Over and against the complete recall of total memory we have to place our ordinary memories, which are of a quite different order (although total recall presumably makes the limited recall of ordinary memory possible). Ordinary memory is a kind of summary or digest of past events which some area of our mind—what some psychologists call the preconscious—prepares for us out of total recall. This digest has a sort of utilitarian value for us—it helps us in our ordinary life and obviously has biological value as well as social value. The selection made by the preconscious mind out of our total memory is made also in the light of our general philosophy of life; it has to conform with our general feeling of what happiness is. Many aspects which in the total recall we should regard as traumatic or as irrelevant are left out in ordinary memory, and only those aspects which are biologically or socially useful to us remain.
Now let us turn to the world of fantasy and imagination. Here we see something which varies over an enormous range among different people and in the same people at different times. We can have fantasies and daydreams and imaginations of the vaguest kind or of the most elaborate and detailed variety. They can run the entire gamut from almost complete incoherence, such as we get in the state of delirium, to the most elaborate and highly organized kind of dramatic or narrative story. In its more elaborate form we have a real story-telling faculty, which exists in all human beings in a rather inchoate and undeveloped form, but which is highly developed in a few.
Before I go into the question of those people in whom the story-telling faculty is very highly developed, let me say that it is possible to induce it by means of hypnosis or reverie (which is, after all, very much like hypnosis) in people who normally don’t exhibit it very strongly. Very frequently these elaborate stories are interpreted by those who hear them as accounts of previous lives in Atlantis or Lemuria, but I don’t think we have necessarily to believe that this is so, because it is quite clear that we all potentially have the story-telling faculty and that certain people have it most powerfully; they can, so to speak, get at this area of the preconscious mind very easily and bring it up to the surface. I remember when I was a small boy at boarding school and we used to tell stories when lights were out. Most of the stories, needless to say, were pretty dull, but there was one boy I shall never forget. He was not a particularly bright boy, but he had this quite exceptional gift and would go on pouring forth extraordinary adventures without any difficulty night after night in a kind of endless serial which kept us all awake for hours.
We get great story-tellers in the world of novels. Alexandre Dumas had no difficulty in pouring forth the Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers without even pausing for breath—they just came rushing out. On a higher level of art we have a very interesting example of this story-telling faculty existing definitely on the unconscious or preconscious level in the case of Robert Louis Stevenson, who tells us in his book Across the Plains that all his short stories were provided for him by his unconscious, either in reverie or in actual dreams while he was asleep. He referred to this other part of his mind as ‘the brownies’—little fairy people who inhabited his skull and would bring forth material which in his conscious state he simply wrote down and elaborated. He says that when he was a boy the brownies used to produce material in a rather haphazard way, but when he had to make his living as a writer they collaborated with him and produced good saleable material.
We next come to the world of dreams, which is a kind of incoherent form of the story-telling world. There are the ordinary dreams which obviously have to deal with the affairs which preoccupy our personal unconscious, and then there are what Jung calls the great dreams which have to do with what he calls the collective unconscious—the great permanent human symbols which run through the whole of human history and which seem to be common to almost all mankind.
Finally, beyond all these, there is the world of visionary experience, which is in some sense a real other world, profoundly different from the world of the personal unconscious and even that of the collective unconscious. It has something deeply strange about it. Before we go into a description of what goes on in this remote area of the mind, let me say a little about the degree to which this distant region is accessible to the conscious side of human beings. If we look at the biographies of eminent poets and painters and musicians, we find that certain of them were able spontaneously to enter this visionary world. They could pass almost at will from the ordinary world of experience into the world of visionary experience. William Blake was able to go at almost any time into this other world of visions. It is true that for a good many years in the middle of his life he was unable to enter this world, but he recovered the faculty later on and went through to the end of his days going back and forth from the ordinary world of tables and chairs to something quite different, to the world which he describes in his poems and his prophetic books, and which he illustrates less successfully—because he was a much less great painter than he was a poet—in his various prints and paintings.
Over and above these poets—and I can’t go into the list of them—we can say without doubt that there are many quite ordinary people—ordinary from the point of view of their powers of expression—who have this power to go from our everyday world into the visionary world and back. They do not have the power, as inspired poets and painters have had, of expressing what they have seen, but they nevertheless do have this capacity for entering a very, very strange world of the mind.
In the past the capacity to have visions was regarded as extremely creditable, and anybody who had them was apt to boast about them. Those who have visions now are apt to keep their mouths shut for fear of being sent to the asylum, but there is nothing intrinsically unhealthy about having visions. It is perfectly true that many insane people do have visions, but many sane people also have visions and know perfectly well that they are having them. A person who has visions reaches the point of insanity only when he doesn’t know he is having visions and mixes them up with real life—or is so obsessed by his visions that he can’t get back into real life. Those people who have the power to enter the world of visions and to go back enjoy both worlds to the utmost degree.
How do people get into this visionary world? So far we have been talking about those who, for whatever reason, are so constituted that they can go and come between the ordinary world and the visionary world. They don’t know how; it just happens to them. But there are methods of transporting into this visionary world people who normally can’t get into it. Some of these methods are psychological; others involve making changes in body chemistry which, for some reason that we don’t understand, permit these distant areas of the mind to come through into consciousness. We find that under hypnosis certain people can go through not merely into the story-telling world, but far beyond, into the world of visions. This is rather uncommon but it quite definitely happens in some cases.
One method of inducing visions by psychological means is the method of complete isolation, which was discovered empirically in many of the religious traditions of the world. The Christian monks of the Thebaide in Egypt in the third and fourth centuries of our era discovered that by going into complete isolation in the desert they were able to induce visions, some of which were of a celestial nature, but very many of which were infernal in quality. Anybody who has frequented picture galleries all over the world will have noticed a great many pictures of the temptations of St Anthony—one of the favourite subjects of medieval and early Renaissance painters—in which one sees the hermit being plagued by the most hideous visions.
The technique of complete isolation has been followed from time immemorial in India. In the old Hindu traditions and in the Tibetan tradition we get accounts of forest dwellers who lived in caves high up in the Himalayas and who, by dint of completely isolating themselves, lay themselves open to this visionary world. The interesting thing is that within recent years these procedures have been exactly imitated and in a sense perfected in various psychological laboratories, especially in the ‘limited environment’ studies of D. O. Hebb at McGill University and John Lilly at the National Institute of Health. People are put where they can neither see nor hear anything, and in extreme cases they are immersed in a tepid bath so there is virtually no change in any of the feelings on the skin. In a
