Another incident, quite a long one. I ask you to have patience with the details, promising that in the end you will see what it is all about. I am in the next room, and I hear Jan and my wife having one of their regular evening arguments, because he will not tell her how he does this or that; at one moment he insists that he has told her—and the next moment he insists that he does not know. My wife finally asks him to concentrate upon an object in the room, and she will see if she can “get” it. He selects the gas stove, in which a fire is burning; and Craig says, “I see a lot of little flames.” Jan insists that is “no good,” she didn’t get the stove; which annoys her very much—she thinks he does not want to allow any success to a woman. He is a “continental male,” something she makes fierce feminist war upon.
Craig is suffering from neuralgia in neck and shoulder, and Jan offers to treat her. He will use what he calls “magnetism”; he believes there is an emanation from his finger-tips, and so, with his two forefingers he lightly traces the course of the nerves of her neck and shoulder and arm. For ten or fifteen minutes his two fingers are tracing patterns in front of her.
Then it is time for him to go home, and he is unhappy, and she succeeds in drawing the explanation from him—he has to walk, and his shoes are tight and hurt him. He has to have them stretched, he tells her. She offers him a pair of my big tennis shoes to wear home, and then she scolds him because he has the fashionable notion that white canvas tennis shoes are not proper footwear for eleven o’clock in the evening. Finally he puts them on and departs; and my wife lies down and makes her mind a blank, and orders it to tell her what Jan is doing.
She has a pencil and paper, and presently she is writing words. They are foreign words, and she thinks they must be in Jan’s native language; they come drifting through her mind for several minutes. Next day comes Jan for the daily lesson, and she shows him this record. He tells her that the words are not in his language, but German—which he knows, but never uses. My wife knows no German; except possibly sauerkraut and kindergarten. But here she has written a string of German and near-German words. I have the original sheet before me, and I give it as well as I can make out the scrawl: “ei einfinen ein-fe-en swenfenz fingen sweizzen czie ofen weizen ofen fingen swienfen swei fingern efein boden fienzen meifen bogen feingen Bladen Meichen frefen eifein.”
Some of this is nonsense; but there are a few German words in it, and others which are guesses at German words, such as might be made by a person hearing a strange language, and trying to set down what he hears. Part of the effort seems to be concentrated on getting one expression, “zwe Fingern”—two fingers! You remember the two fingers moving up and down over Craig’s neck and shoulder! And “Ofen”—the argument about the stove! And “bladen”—to stretch shoes over a block of wood. Where these ideas came from seems plain enough. But where did the German come from—unless from the subconscious mind of Jan?
A further detail, especially curious. Jan gave my wife the meaning for the word “bladen”: “to stretch shoes over a block of wood”; I have the memo which he wrote at the time. But looking up the word in the dictionaries, I do not find it, nor can I find any German who knows it. Apparently there is no such word; and this would clearly seem to indicate that my wife got her German from Jan. If so, it was by telepathy, for he spoke no word of it that evening.
It is the fashion among young ladies of the South to tease the men; and Craig found in this episode a basis for tormenting her psychic instructor. He had assured his patient that during the treatment he was sending her “curative thoughts.” But what kind of telepathic healer was it who sent gas-stoves and shoe-blocks into a neuralgic shoulder? Jan, missing the humor, and trying to save his reputation, declared that he hated the German language so greatly, he did not even allow himself to think in it! Germany was associated in his mind with the most painful memories, and all that previous day he had been fighting depression caused by these memories. You see, in this blundering defense, a significant bit of evidence. Jan had really had the German language in his thoughts at the time Craig got them!
I have before me a letter from Jan to my wife, postmarked Santa Barbara, October 19, 1927. He says: “May these lovely Cosmos bring you such peace and contentment as they have brought me.” He has cut a double slit in the paper, and inserted cosmos blossoms and violets. Prior to the receipt of this letter, my wife was making the record of a dream, and here is what she wrote down: “I dreamed Jan had a little basket of flowers, pink roses and violets, shaped like this.” (A drawing.) “He lifted them up and said they were for me, but a girl near him took them and said, ‘But I want them.’” When Jan came to see us again, my wife asked about the circumstance, and learned the following: a woman friend, who had given Jan the flowers, had accused him of meaning to send them to a girl; but he had answered that they were for “a middle-aged and distinguished lady.”
Fig. 13