Put Prissy under the tablecloth then. Miaow!
What happens? Prissy under the tablecloth, like a canary when you cover his cage, goes into a "sleep," a trance.
A trance, not a sleep. A trance means that all her individual, personal intelligence goes to sleep, like a hen with her head under her wing. But the apparatus of consciousness remains working. Without a soul in it.
And what can this apparatus of consciousness do, when it works? Why surely something. A wireless apparatus goes tick-tick-tick, taking down messages. So does your human apparatus. All kinds of messages. Only the soul, or the under-consciousness deals with these messages in the dark, in the under-conscious. Which is the natural course of events.
But what sorts of messages? All sorts. Vibrations from the stars, vibrations from unknown magnetos, vibrations from unknown people, unknown passions. The human apparatus receives them all, and they are all dealt with in the under-conscious.
There are also vibrations of thought, many, many. Necessary to get the two human instruments in key.
There may even be vibrations of ghosts in the air. Ghosts being dead wills, mind you, not dead souls. The soul has nothing to do with these dodges.
But some unit of force may persist for a time, after the death of an individual—some associations of vibrations may linger like little clouds in the etheric atmosphere after the death of a human being, or an animal. And these little clots of vibration may transfer themselves to the conscious-apparatus of the medium. So that the dead son of a disconsolate widow may send a message to his mourning mother to tell her that he owes Bill Jackson seven dollars: or that Uncle Sam's will is in the back of the bureau: and cheer up. Mother, I'm all right.
There is never much worth in these "messages." Because they are never more than fragmentary items of dead, disintegrated consciousness. And the medium has and always will have a hopeless job, trying to disentangle the muddle of messages.
Again, coming events may cast their shadow before. The oracle may receive on her conscious-apparatus material vibrations to say that the next great war will break out in 1925. And in so far as the realm of cause-and-effect is master of the living soul, in so far as events are mechanically maturing, the forecast may be true.