He did not leave her until it seemed to him that she no longer regarded the incident seriously; but in his own mind he was by no means at ease. At the earliest moment possible he went to consult with a fellow physician who was a specialist in disorders of the nerves, and to him he told the whole case as accurately as he was able. The specialist put some questions and in the end asked:—
“Has she ever been hypnotized?”
“I’m sure she never has,” Carroll answered. “She might easily be a subject, I should think. She’s naturally nervous, and just now she is run down and unstrung.”
“It seems like a case of self-hypnotism,” the other said. “Sometimes, you know, patients unconsciously hypnotize themselves, or get hypnotized, without having any idea of it.”
“But would n’t she know it afterward?”
“Oh, no; the second personality generally knows all about the first—”
“You mean,” interrupted Carroll, “that the normal person is the first and the hypnotized is the second?”
“Yes. The personality that comes to the surface in hypnotism, the subliminal self, knows all about the normal person, but the normal person has no idea of the existence of the secondary, the subliminal personality.”
“It’s so cheerful to think of yourself as a sort of nest of boxes,” Carroll commented grimly, “one personality inside of the other, and you only knowing about the outside box.”