Observations placeholder
Otto Reimann
Identifier
007879
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
from the afterword of Mary Rose Barrington, Ian Stevenson and Zofia Weaver, A World in a Grain of Sand: The Clairvoyance of Stefan Ossowiecki, 2005.
Otto Reimann, a Czech born in 1903, had an equal or greater talent for psychometry than Schermann of whom he was an approximate contemporary. As a young man Reimann became interested in graphology, but never underwent any formal training in it and never practiced professionally as a graphologist. His family was wealthy and he worked as an employee of a bank.
From just glancing at a piece of paper, Reimann could describe the writers appearance, surroundings, and to some extent the past of his life. For example, of one item presented to him he said correctly that the writer had behaved like a madman and had to be locked up. Of another item he said correctly that the writer was blind in his left eye (Schmidt, 1930). In another test the target, concealed in an envelope, was some writing in Chinese. Reimann said the writing was Chinese and then himself drew characters on a piece of paper that with fair closeness resembled some of the Chinese characters of the target (Stinner, 1930).
When Fischer gave Reimann a medicinal capsule as a test object, Reimann first said that it had contained a lethal poison; at the same time by bringing both his hands near his throat he seemed to suggest death by strangulation. Fischer told Reimann that poison was incorrect.
Reimann then said death had occurred by self-strangulation, but he thought this impossible. In fact, he was correct. A doctor had owned the capsule, which had contained a lethal poison. He had had a premonition of having a stroke and intended to kill himself with the capsule if that happened. He did have a stroke, but at that time nurses watching over him thwarted his plan to swallow the capsule. A little later, when the nurses left him briefly unwatched, he strangled himself with his shirt (Fischer, 1934b).
Reimann could develop and communicate information about the history of objects, such as weapons and the lethal capsule I mentioned, that he was allowed to hold. Given a test object he would speak immediately and fluently (Schmidt, 1930).
In this respect he differed from Ossowiecki, who sometimes took minutes, even hours, to obtain information about a test object. In another respect, however, he resembled Ossowiecki; he had some capacity for introspection, and at a meeting of physicians in 1930 he tried to describe the process of psychometry. His information about the target did not come to him, he said, as one piece altogether, like a photograph. Instead, as metaphors of the process he preferred those of slowly building a mosaic from tiny pieces of stone or painting a portrait by repeated applications of pigment to a canvas (Schmidt, 1930).
The source of the experience
Ordinary personConcepts, symbols and science items
Concepts
BridgePerceptions
Perceptions - accessing perceptions
Perceptions - what has perceptions
Psychometry