, under specified control.
To concentrate in this undivided way you first give yourself a ‘suggestion’
to the effect that you will relax your mind and your body,
making the body insensitive and the mind a blank, and yet reserving
the power to ‘break’ the concentration in a short time. By
making the body insensitive I mean simply to relax completely
your mental hold of, or awareness of, all bodily sensation. After
giving yourself this suggestion a few times, you proceed to relax
both body and mind. Relax all mental interest in everything in
the environment; inhibit all thoughts which try to wander into
consciousness from the subconsciousness, or from wherever else
thoughts come. This is clearly a more thorough affair than ‘just
relaxing.’
“Also, there is something else to it—the power of supervising
the condition. You succeed presently in establishing a blank state
of consciousness, yet you have the power to become instantly conscious,
also; to realize when you are about to go into a state of sleep,
in which you have not the power of instantly returning to consciousness.
Also, you control, to a certain degree, what is to be
118presented to consciousness when you are ready to become conscious.
For example, you want a message from the person who is sending
you a message; you do not want a train of subconscious ‘day dreams.’
“All this is work; and so far, it is a bore. But when you have
learned to do it, it is an art worth knowing. You can use it, not only
for such experiments as telepathy and clairvoyance, but for improving
your bodily health. To relax thoroughly several times each
day while holding on to a suggestion previously ‘planted’ in the
subconsciousness is more beneficial to health than any other one
measure I know.
“The way to relax is to ‘let go.’ ‘Let go’ of every tense muscle,
every tense spot, in the body. Pain is tension. Pain can be inhibited
by suggestion followed by complete relaxation. Drop your body,
a dead-weight, from your conscious mind. Make your conscious
mind a blank. It is the mind, conscious or subconscious, which
holds the body tense. Give to the subconsciousness the suggestion
of concentrating on one idea, and then completely relax consciousness.
To make the conscious mind a blank it is necessary to ‘let go’
of the body; just as to ‘let go’ of the body requires ‘letting go’ of
consciousness of the body. If, after you have practiced ‘letting go’
of the body, you find that your mind is not a blank, then you have
not succeeded in getting your body rid of all tension. Work at it
until you can let both mind and body relax completely.
“It may help you to start as follows: Relax the body as completely
as possible. Then visualize a rose, or a violet—some pleasant,
familiar thing which does not arouse emotional memory-trains.
Gaze steadily, peacefully, at the chosen object—think only of it—try
not to let any memories it may arouse enter your mind. Keep
attention steady, just seeing the color, or the shape of the flower
and nothing else. Do not think things about the flower. Just look
at it. Select one thing about it to concentrate on, such as its shape,
or its color, or the two combined in a visual image: ‘pink and
round.’
“If you find that you are made nervous by this effort, it is apt
to be due to the fact that you are thinking things. Maybe the object
you have chosen has some buried memories associated with it—something
which arouses unconscious memories of past unhappy
events. Roses may suggest a lost sweetheart, or a vanished garden
119where you once were happy and to which you long to return. If so,
select some other flower to concentrate on. Flowers are usually the
most restful, the things which are not so apt to be involved with
distressing experiences. A bottle of ink might suggest the strain of
mental work, a spoon might suggest medicine. So, find a peace-inspiring
object to look at. When you have found it, just look at it,
with undivided attention.
“If you succeed in doing this, you will find it hard not to
drop asleep. But you must distinguish between this and the state
you are to maintain. If you drop asleep, the sleep will be what is
called auto-hypnotic sleep, and after you have learned to induce it,
you will be able to concentrate on an idea, instead of the rose, and
to carry this idea into the sleep with you as the idea to dominate
the subconsciousness while you sleep. This idea, taken with you
into sleep in this way, will often act in the subconsciousness with
the same power as the idea suggested by a hypnotist. If you have
ever seen hypnotism, you will know what this means. You can
learn to carry an idea of the restoration of health into this auto-hypnotic
sleep, to act powerfully during sleep. Of course this curative
effect is not always achieved. Any idea introduced into the
subconsciousness may meet a counter-suggestion which, if you are
ill, already exists in the subconsciousness, and a conflict may ensue.
Thus, time and perseverance may be necessary to success.
“But this is another matter, and not the state for telepathy—in
which you must avoid dropping into a sleep. After you have
practiced the exercise of concentrating on a flower—and avoiding
sleep—you will be able to concentrate on holding the peculiar blank
state of mind which must be achieved if you are to make successful
experiments in telepathy. There may be strain to start with, but it
is getting rid of strain, both physical and mental, which constitutes
relaxation, or blankness, of the conscious mind. Practice will teach
you what this state is, and after a while you can achieve it without
strain.
“The next step: ask someone to draw a half-dozen simple
designs for you on cards, or on slips of paper, and to fold them so
that you cannot see the contents. They should be folded separately,
so that you can handle one at a time. Place them on a table, or
chair, beside your couch, or bed, in easy reach of your hand, so that
120you can pick them up, one at a time, while you are stretched out
on the bed, or couch, beside them. It is best at first to experiment
in the dark, or at least in a dimly lit room, as light stimulates the
eyes and interferes with relaxation. If you experiment at night,
have a table lamp within easy reach, so that you can turn the light
off and on for each experiment without too much exertion, as you
must keep your body and mind as passive as possible for these
experiments. If you have no reading light near, use a candle. You
must have also a writing pad and pencil beside you.
“After you have placed the drawings on the table, turn off the
light and stretch your body full length on the couch. Close your
eyes and relax your body. Relax completely. Make the mind a
complete blank and hold it blank. Do not think of anything.
Thoughts will come. Inhibit them. Refuse to think. Do this for
several moments. It is essential to induce a passive state of mind
and body. If the mind is not passive, it feels body sensations. If the
body is not relaxed, its sensations interfere with the necessary mental
passivity. Each reacts on the other.
“The next step, after having turned off the light and closed
your eyes and relaxed mind and body full length on the couch, is to
reach for the top drawing of the pile on the table. Hold it in your
hand over your solar plexus. Hold it easily, without clutching it.
Now, completely relaxed, hold your mind a blank again. Hold it
so for a few moments, then give the mental order to the unconscious
mind to tell you what is on the paper you hold in your hand. Keep
the eyes closed and the body relaxed, and give the order silently,
and with as little mental exertion as possible.
“However, it is necessary to give it clearly and positively, that
is, with concentration on it. Say to the unconscious mind, ‘I want
the picture which is on this card, or paper, presented to my consciousness.’
Say this with your mind concentrated on what you are
saying. Repeat, as if talking directly to another self: ‘I want to see
what is on this card.’ Then relax into blankness again and hold
blankness a few moments, then try gently, without straining, to see
whatever forms may appear on the void into which you look with
closed eyes. Do not try to conjure up something to see; just wait
expectantly and let something come.
“My experience is that fragments of forms appear first. For
121example, a curved line, or a straight one, or two lines of a triangle.
But sometimes the complete object appears; swiftly, lightly, dimly-drawn,
as on a moving picture film. These mental visions appear
and disappear with lightning rapidity, never standing still unless
quickly fixed by a deliberate effort of consciousness. They are
never in heavy lines, but as if sketched delicately, in a slightly
deeper shade of gray than that of the mental canvas. A person not
used to such experiments may at first fail to observe them on the
gray background of the mind, on which they appear and disappear
so swiftly. Sometimes they are so vague that one gets only a notion
of how they look before they vanish. Then one must ‘recall’ this
first vision. Recall it by conscious effort, which is not the same
thing as the method of passive waiting by which the vision was first
induced. Instead, it is as if one had seen with open eyes a fragment
of a real picture, and now closes his eyes and looks at the memory
of it and tries to ‘see’ it clearly.
“It is necessary to recall this vision and make note of it, so as
not to forget it. One is sure to forget it—indeed it is his duty to do
so—in the process of the next step, which is one of blankness again.
This blankness is, of course, a deliberate putting out of the conscious
mind of all pictures, including the one just visioned. One
must now order the subconscious not to present it to the conscious
mind’s picture-film again unless it is the right picture, i.e., the one
drawn on the card which is held in hand. Make the conscious mind
blank again for a brief space. Then look again on the gray canvas
of mind for a vision. This is to test whether the first vision came
from subconscious guessing, or whether it came from the deeper
mind—from some other source than that of the subconscious, which
is so apt to offer a ‘guess,’ or false picture.
“Do this whole performance two or three times, and if the first
vision persists in coming back, accept it. As soon as you have
accepted it—that is, decided that this is the correct vision—turn on
the light, and without looking at the card, or paper, which contains
the real picture, pick up the writing pad and pencil and make a
sketch of every detail of the vision-picture. This is a nuisance, as it
interrupts concentration and the desired passivity. But it is absolutely
necessary to record the vision in every detail, before one looks
at the real picture, the one on the card he has been holding in hand.
122If one does not make a record of his vision in advance of looking
at the card picture, he is certain to forget at least some part of it—maybe
something which is essential. Worse yet, he is apt to fool
himself; the mind is given to self-deception. As soon as it sees the
real drawing, it not only forgets the vision, but it is apt to imagine
that it visioned the picture it now sees on the card, which may or
may not be true. Imagination is a far more active function than
the average person realizes. This conscious-subconscious mind is
‘a liar,’ a weaver of fiction. It is the dream-mind, and also it is the
mind of memory trains.
“Do not omit fragments which seem to be out of place in a
picture. These fragments may be the real things. If in doubt as to
what the object of your vision is, do not try to guess. But if you
have a ‘hunch’ that something you have seen is connected somehow
with a watch, for example, or with an automobile, make a note of
this ‘hunch.’ I use this popular word to indicate a real presentation
from some true source, something deeper and more dependable
than our own subconscious minds. I call this the ‘deep mind’ in
order to have a name for it. I do not know what it is, of course—I
am only judging from the behavior of the phenomena.
“Do not fail to record what seems to be a very stray fragment,
for it may be a perfect vision of some portion of the real picture.
Record everything, and then later you can compare it carefully with
the real drawing. Of course, do not be fantastic in your conclusions.
Do not think you have gotten a correct vision of an automobile
because you saw a circle which resembled a wheel. However, I once
saw a circle and felt that it was an automobile wheel—felt it so
vividly that I became overwhelmed with curiosity to see if my ‘feeling’
was correct, and forthwith turned on the light and examined
the real picture in my hand. I found that it was indeed the wheel
of an automobile. But I do not do this kind of thing unless I have
a very decided ‘hunch,’ as it tends to lead back to the natural impulse
of the mind to ‘guess’—and guessing is one of the things one
has to strive to avoid. To a certain extent, one comes to know a
difference between a guess and a ‘hunch.’
“The details of this technique are not to be taken as trifles.
The whole issue of success or failure depends on them. At least,
this is so in my case. Perhaps a spontaneous sensitive, or one who
123has a better method, has no such difficulties. I am just an average
conscious-minded person, who set out deliberately to find a way to
test this tremendously important question of telepathy and clairvoyance,
without having to depend on a ‘medium,’ who might be
fooling himself, or me. It was by this method of careful attention
to a technique of details that I have found it possible to get telepathic
messages and to see pictures on hidden cards, and symbolic
pictures of the contents of books.
“This technique takes time, and patience, and training in the
art of concentration. But this patience is in itself an excellent thing
to learn, especially for nervous and sick people. The uses of mental
concentration are too various and tremendously beneficial to enumerate
here. The average person has almost no power of concentration,
as he will quickly discover by trying to hold his undivided
attention on one simple object, such as a rose, or a bottle of ink, for
just a few minutes. He will find that a thousand thoughts, usually
association trains connected with the rose, or the ink, will appear
on his mental canvas, interrupting his concentration. He will find
that his mind behaves exactly like a moving-picture film, or a fireworks
display. It is the division of attention that uses up energy,
if I am not mistaken.
“Of course this technique is not ‘original.’ I got it by selecting
from hints here and there in my reading, and from my general study
and observation of the behavior of the mind.
“Among the difficulties to be overcome—and this is one which
is easily detected—is the appearing of visions of objects one has
observed in the environment just before closing the eyes. When I
close my eyes to make the next test, I invariably find that the last
picture, and my own drawing of it, and also the electric light bulb
which I have lighted in order to see the last picture—all these immediately
appear on the horizon of my mind. It often takes quite a
while to banish these memory-ghosts. And sometimes it is a mistake
to banish them, as the picture you hold in your hand may be quite
similar to the preceding one. If, therefore, a picture resembling
the preceding continues obstinately to represent itself, I usually
accept it, and often find that the preceding and present cards contain
similar pictures.
“Another difficulty is the way things sometimes appear in
124fragments, or sections, of the whole picture. A straight line may
appear, and it may be either only a portion of the whole, or it may
be all there is on the card. Then I have to resist the efforts of my
imagination to speculate as to what object this fragment may be
part of. For instance, I see a series of points, and have the impulse
to ‘guess’ a star. I must say no to this guesswork, unless the indescribable
‘hunch’ feeling assures me it is a star. I must tell myself
it may be indeed a part of a star, but, on the other hand, it may be
a complete picture of the drawing in hand, perhaps the letter W,
or M, or it may be a part of a pennant, or what not. Then I must
start over, and hold blank a while. Then repeat the request to the
deep mind for the true picture. Now I may get a more complete
picture, or maybe this fragment reappears alone, or maybe it repeats
itself upside-down, or doubled up in most any way.
“I start all over once more and now I may get a series of fragments
which follow each other and jump together as do the comic
cartoons which are drawn on the screen with pen and ink. For
instance, two points appear, then another appears separately and
jumps to the first two, and joins up with them, then two more. The
result is a star, and this may be the true picture. It usually is. But
sometimes this is the subconscious mind, or perhaps the conscious,
trying to finish the object as it has ‘guessed’ it should be. This error
of allowing the conscious or the subconscious mind to finish the
object is one to be most careful about. As one experiments, he
realizes more and more that these two minds, the conscious and the
subconscious, are really one, subconsciousness being only a disorderly
store-house of memories. The third, or ‘deep mind’ is apparently
the one which gives us our psychic phenomena. Again I say,
I do not know what this ‘deep mind’ is; I use the words merely to
have a name for that ‘other thing’ which brings the message.
“The conscious mind, combined with the subconscious, not
only wants to finish the picture, but decides sometimes to eliminate
a detail which does not belong to what it has guessed should be
there. For example, I will discuss the drawings which have been
given as Figures 35, 35a, in this book. I ‘visioned’ what looked like
a figure 5, except that at the top where there should be a small
vertical line projecting toward the right, there was a flare of very
long lines converging at one end. I consciously decided that the
125long lines were an exaggeration and multiplication of what should
properly be at the top of a five, and that I should not accept them.
Here was conscious mind making a false decision. But by obeying
the rules I had laid down in advance, I was saved from this error of
consciousness. I closed my eyes, gave a call for the true picture, and
the lines appeared again, so I included them in my drawing. When
I opened the envelope and looked at the picture inside, it was an
oil derrick. So the flare of long lines was the real thing, while the
figure 5 was the interloper—at least, so I now consciously decided.
I thought that the figure 5 and the flare of lines were entirely separate
mental images, one following the other so rapidly that they
appeared to belong together.
“But again my conscious decision was in error. Several hours
later, after I had put the whole matter out of my mind and had
been attending to household duties, I suddenly remembered the
paper jacket of a German edition of my husband’s novel, ‘Oil,’
which was on a shelf in the next room to the one in which I had
made my experiments. Why did I suddenly remember this book?
I had not noticed it for a long time—its jacket drawings were out of
sight, as the book was wedged between many others on the book
shelves in an inconspicuous place in the room. On one side of the
jacket of this book was a picture of three oil derricks; on the other
side was a large dollar mark, almost covering one entire side of the
book. I had seen this jacket, had indeed taken special notice of it,
at the time of its arrival from Germany. So here seems to have been
a clear case of the subconscious mind at work during my experiment,
adding to my true vision of an oil derrick, the subconsciously
remembered dollar mark which looked like a figure 5, partly hidden
by the oil derrick in my vision. Here was a grand mix-up of the
false guesses of consciousness and subconsciousness, and the true
presentations from the ‘deep mind.’
“But this was not the end. This confusion in regard to the
dollar mark went forward, in memory-trains to two other experiments.
Several days later, I was trying a new set of drawings, and
one of them caused in my mind a vision of the capital letter S. Instantly,
two parallel straight lines crossed it, turning it into a dollar
mark: $. Then it became an S again without the lines. Then the
lines came back. This strange behavior of my vision continued. I
126was in a quandary as to which to accept, the S or the $. Then there
appeared an old-fashioned money-bag, such as I used to see in my
father’s bank as a child, full of small coins. It took its place in the
vision beside the dollar mark. I decided with the usual erroneous
consciousness that this money-bag was a hint from my real mind,
so I accepted the dollar mark as correct. But it turned out not to be.
When I looked at the drawing in hand it was a letter S. My subconsciousness
had supplied the money-bag, and the two parallel
lines.
“Several days later, in a vision with a third set of drawings, I
saw a letter S, and then at once the bag of small change appeared,
but there were no parallel lines on the S. This time the real drawing
was a dollar mark! So, my subconsciousness, as soon as the dollar
mark had appeared in subconsciousness, had meddled again; it had
remembered the last experiment and the scolding I had given it for
its guess work, so it now subtracted the parallel lines from the new
vision to make it correct, according to the last experiment. It had
remembered the last experiment only, forgetting the first one, of
the oil derrick, just as I had ordered it to do on the occasion of the
second experiment. So, it subtracted the two parallel lines, but it
added the remembered bag of money, which I had included in my
scolding. From this kind of interference by the subconsciousness,
I realized that it is indeed no simple matter to get things into consciousness
from the ‘deep mind’ without guesses and additions and
subtractions made by the subconsciousness. Why the subconscious
should meddle, I do not know. But it does. Its behavior is exactly
like that of the conscious mind, which is also prone to guessing.
All this sounds fantastic—to anyone who has not studied his mind.
But I tell you how it seems to me.
“Maybe everything comes from the subconscious. Maybe there
is no ‘deep mind.’ Maybe the subconscious gets its knowledge of
what is on the drawing directly from the drawing, and is merely
blundering around, adding details by guesswork to what it has seen
incompletely. But I think that these experiments prove that this
is not the case. I think a study of them shows that a true vision
comes into the subconsciousness, not directly from the drawing, but
from another mind which has some means of knowing, and sending
to consciousness via the subconsciousness whatever I ask it for. Of
127course I cannot attempt to prove this here. It was one of the questions
to which I was seeking an answer, and the result seems to point
to the existence of a deeper mind, showing how its behavior is quite
different from that of the subconscious.
“I wanted to find out if the true vision could in any way be
distinguished from ‘imagination,’ or these busy guesses of the subconsciousness.
To help myself in this matter, I first made an examination
of exactly how these guesses come. I said to myself: every
thought that ever comes to consciousness, excepting those due to
direct outside stimulation, may proceed from some deeper source,
and by subconscious memory-trains attaching to them, appear to
be the work of subconsciousness. So I shut my eyes and made my
mind blank, without calling on my mind to present any definite
thing. I had no drawing in my hand. After a brief space of blankness,
I relaxed the enforced blankness and waited, dreamily, for
what might come. A picture soon came, with a whole memory-train.
First a girl in a large garden hat, then a garden path and
flowers bordering it, then a spade, a wheelbarrow, and so on—things
associated in my memory with a girl in a garden hat. As to where
the girl in the hat came from, I know not. As to why she should
come instead of any other of billions of things seen by me during
my life, I know not. I had not asked my mind for her. The question
of why she came is interesting.
“But it was easy to account for the other things—the association-train.
I learned from this experiment, and several repetitions of it,
that something always came—a girl, or a steamship, or the fact that
I had not attended to some household duty, or what not—and a train
of associated ideas followed. I learned, in a more or less vague way,
how these things behaved, and how I felt about them. This enabled
me to notice, when later I got a true vision, that there was a difference
between the way this true vision came and the way the ‘idle’
visions came. When the true visions came, there usually came with
them a ‘something’ which I call a ‘hunch.’ There was, of course,
always in my consciousness the question: is this the right thing, or
not? When the true vision came, this question seemed to receive
an answer, ‘yes,’ as if some intelligent entity was directly informing
me.
128“This was not always the case. At times no answer came, or at
least, if it came, it was obscured by guesses. But usually it did, after
I had watched for it, and a sort of thrill of triumph came with it,
quite different from the quiet way in which the money-bag had
appeared in answer to my uncertainty. The subconscious answers
questions, and its answers are always false; its answers come quietly,
like a thief in the night. But the ‘other’ mind, the ‘deep mind’
answers questions, too, and these answers come, not quietly, but as
if by ‘inspiration,’ whatever that is—with a rustling of wings, with
gladness and conviction. These two minds seem different from each
other. One lies and rambles; the other sings, and is truthful.
“But do not misunderstand me. I am not a religious convert.
I am searching for knowledge, and recording what I find. Others
on this search may have found these same things, but the conclusions
they have drawn may not turn out to be the ones I shall draw.
“One or two other things of interest should perhaps be mentioned.
First, I found that, in doing a series of several drawings, the
percentage of successes was higher in the first three attempts. Then
there began to be failures, alternating with successes. This may
have been due to the fact that the memory-pictures of these first
three experiments now constituted a difficulty. So much attention
had to be given to inhibiting these memory-pictures, and in deciding
whether or not they were to be inhibited. Or it may be due to
some other cause, such as fatigue or boredom.
“The second detail is that during the earliest experiments, I
developed a headache. I think this was due to the fact that I strained
my closed eyes trying to see with them. I mean, of course, trying to
see a vision, not the card in my hand. Using the eyes to see with is
a habit, and habits are not easily overcome. I soon learned not to
use my eyes, at least not in a strained way, and this was the end of
the headaches. However, this use of the eyes in telepathy may perhaps
mean more than a mere habit. The mental canvas on which
these ‘visions’ are projected seems to be spread in the eyes, and it is
the eyes which seem to see them—despite the fact that the room may
be dark, the eyes closed, and the drawing on the paper be wrapped
in thick covering and not within normal range of the eyes. But this
may be due to the habit of associating all pictures with your eyes.”
129
So much for the art of voluntary mind-reading. In conclusion
I, the husband, attempt to say a few words about what these phenomena
mean, and how they come about.
This attempt involves me in a verbal duel with my wife, which
lasts into the small hours of morning. It involves the everlasting
debate between the vitalists and the mechanists, which had best be
left to Dr. Watson and Professor McDougall, and the others who
are no more able than I am to look at the neurons of the brain in
action, to see what happens. But I insist that until Craig and Dr.
Watson, Professor Eddington and Mrs. Eddy have found out positively
whether the universe is all mind or all matter, I must go on
speaking in the old-fashioned way, as if there were two worlds, the
physical and the mental, two sets of phenomena which interact one
upon the other continuously, even though the manner of this happening
is beyond comprehension.
With this much apology, I obtain permission to put forth my
humble guess as to the part played by mental concentration in the
causing of telepathy, clairvoyance, and trance phenomena. It seems
to me that the process of intense concentration may cause the nervous
energy, or brain energy, whatever it is, to be withdrawn from
some of the brain centers and transferred to others; and it may be
this displacement and disturbance of balance which accounts for
such phenomena as catalepsy, automatism, and somnambulism.
Portions of the mind which are ordinarily below the level of consciousness
are raised to more intense forms of activity. New levels
of mind are tapped, new “personalities” or faculties are brought
into action, and persons under hypnotism develop mental powers
they do not consciously possess.
That it is intense concentration upon one suggestion—the narrowing
of the attention to one focus—which produces the cataleptic
trance is something which my wife set out to prove, and by going
close to the border-line she feels that she did prove it. The rigidity
130began at the extremities and crept rapidly over the body. In spite
of my protests, Craig insisted that she was going the whole way,
and asked me to stand by and make some tests. I was to wait three
minutes, and then lift her up by the feet. I did so, and found an
extraordinary thing—the body was perfectly rigid, like a log of
wood, except at the neck! When I lifted her by her feet, the neck
bent, so that the head remained on the pillow, while the feet were
raised at least a yard in the air. Later, when Craig had relaxed, she
told me that she had known what was happening; there had been
one point of consciousness left, and she had the belief that she could
let that go in another moment, but was afraid to do so, because she
might not come out again. For an instant, she had felt that strange
terror one feels at the moment he ceases to struggle against the
fumes of gas or ether, and plunges into oblivion. The difference
is that, in the case of gas or ether, one cannot hold on to consciousness;
but in the case of the cataleptic state, he can recall his receding
consciousness. Craig, of course, had not concentrated with complete
attention to one idea; one portion of her mind was concentrated
upon achieving rigidity, while another was watching and
protesting against oblivion.
Dr. Morton Prince wrote to Craig: “You are playing with
powerful and dangerous forces.” And so she dropped this form of
experiment. But more should be known about these trances, which
often occur spontaneously, and can be caused by fear—that is to say,
an intense concentration on the idea of escape from danger, which
produces a tension amounting to paralysis. In such cases there are
a number of new dangers; one being that some doctor will try to
restore you with drugs and wrong suggestions. Every suggestion of
fear on the part of the onlookers must be avoided in case of trances,
for the subconscious mind of the victim hears every word, and
believes it; also telepathy has to be remembered. One must not
only speak quietly and firmly, repeating that everything is all right,
and that the person will come out safely; one must also think this.
The trance may last a long time, but keep calm and sure of success,
and keep the doctor and the undertaker away. The condition of
catalepsy is more common than is realized, and it is unpleasant to
think how many persons are embalmed while in this condition.
131All this sounds disturbing, but it has nothing to do with our
telepathy experiments, in which the state of concentration is not
one of tension accompanied by the suggestion of rigidity, or of fear,
but on the contrary is a state of relaxation, accompanied by the
suggestion of control, or supervision. This matter of supervision
has been carefully set forth by Craig in her statement. It is one of
the mind’s great mysteries: how, while thinking about nothing,
you can not only remember to give a suggestion, but can also act
upon it. Craig insists that we have three minds; and she has in this
the backing of William McDougall, an Englishman, who was called
the “dean” of American psychologists. McDougall talks about the
various “monads” of the mind; so let us say that one “monad”
gives an order to a second “monad” to become blank, after it has
given an order to a third to present to the first a picture.
The psychic Jan gives such “autosuggestions” to himself when
he goes into a trance, and tells his trance mind to bring him out at
a certain moment. How that trance mind can measure time as
exactly as a clock is another of the mysteries; but that it happens is
beyond doubt. My wife took Jan to a group of scientists in Boston,
and several of them held watches and expressed their surprise at
what Jan was able to do. It is obvious that when the psychic lets
himself be buried six feet under the ground in an ordinary pine-wood
coffin, he is staking his life upon his certainty that he will not
come out of the state of lethargy until after he has been dug up.
He also stakes it upon the hope that the physicians who have
the test in charge will have sufficient sense to realize the importance
of having him dug out at the time agreed. In one case they were
several minutes late, and Jan nearly suffocated. I never saw one of
these burials, because Craig obtained his promise not to do them
after she knew him; but I have talked with several physicians who
watched and directed all the details, and I have a moving-picture
film of one.
132
Mention telepathy in company, and almost everyone has a
story to tell. You can find a clairvoyant to tell you about yourself
for a dollar—and maybe she is a fraud, but then again, maybe she is
a person with a gift which she does not understand, and the police
throw her into jail because they don’t understand it either. I am
sorry if I aid the mass of fraud which I know exists in this field, but
there is no power of man which may not and will not be abused.
The person who invented high explosives and made possible great
tunnels and bridges, also made possible the destruction of the Louvain
library. The person who makes a dynamo may electrocute
himself.
In spite of all fraud, I am convinced that there are thousands
of genuine clairvoyants and psychics. My friend Will Irwin told
me recently how he spent a year or so collecting material and writing
an exposure of fraud, “The Medium Game,” published in Collier’s
Weekly some twenty years ago. At the end of his labors he
went, on sudden impulse, into a “parlor” on Sixth Avenue, a cheap
neighborhood of New York, and a fat old woman in a greasy wrapper
took his dollar, and held his hand in hers, and told him things
which he believed were known to no human being but Will Irwin.
“What is the use of it?” some will ask. I reply with another
question: “What was the use of the lightning which Franklin
brought down from the clouds on his kite-string?” No use that
Franklin ever knew; yet today we make his lightning turn the
wheels of industry, and move great railroad systems, and light a
hundred million homes, and spread jazz music and cigarette advertising
thousands of miles in every direction. It is an axiom of the
scientist that every scrap of knowledge will be put to use sooner or
later; get it, and let the uses wait. The discovery of the cause of
bubonic plague was made possible because some foolish-minded
entomologist had thought it worth-while to collect information
about the fleas which prey upon the bodies of rats and ground
squirrels.
133I know a certain Wall Street operator who employed a “psychic”
to sit in at his business conferences, and tell him if the other
fellow was honest. I believe it didn’t work very well; perhaps the
circumstances were not favorable to concentration. Needless to say,
Craig and I have no interest in such uses to be made of our knowledge.
What telepathy means to my wife is this: it seems to indicate
a common substratum of mind, underlying our individual minds,
and which we can learn to tap. Figure the conscious mind as a tree,
and the subconscious mind as the roots of that tree: then what of
the earth in which the tree grows, and from which it derives its sustenance?
What currents run through that earth, affecting all the
trees of the forest? If one tree falls, the earth is shaken—and may not
the other trees feel the impulse?
In other words, we are apparently getting hints of a cosmic
consciousness, or cosmic unconsciousness: some kind of mind stuff
which is common to us all, and which we can bring into our individual
consciousness. Why is it not sensible to think that there may
be a universal mind-stuff, just as there is a universal body-stuff, of
which we are made, and to which we return?
When Craig orders her mind, or some portion of it, or faculty
of it, to get what is in Bob’s mind, while Bob is forty miles away—and
when her mind does that, what are we to picture as happening?
If I am correct in my guess, that mind and body are two aspects of
one reality, then we shall find some physical form of energy being
manifested, just as we do when we communicate by sound waves.
The human brain is a storage battery, capable of sending impulses
over the nerves. Why may it not be capable of sending impulses by
means of some other medium, known or unknown? Why may there
not be such a thing as brain radio?
Certainly we know this, that every particle of energy in the
universe affects to some slight extent every other particle. The
problem of detecting such energy is merely one of getting a sufficiently
sensitive device. Who can say that our thoughts are not
causing vibrations? Who can set a limit to the distance they may
travel, or to the receiving powers of another brain, in some way or
other attuned thereto? Any truly scientific person will admit that
this is a possibility, and that it is purely a question of experimenting,
to find out if it does happen, and how.
134Again, consider the problem of clairvoyance, suggested by
Craig’s ability to tell what is inside a book she holds in her hand
without seeing it, or to reproduce drawings when no human mind
knows what drawing she holds. How are we to figure that as happening?
Shall we say that brain vibrations affect material things
such as paper, and leave impressions which endure for a long time,
possibly forever? Can these affect another brain, as in the case of
a bit of radium giving off emanations? It seems to me correct to say
that, theoretically, it is inevitable. Every particle of energy that
has ever been manifested in the universe goes on producing its
effects somewhere, somehow, and the universe is forever different
because of that happening. The soil of Britain is still shaking with
the tramp of Caesar’s legions, two thousand years old. Who can say
that some day we may not have instruments sensitive enough to
detect such traces of energy? On the very day that I am reading the
galley proofs of this book, I find in my morning paper an Associated
Press dispatch, from which I clip a few paragraphs.
“A fundamental discovery in photography that takes the ‘pictures’
directly on cold, hard untreated metal without the usual
photographer’s medium of a sensitized plate was made public tonight
at Cornell University. It reveals that seemingly impervious
metal records on its surface unseen impressions from streams of
electrons and that these marks can be brought into visibility by the
right kind of a ‘developer,’ exactly as photographic images are
brought out on sensitized paper....
“While studying sensitivity of photographic plates to electron
rays it suddenly was realized that polished metal surfaces might be
able to pick up impressions of these beams, and when tests were
made they showed that not only could such records be made on
metals, but the amazing fact appeared that some metals are almost
as sensitive as photographic film, and for very low velocity electrons
much more sensitive....
“This young physicist one day was looking at the rough spots
produced on the metal target of an x-ray tube by electron bombardment.
Such spots are commonplace, familiar sights to laboratory
workers. It occurred to Dr. Carr that perhaps long before the electrons
produced the rough place they made an invisible impression,
which might be ‘developed’ in the same manner that the still invisible
135image on a photo is brought out by putting it into a developing
bath. Carr shot the electron rays at gold plates and developed them
with mercury vapor, he shot them at silver and developed with
iodine, he used hydrochloric acid to develop zinc plates and iodine
to develop copper.”
And now, if x-rays leave a permanent record on metal, why
might not brain-rays, or thought-rays, leave a record upon a piece
of paper? Why might not such energies be reflected back to another
brain, as light is reflected by a mirror? Or perhaps the record might
stay as some other form of energy, turned back into brain-rays or
thought-rays by the percipient. We are familiar with this in the
telephone, where sound vibrations are turned into electrical vibrations,
and in this form transported across a continent and under an
ocean, and then turned back into sound vibrations once again.
That mental activities do leave some kind of record on matter
seems certain; at any rate, it is the basic concept of the materialistic
psychologist. For what is memory, to the materialist, but some kind
of record upon brain cells? He compares these cells to photoelectric
cells, and imagines a lot of stored up records which we can consult.
If now it should be found that such memory records are impressed,
not merely upon living brain cells, but upon the molecules or electrons
which compose any form of matter, what would be so incredible
about that?
I have gone this far, in the effort to meet my materialist friends
halfway. For my part, I have no metaphysics; I am content to say
that I do not know what matter is, nor what mind is, nor how
they interact. If you want to realize the inadequacies of the materialistic
dogma, so far as concerns this special field, you may
consult the work of Dr. Rudolph Tischner, a qualified scientist of
Germany, whose book, Telepathy and Clairvoyance, is published
in translation by Harcourt, Brace and Company. The last chapter,
called “Theory,” deals with the suggested explanations in more
detail than I have the space for here.
136
April 21, 1929. I am over at the office fixing up this manuscript
to send to the publisher; and just as I have it nicely wrapped,
it has to be opened again—for this is what has happened. Craig,
with her anxiety complex, has had this thought: “Here is Upton
committing himself in this public way, on a subject about which
people know so little and suspect so much; and suppose this faculty,
whatever it is, should be gone in these last few weeks, while I have
been fussing over spring housecleaning! Suppose I should find I
can never do it again!”
She has to make sure all over again. She has in her desk a fat
envelope marked: “To try.” A lot of old drawings, left-overs from
different series that she has tried and failed on during the past
several months; some that she herself has drawn for friends; some
that she was interrupted while doing—a job lot, in short. She does
not know how many, as she has stuck them in from time to time,
and never looked into the envelope; but it is well filled. Now she
takes out some drawings, with averted eyes, and lies down and
tries them. The house is quiet, a good opportunity, so she does
nine drawings, and there is only one complete failure in the lot.
One is a marvel—as good as any. It is a drawing I had made,
a donkey’s head and neck, with a wide collar. Craig writes: “Cow’s
head in ‘stock’”—a “stock” being in Mississippi a wooden yoke
made to keep cattle from jumping fences. She draws the head of
the so-called “cow” and the “stock”; it is a perfect donkey’s head,
facing just as mine does.
And then there is a duck, about to eat a snail. Such a jolly
duck, and such a wheely snail shell! Craig has made this drawing
to amuse the little daughter of Bob and Dolly, who had a pet duck,
called “Mary Ann,” fed on snails. Craig made this drawing several
months ago, to let the child “concentrate” on, and try telepathy
like the grown-ups. And now, with this drawing under her hand,
Craig writes: “See wheels. Think of children. Has to do with
children.” The drawing of the snail shell is plainly a lot of “wheels.”
137Now, of course, Craig had previously seen every one of these
drawings, and so they were all in her subconscious mind. But these
drawings had never been seen by her at the same time. They were
put into the envelope, some at one time, some at another. Now
she has taken out a few at random. What a jumble for any subconscious
mind to keep track of! How is Craig’s mind to know
which drawings she has taken out, and which one she is holding
under her hand?
Again we have something more than telepathy. For no human
mind knows what drawings she has taken from that envelope. No
human mind but her own even knows that she is trying an experiment.
Either there is some superhuman mind, or else there is
something that comes from the drawings, some way of “seeing,”
other than the way we know and use all the time. Make what you
can of this, but don’t laugh at it, for most certainly it happens.
138
October, 1929. At my wife’s insistence, I have held up this
book for six months, in order to think it over, and have the manuscript
read by friends whose opinions we value. A score or more
have read it, and made various suggestions, many of which I have
accepted. Some of the reactions of these friends may be of interest
to the reader.
The news that I was taking up “psychic” matters brought me
letters both of curiosity and protest. My friend Isaac Goldberg of
Boston reported the matter in the Haldeman-Julius publications
under the title: “Sinclair Goes Spooky.” I hope that when he has
read this book, he will find another adjective. My friends, both
radical and respectable, must realize that I have dealt here with
facts, in as patient and thorough a manner as I have ever done in
my life. It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is
equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence.
There came to me a letter of warning from a good comrade,
T. H. Bell of Los Angeles, an elderly Scotchman who has grown
up in the Socialist movement, and known the old fighters of the
days when I was a child. He begged me not to jeopardize my
reputation; so I thought he would be a good test for the manuscript,
and asked him to read it. Some of his suggestions I accepted,
and the work is the better for them. But Comrade Bell was not
able to believe that Craig’s drawings could have come by telepathy,
for the reason that it would mean that he was “abandoning the
fundamental notions” on which his “whole life has been based.”
Comrade Bell brought many arguments against my thesis, and
this was a service, because it enables me to answer my critics in
advance. First, what is the value of my memory? Can I be sure
that it does not “accommodate itself too easily to the statement
Sinclair wishes to believe?” My answer is that few of the important
cases in the book rest upon my memory; they rest upon records
written down at once. They rest upon drawings which were made
139according to a plan devised in advance, and then duly filed in envelopes
numbered and dated. Also, my memory has been checked by
my wife’s, who is a fanatic for accuracy, and has caused me torment,
through a good part of our married life, by insisting upon going
over my manuscripts and censoring every phrase. Also Bob and
Dollie and my secretary have read this narrative, and checked the
statements dealing with them.
Next objection, that I am “a man without scientific training.”
The acceptance of that statement depends upon the definition of
the word “scientific.” If it includes the social sciences, then I have
had twenty-five years of very rigid training. I have made investigations
and published statements, literally by thousands, which were
criminal libels unless they were true and exact; yet I have never
had any kind of libel suit brought against me in my life. As to the
scientific value of the particular experiments described in this
book, the reader can do his own judging, for they have been described
in detail. I don’t see how scientific training could have
increased our precautions. We have outlined our method to scientists,
and none has suggested any change.
Next, the fact that in the past I have shown myself “naïve and
credulous at times.” No doubt I have; but I have learned by such
experiences, and I am not so naïve and credulous as when I was
younger. Neither do I see how these qualities can play much part
in the present matter. I surely know the conditions under which
I made my drawings, and whether I had them under my eyes while
my wife was making her drawings in another room; I know about
the ones I sealed in envelopes, and which were never out of my sight.
As for my wife, she certainly has nothing of the qualities of naïveté
and credulity. She was raised in a family of lawyers, and was given
the training and skeptical point of view of a woman of the world.
“Trust people, but watch them,” was old Judge Kimbrough’s
maxim; and following it too closely has almost made a pessimist
of his daughter.
Next, that Craig is “in poor health.” That is true, but I do
not see how it matters here. She has often been in pain, but it has
never affected her judgment. She chose her own times for experimenting,
when she felt in the mood, and her mind was always clear
and keen for the job.
140Next, “a husband and wife are a bad pair to make telepathic
experiments. Living so much together, their common life does tend
to make them think of the same thing at the same time.” This is
true; but how does it account for the half-dozen successes with a
brother-in-law, twenty or thirty with a secretary, and many with
Jan? How does it account for the covers and jackets of books in
which I had no interest, but which had come to me by chance, and
which Craig had never even glanced at, so far as she remembers?
It is true that in the early days most of our drawings were of
obvious things which lay about the house, scissors, table-forks,
watches, chairs, telephones; so there was a better chance of guess
work. How much chance, was determined by my son and his wife,
who, hearing that Craig and I were trying telepathy experiments,
decided to try a few also—without knowing anything about the
technique. They also drew scissors, table-forks, watches, chairs,
telephones, and such common objects. The only trouble was that
when David tried to reproduce Betty’s drawings, he drew the chair
where she had drawn the scissors, and drew the watch where she
had drawn the table-fork, and so on. They did not get a single
success.
I think that if you will go back and look over those drawings
as a whole, you must admit that the objects were as varied as the
imagination could make them. I do not see how any one could
choose a set of objects less likely to be guessed than the series which
I have numbered from 5 to 12—a bird’s nest full of eggs and surrounded
by leaves, a spiked helmet, a desert palm-tree, a star with
eight double points, a coconut palm, a puppy chasing a string, a
flying bat, a Chinese mandarin, and a boy’s foot with a roller-skate
on it. None of these objects has any relationship whatever to my
life, or to Craig’s, or to our common life. To say that a wife can
guess such a series, because she knows her husband’s mind so well,
seems to me out of all reason.
Next, the point that some of the cases are not convincing by
themselves. I am familiar with this method of argument, having
encountered it with others of my books. Let me beg you to note
that the cases are not taken by themselves, but are taken as a whole.
I can think, for example, of several ways by which Craig might have
known that I had put my little paper of written notes into the
141pocket of my gray coat, or that I had left some medical apparatus
under the bathtub at the office. She might have seen these things,
and then have forgotten it, and her subconscious mind might have
brought back to her the location of the objects, but failed to remind
her of the previous seeing. If such cases had stood alone, I would
not have thought it worth while to write this book.
The same thing applies to Craig’s production of German
words. Having spent several weeks with me in Germany, and having
known many Germans, she no doubt has German words in her
subconscious mind. This also applies to certain dream cases. Any
one who wants to can go through the book and pick out a score of
cases which can be questioned on various grounds. Perhaps it
would be wiser for me to cut out all except the strongest cases. But
I rely upon your common sense, to realize that the strongest cases
have caused me to write the book; and that the weaker ones are
given for whatever additional light they may throw upon the problem.
If you want to deal fairly with the book, here is what you have
to explain. How did it happen that at a certain agreed hour when
Bob at Pasadena drew a table-fork and dated and signed the drawing,
Craig in Long Beach wrote: “See a table-fork, nothing else,”
and dated and signed her words? If you call this a coincidence, how
are you going to account for the chair, and the watch, and the circle
with the hole in the middle, and the sense of pain and fear, and the
spreading black stain called blood, all reproduced under the same
perfect conditions? I say that if you call all this coincidence, you
are violating the laws of probability as we know them. I say that
there are only two possible explanations,—either telepathy, or that
my wife and her brother-in-law were hoaxing me.
But if you want to assume a hoax, you have to face the fact
that my wife a few days later was reproducing a series of drawings
which I made and kept in front of my eyes in a separate room from
her, in such a position that she could not see them if she wanted to.
If I thought it worth while, I could draw you a diagram of the place
where she sat and the place where I sat, and convince you that
neither mirrors, nor a hole in the wall, nor any other device would
have enabled my wife to see my drawings, until I took them to her
142and compared them with her drawings. The only way you can
account for that series of successes is to say that I am in on the hoax.
My good friend and comrade, Tom Bell, does not suggest that
I am in it; but others may say it, so I will answer. Let me assure
you, there is no reason in the world why I should take the field
on behalf of the doctrine of telepathy—except my conviction that
it has been proved. I don’t belong to any church which teaches
telepathy. I don’t hold any doctrine which is helped by it. I don’t
make any money by advocating or practicing it. There is no more
reason why I should be concerned to vindicate telepathy, than there
is for my coming out in support of the Catholic doctrine of the
Immaculate Conception, or the Mormon doctrine of Urim and
Thummim, or the Koreshan doctrine that the earth is a hollow
sphere and we live on the inside of it.
I assure you I am as cold-blooded about the thing as a man
can be. In fact, I don’t like to believe in telepathy, because I don’t
know what to make of it, and I don’t know to what view of the
universe it will lead me, and I would a whole lot rather give all my
time to my muckraking job which I know by heart. I don’t expect
to sell especially large quantities of this book; I am sure that by
giving the same amount of time and energy to other books I have
in mind, I could earn several times as much money. In short, there
isn’t a thing in the world that leads me to this act, except the conviction
which has been forced upon me that telepathy is real, and that
loyalty to the nature of the universe makes it necessary for me to
say so.
My friend and publisher Charles Boni thinks that I should
write this book without protestations; taking a dignified position,
sure that my readers will trust me. But as it happens, I have read,
not merely the literature of psychic research, but also the literature
in opposition to it, and I know the arguments advanced by persons
who are unwilling to change their “fundamental notions.” It seems
common sense to answer here the objections which are certain to
be made.
I submitted this manuscript to the two leading psychologists
of America, Morton Prince and William McDougall. Dr. Prince
was taken by death before he found time to read it, but Professor
McDougall read it, and has stated his reactions in the preface. In
143writing to me, he expressed the hope that my wife would be able
to make some of these telepathy tests under the observation of well-known
scientists. In replying, I assured him that my wife and I
shared this hope; but whether it can ever be realized is a problem
for the future. All Craig’s work so far has depended upon a state
of complete peace and relaxation. As she has pointed out, it is a
matter of “undivided concentration,” and even such disturbing
things as light and noise are an interference. One friend who has
tried to experiment lately at our instigation gave it up because of
automobile horns in the street outside. She declared that these had
never disturbed her before, but that the effort not to hear them
when concentrating only caused her to concentrate on the horns,
and so threatened to give her a case of “nerves.”
Whether Craig would be able to get the necessary state of
mind in the presence of strangers, skeptical or possibly hostile, is
a problem yet to be solved. Unless we are going to beg the question,
we have to assume that telepathy may be a reality; and if it be a
reality, then certainly what is in the other person’s mind makes
a difference, and certainly it is a serious matter to ask a woman in
delicate health to open her mind to the moods of strangers. Some
day in the future Craig is going to make the test, but whether it
succeeds or fails will not alter, so far as I am concerned, what has
already happened in my presence.
Another of my friends who read the manuscript was Floyd
Dell, and he thinks that readers of my books will wish to know to
what extent, if any, my interest in the subject of telepathy is going
to change my attitude to the struggle for social justice. To that I
reply that I have been interested in psychic research for the past
thirty-five years, ever since, as a youth, I met Minot J. Savage; but
this has not kept me from believing ardently in the abolition of
parasitism, exploitation, and war. While the telepathy experiments
were going on I wrote “Boston,” a novel of some 325,000 words, in
less than a year. While I am consulting with my friends about
this manuscript, I am writing a novel, “Mountain City,” which I
hope my Socialist friends will find of interest. The only discovery
that can weaken my interest in the economic problem will be one
which enables human beings to live without food, clothing, and
144shelter. But in the meantime, I see no reason why Socialists are
required to be ignorant of psychology.
James Fuchs, another patient critic of my writings, thinks I
appear naïve in this book, and should reveal some knowledge of
the vast literature on the subject. My reason for not doing so is
that very vastness; one would need several volumes to handle it.
In the Proceedings of the American and British Societies for Psychical
Research lies buried endless evidence on the subject; but scientific
authority remains for the most part uninterested in that
evidence, and would not be interested in my rehash of it. I have
written this book to tell my readers and friends what I myself have
seen with my own eyes. That is my job, and I leave the rest to others
who are better qualified.
Fuchs reminds me that “umbilical sensory perception” is a
well-known psychic phenomenon, and that Craig, in holding the
drawings over her solar plexus, is repeating the method of Justinus
Kerner (1786–1862), about whom you will find an article in the
“Encyclopedia Britannica.” Craig knew about that from various
sources, and some of her experiments were designed to test the
explanation. I made eight drawings and laid them face down on the
table by her couch, perhaps three feet from her head. I put them
there while she was out of the room, and I sat and watched, to be
sure she did not ever touch them. She lay on the couch and made
some notes and drawings which reproduced the essential features
of half a dozen of my drawings—all at once! So, if Craig has an
umbilical eye, she must also have one in the side of her head which
can see through several thicknesses of paper.
My daughter-in-law at that time also made suggestions which
I accepted. She spoke for the new generation of radicals, saying:
“The book aroused a storm of metaphysical speculation in my
mind, and I could wax eloquent with slight provocation.” This
is different from refusing to “abandon the fundamental notions on
which my whole life has been based.”
145
One interesting point I observe: in any company where
the subject of this manuscript is brought up, invariably some person
declares that he or she has had such experiences. One lady,
highly educated, assured me that she and her husband had developed
telepathy to a point where it served them on a lonely ranch
in the place of telegraph and telephone. Only a few days ago I met
at luncheon Bruno Walter, orchestra leader, who had come from
Germany to conduct concerts in the Hollywood Bowl. Mr. Walter
narrated to me the incident which follows:
While conducting in some middle western city, he was a guest
at a luncheon, and found himself becoming very ill. He explained
matters to his host, who called a taxicab, but this cab did not arrive,
and Mr. Walter, in great distress, took his hat and left the house,
saying that he would look for a cab. Turning the corner of the
street, he came upon his manager, driving a car, and hailed him.
“A most fortunate accident!” exclaimed the sick man, but the
manager assured him that it was no accident; about half an hour
previously, the manager had been seized by an intense feeling that
Mr. Walter was in trouble, and had been moved to get into his
car and drive. He did not know where Mr. Walter had gone, but
simply followed his impulse to drive in a certain direction.
Another incident, told me by Fremont Older, editor of the San
Francisco Call, and a veteran fighter in the cause of social justice.
Older had seen many demonstrations of telepathy, and was completely
convinced of its reality. A friend of his, living on a ranch,
employed a cook named Sam who had the gift, and agreed to give
a demonstration for the Olders. Sam asked Older to get a book and
wrap it in thick paper, and Sam would tell the name of the book and
the author. Older went out to his car, but could find no book, only
a folder of maps, which he wrapped in several thicknesses of paper.
Sam put the package to his head, and after a minute or two said,
“This is not a book, it is a map or something. Why don’t you get
146me a regular book?” So Older went to his car again and found a
book belonging to his wife, and wrapped it with care and tied it.
Sam put it to his head, and began to spell letters, and finally stated
as follows: “Julia France and her Times, by Gertrude Atherton,
published by the Macmillan Company.” This was correct. Sam
added: “I get another name. What has Ernest Hopkins got to do
with this book?” Older and his wife were dumbfounded; for the
name was that of a member of the newspaper staff who had been
asked to review the book, but Mrs. Older had taken the copy from
him because at the last moment she wanted something to read on
her trip.
As this book is going to the printer, my attention is called to
the fact that Dr. Carl Bruck of Berlin has published a book entitled
“Experimentelle Telepathie,” in which he reports a series of tests
closely resembling those here described. The main difference is
that he used hypnotized subjects, four different young men, as the
recipients of his telepathic messages. He made drawings at home,
and locked them in a large portfolio, which he placed in an adjoining
room from the subject, two or three yards distant through
a wall. He himself sat in front of the hypnotized subject, and concentrated
upon “sending” one of the drawings. Under these
conditions, in a total of 111 experiments, one-third were successful.
The Berlin correspondent of the “Scientific American” reported
these tests in the issue of May, 1924, where those interested may
read the details, and inspect twelve of the drawings. The tests were
conducted in the presence of various physicians and scientists; and
I am interested in a recent comment on the matter by a German
physician living in Mexico City: “Bruck’s work has gone almost
wholly unnoticed.”
I say to scientific men, that such work deserves to be noticed.
There is new knowledge here, close to the threshold, waiting for
us; and we should not let ourselves be repelled by the seeming
triviality of the phenomena, for it is well known that some of the
greatest discoveries have come from the following up of just such
trivial clews.
What did Benjamin Franklin have to go on when he brought
the lightning down from the clouds on the string of a kite? Just
a few hints, picked up in the course of the previous hundred years;
147a few traces of electricity noted by accident. The fact that you got
a spark if you stroked a cat’s fur; the fact that you got the same kind
of a spark by rubbing amber, and a bigger one by storing the energy
in a glass jar lined with tinfoil—that was all men had as promise
of the miracles of our time, dynamos and superpower, telegraph
and telephone, x-ray surgery, radio, wireless, television, and new
miracles just outside our door. If now it be a fact that there is a
reality behind the notions of telepathy and clairvoyance, to which
so many investigators are bearing testimony all over the world, who
can set limits to what it may mean to the future? What new powers
of the human mind, what ability to explore the past and future, the
farthest deeps of space, and those deeps of our own minds, no less
vast and marvelous?
To set limits to such possibilities is not to be scientific, it is
merely to be foolish. The true scientist sets no limits to human
powers, he merely asks that we verify our facts. This my wife and
I have tried to do, and I think that, so far as concerns telepathy at
least, we can claim success. We present here a mass of real evidence,
and we shall not be troubled by any amount of ridicule from the
ignorant. I tell you—and because it is so important, I put it in
capital letters: TELEPATHY HAPPENS!
149
150The following was originally published as Part I
of Bulletin XVI of the Boston Society for Psychic
Research in April, 1932. The figure numbers
listed herein refer to the illustrations in Mental
Radio, with the exception of Figures 147, 148, and
149 which appeared in the Bulletin only.
The author of the report was Dr. Walter Franklin
Prince, Research Officer of the society. He was a
doctor of divinity of the Methodist Episcopal
Church and had been pastor of several churches.
Later he retired and took up the work of the society.
He died two years after this report appeared.
