The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (43 page)

We can see that the left and right halves of the brain correspond roughly to Hudson’s objective and subjective minds. And how does this help us to understand hypnosis? Well, it would seem that the hypnotist “anesthetizes” the left brain – makes it fall asleep – while the right remains wide awake. If Hudson is correct – and there seems every reason to believe that he is – the right brain is then able to operate with the full powers of the subjective mind. There seem to be obvious clues here to how we could all make better use of our powers.

According to modern medicine, hypnosis merely enables you to relax and become less self-conscious. It has no power to make you “superhuman”. Yet once again, this is contradicted by the facts. We have already seen that the Marquis de Puységur was able to communicate telepathically with Victor Race when Victor was in a trance. And anyone who takes the trouble to look into the four volumes of Eric J. Dingwall’s
Abnormal Hypnotic Phenomena
– which is devoted mainly to the nineteenth century – will find dozens of cases that leave no doubt whatever that “telepathy under hypnosis” has been demonstrated over and over again. One of Dingwall’s most astonishing accounts concerns the brothers Alexis and Adolphe Didier, who could both perform remarkable paranormal feats under hypnosis. For example, the two would play a game of cards with cards that were turned facedown. Nevertheless, one brother would be able to tell his partner which cards the other held, as if he were looking over his shoulder.

The father of the Didiers was himself a remarkable hypnotic subject who would sometimes go into a trance at the breakfast table while reading the newspaper – and continue reading the newspaper although he had dropped it onto the table and was not looking at it. Alexis, the more talented of the two brothers, was particularly expert at “traveling clairvoyance”. The person he was talking to could ask him to describe what he (the “client”) had been doing that day, or to “travel” to his home and describe it. This sounds as if it could be explained by
telepathy – except that Didier could tell the client things he did not know himself. On one occasion Didier described a magistrate’s study with great accuracy and mentioned that there was a bell on the table; the magistrate denied this. But when he got home he found that Didier was correct; his wife had placed the bell there since he had left home.

Alfred Russel Wallace, codeveloper (with Darwin) of the theory of evolution in the mid-nineteenth century, became interested in hypnosis when he was a young schoolteacher, and he discovered that some of his pupils were excellent hypnotic subjects. One boy would actually share Wallace’s perceptions when in a trance; if Wallace pinched his own arm, the boy started and rubbed his arm; if Wallace tasted sugar, the boy smiled and licked his lips; if Wallace tasted salt, the boy grimaced.

In the 1880s, the French psychologist Pierre Janet was able to place one of his patients, a woman named Leonie, in a hypnotic trance
from the other side of Le Havre
and summon her to come to him. The experiments were performed under test conditions under the auspices of the Society for Psychical Research.

Almost a century later Dr Gustav Pagenstecher discovered that one of his patients, Maria Reyes de Zierold, was able to share his own sensations, tasting substances he put on his tongue and wincing if he held his hand over a lighted match. The first time he hypnotized her, she told him that her daughter was listening at the door; Pagenstecher opened the door and found that this was true. This sounds as if she may simply have heard the girl outside; but she was also able to describe what Pagenstecher was doing when he was in the next room. Under hypnosis, Maria also became an excellent psychometrist and could describe with great accuracy the history of objects placed in her hands.
¹¹

All of this obviously raises a fascinating possibility – that hypnosis may not merely involve placing someone in a trance through suggestion but that it might be
the direct influence of one mind upon another
. In
Over the Long High Wall
, writer J. B. Priestley tells how, at a boring literary dinner in New York, he told the person sitting next to him that he intended to try to make one of the poets wink at him. He chose a serious-looking woman, “no winker”, and concentrated on her. After a while she turned and winked at him. Priestley’s neighbour was inclined to doubt whether it had been a wink, but after the dinner, the woman came up to him to apologize for winking at him, remarking, “I don’t know what made me do it”.

This brings us back to the question raised at the beginning of this article: whether a hypnotist can influence someone to commit a criminal act against his will. The evidence suggests that it is possible. In 1865, in France, a vagabond named Thimotheus Castellan was tried for abducting and raping a young peasant girl named Josephine. He had knocked on the door of her father’s cottage, begging shelter for the night. The next morning, when the father and brothers had gone off to work, neighbours noticed him making passes in the air behind Josephine’s back. Over the midday meal, Castellan made a movement with his fingers, and she felt her senses leaving her; he then carried her into the next room and raped her. She said she wanted to resist but was paralyzed. Later, he left and took her with him, demonstrating his power over her at various farms where they stayed by making her walk on all fours like an animal. He was finally arrested and sentenced to twelve years in prison.

In 1934 a Heidelberg hypnotist named Franz Walter met a woman on a train and caused her to pass into a trance simply by taking her hand. After raping her, he ordered her to work for him as a prostitute. He subsequently ordered her to make several attempts on her husband’s life; when these failed, he ordered her to commit suicide. She was saved by passersby on two occasions. Finally, a police surgeon guessed that she had been hypnotized and ordered to keep silent about it; he succeeded in “unlocking” her memory, and Franz Walter was sentenced to ten years in prison.

In 1985 two Portuguese criminals, both named Manuel, succeeded in parting a number of victims from their life savings through hypnosis. One woman described how she had simply been talking to one of the men when he took her hand and she felt “cold all over”, then went into a stupor in which she obeyed orders to go home and withdraw her savings; she handed over more than £1,000. The two men were caught by accident when a hairdresser heard one of her clients agreeing (over the telephone) to meet them and give them money; she had heard of the earlier case and notified the police. The men were deported.
¹²

All of this seems to suggest that there is a telepathic element in hypnosis – of one mind directly influencing another – and that legends about real-life Svengalis may have some basis in fact. Ferenc Volgyesi, whose book
Hypnosis in Men and Animals
has already been mentioned, was convinced that legends about the “hypnotic gaze” of the snake were
not without foundation; he cites examples of toads, frogs, and rabbits being “transfixed by a snake’s gaze”, which involved the expansion of its pupils; but he has photographs of other creatures engaged in “battles of will” in which they simply stare at each other. In one case, a toad won a “battle of will” against a snake.

This is not, of course, to deny the validity of the generally accepted theory of hypnosis – that it is basically a matter of suggestion. Hypnosis, as we have seen, is based on a state of abstraction, and hypnotists undoubtedly create this state by suggestion – usually by suggesting that the subject is becoming sleepy, that his limbs are becoming heavy, and so on. But it is the right brain – the “other you” – that accepts these suggestions and puts “you” to sleep, while
it
remains wide awake. Its powers are then at the disposal of the hypnotist (which suggests, in turn, that a good hypnotic subject ought to be able to cure people at a distance, as Hudson did).

What seems to have happened, in the case of Nelson Nelson, the rapist described at the beginning of this chapter, is that his suggestions made his patients totally unaware of their bodies and that he committed the sexual assaults while the patients were virtually asleep, as if under anesthesia.

But it would be a mistake to assume that this supports the view that a hypnotist could not persuade an unwilling subject to submit to sexual intercourse. In his book
Open to Suggestion
(1989), a study of the abuse of hypnosis, Robert Temple devotes a whole chapter to rape under hypnosis. One assault victim describes how the hypnotist raised her bra and caressed her breasts, yet she still made a further appointment. The next time, after placing her in a light trance,

Here it seems clear that she had no more desire to be raped than the victim of the two Portuguese criminals had to hand over her life savings. This is clearly a case in which – as with Thimotheus Castellan and Franz Walter – the will of the hypnotist prevailed over the will of the victim. Temple also cites a case of a homosexual assault on a soldier by a hypnotist – his colonel – in which the soldier felt immobilized and
unable to get up from the bed, although he objected to the colonel’s advances.

Temple himself describes a personal episode that throws an interesting light on hypnosis. He was undergoing a course of hypnotic treatment and one day failed to “wake up”. But because he was aware that his doctor was in a hurry to get away, he pretended to be fully conscious. Outside, he told his wife – who was waiting in the car – that he was still hypnotized and asked her to blow on his face; she thought it funny and screamed with laughter. On the way home, he saw a tree and ordered her to stop. Then he went and embraced the tree and burst into tears, telling it how beautiful it was. After that he lay on his back, staring at the night sky and uttering maudlin remarks. In fact, he behaved exactly as if drunk. Back at home, he drank down half a glass of neat gin – a drink he disliked – and finally “came to”. It is clear that he knew that a part of his mind was still under hypnosis but was unable to awaken it.

This raises another important point. William James has pointed out that there are certain days on which we feel that our vital powers are simply not at their best; “our fires are damped; our draughts are checked”. We feel curiously dull, like a car whose engine is still cold and that keeps “cutting out”. In fact, the remarkable teacher Gurdjieff asserted that our ordinary consciousness is literally a state of sleep and that we have to make superhuman efforts if we are to wake up. (
Hypnosis
comes from the Greek
hypnos
– “sleep”.)

Clearly, then, hypnosis is not some abnormal, freak condition that we can ignore. It offers clues to what is wrong with human beings and to why it is the easiest thing in the world to waste one’s life. Our basic problem is to “shake the mind awake”.

Notice that when we are dull and bored, we feel “alienated” from reality. We feel trapped in the physical world and in the present moment; “reality” is a prison. This is the opposite of what happens when we are happy and excited – for example, when looking forward to some eagerly anticipated event – or when we are deeply relaxed. In these states, the world seems infinitely fascinating; reality seems to stretch around us in endless vistas, like a view from a mountaintop.

It is obvious that in such states, the right and left brains are in close communication. When you are bored, you are trapped – not only in the physical world, but in your left brain. You are, in essence, a split-brain patient. The same thing happens if you are absorbed in a daydream, except that in this case you are trapped in your inner world – your right brain. If you spend too much time in such states – what is sometimes called “escapism” – you begin to find the real world unbearable, and
you alternate between being trapped inside yourself and feeling trapped in the physical world.

On the other hand, in moods of happiness or relaxation, you become, for a short time, a “whole-brain” patient. Your right brain – your intuitive self – now feels awake, and you realize that this “whole” state is far closer to what human consciousness was intended to be. One of the oddest things about these states is that, when we look back on our miseries and misfortunes, most of them seem laughably trivial, the result of the lopsided half-consciousness that we regard as “normal”.

The French philosopher Sartre had a word for these states in which we feel trapped in the present moment: “nausea”. And, oddly enough, he regarded “nausea” as the fundamental reality of human existence – what you might call the basic state of human consciousness – rather like seeing an attractive woman with her hair in curlers and cold cream smeared all over her face. It follows, of course, that Sartre felt that human life is meaningless and that – as he put it in a famous phrase – “man is a useless passion”. His close associate Simone de Beauvoir captured the spirit of “nausea” when she wrote: “I look at myself in vain in a mirror, tell myself my own story. I can never grasp myself as an entire object. I experience in myself the emptiness that is myself. I feel that I am not”. But obviously, she was simply talking about the experience of being trapped in left-brain consciousness. Yet it is quite clear that she was mistaken when she said that she could never grasp herself as an entire object and that she felt “she is not”. In “whole-brain” states, we have a curious sense of our own reality
and
that of the world. We suddenly
know
that “we are”.