We now also see that the same principle of reproduction by a secondary process holds in hallucinatory phenomena whether artificial or spontaneous, and in many dreams. When a person looking into a crystal sees a scene which is a truthful pictorial representation of an actual past experience which he does not consciously remember, it follows that that visual hallucination must be induced and constructed by some secondary subconscious process outside of and independent of the processes involved in his personal consciousness. And, likewise, when a dream is a translation of a forgotten experience into symbolical terms it follows that there must be, underlying the dream consciousness, some subconscious process which continues and translates the original experience into and constructs the dream.
This being so we are forced to two conclusions: first, in all these types of phenomena the secondary process must in some way be closely related to the original experience in order to reproduce it; and, second, a mental experience must be conserved in some form which permits of a subconscious process reproducing the experience in one or other of the various forms in which memory appears. Further than this I will not go at present, not until we have more extensively reviewed the number and kinds of mental experiences that may be conserved. This we will do in the next lecture.
[5]. Automatic writing is script which has been produced unconsciously or involuntarily, although the writer is in an alert state, whether it be the normal waking state or hypnosis. The hand writes, though the subject does not consciously direct it. Ordinarily, though not always, the subject is entirely unaware of what the hand is writing, and often the writing is obtained better if the attention is diverted and directed toward other matters. The first knowledge then obtained by the subject of what has been written, or that the hand has written at all, is on reading the script. Some persons can cultivate the art of this kind of writing. Mrs. Verrall and Mrs. Holland, for example, deliberately educated themselves to write automatically, and each published a volume of her records. In other normal people automatic writing seems to develop accidentally or under special circumstances. In certain types of hysteria it is very easily obtained. “Planchette,” which many years ago was in vogue as a parlor game, was only a particular device to effect automatic writing.
[6]. In this particular experiment, when the hand wrote “automatically,” the second hypnotic consciousness vanished and the subject went into a trance state, or what is equivalent to a third hypnotic state. There was no consciousness present, excepting that which was associated with the writing hand. At other times, in experiments of this class with this same subject, the hypnotic or the waking consciousness, as the case might be, persisted alert while the hand wrote. For the purpose of the experiment in recovering memories this change in the psychological condition is not of importance, the principle remains the same.
[7]. Journal of the S. P. R., July, 1906. A fuller account of this case was later published in the same journal, August, 1911.
[8]. A remark made by the subject in the trance state, though passed over in the report as apparently inconsequential, has really much meaning when interpreted through that conception of the unconscious memory process which will be developed in succeeding chapters. The subject, while in the trance, claimed to be in a mental world wherein “is to be found, it is said, not only everything that has ever happened or will happen, but all thoughts, dreams, and imagination.” In other words, in that psychical condition into which she passed, all the conserved conscious experiences of her life could be awakened into memory.
[9]. Proceedings of the S. P. R., October, 1906, Chap. XII.
[10]. In the automatic script, which purported to be a spiritistic message from a dead friend named Annette, occurred the enigmatical sentence: “Tell her this comes from the friend who loved cradles and cradled things.” The meaning of this was revealed by the above-mentioned letter to Mrs. Holland, written twenty years previously. It was from a friend of Annette’s, and quoted an extract from Annette’s will, which ran, “because I love cradles and cradled things.” When Mrs. Holland was tearing up some old letters she came across this one. (“On the automatic writing of Mrs. Holland,” by Miss Alice Johnson: Proceedings of the S. P. R., June, 1908, pp. 288, 289.)
[11]. It would have required a stenographer, whom I did not have, to record fully all these recovered memories. They would fill several printed pages, and I can give only a general résumé of them. Some weeks later the experiment was repeated and a record taken as fully as possible in long hand.