Observations placeholder
Getting at demons
Identifier
007893
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
This lady’s trance states had been up to this point trouble free and there had been every attempt to separate the trance and the waking state to allow free association, but then something different happened during one session - she remembered afterwards what had been said. What surfaced was what haunted and worried her – in effect what had frightened her in church. This shows that the technique can be used to get at what worries people the most – the demons
A description of the experience
Letters on Mesmerism – Harriet Martineau
.........an idea which she had heard in church intruded itself among some otherwise derived, and troubled her by the admixture. On that occasion, she remarked afterwards, that she had been dreaming, and, she thought, talking of the soul and the day of judgment. This is the only instance of her retaining any trace of anything being said or done in the trance.
Her surprise on two or three occasions, at finding herself, on awaking in a different chair from the one she went to sleep in, must show her that she has walked; but we have every evidence from her reception of what we say to her, and from her ignorance of things of which she had previously informed us, that the time of her mesmeric sleep is afterwards an absolute blank to her.
I asked her one evening lately, when she was in the deep sleep, what she would think of my publishing an account of her experience with my own, whether she should be vexed by it. She replied that she should like it very much: she hoped somebody would let her know of it, and show it to her, for, though she remembered when asleep everything she had thought when asleep before, she could not keep any of it till she awoke. It was all regularly "blown away." But if it was printed, she should know; and she should like that.