Page:Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology (1916).djvu/52

34 Within the first half-hour, during which there usually prevails a kind of semi-somnambulism with a dream-like manner, hallucinations, etc., the amnesia gradually disappears, whilst fragmentary memories emerge of what has occurred, but in a quite irregular and arbitrary fashion.

The later séances were usually begun by our hands being joined and laid on the table, whereon the table at once began to move. Meanwhile S. W. gradually became somnambulic, took her hands from the table, lay back on the sofa, and fell into the ecstatic sleep. She sometimes related her experiences to us afterwards, but showed herself very reticent if strangers were present. After the very first ecstasy she indicated that she played a distinguished rôle among the spirits. She had a special name, as had each of the spirits; hers was Ivenes; her grandfather looked after her with particular care. In the ecstasy with the flower-vision we learnt her special secret, hidden till then beneath the deepest silence. During the séances in which her spirit spoke, she made long journeys, mostly to relatives, to whom she said she appeared, or she found herself on the Other Side, in “That space between the stars which people think is empty; but in which there are really very many spirit-worlds.” In the semi-somnambulic state which frequently followed her attacks, she once described, in peculiar poetic fashion, a landscape on the Other Side, “a wondrous, moon-lit valley, set aside for the races not yet born.” She represented her somnambulic ego as being almost completely released from the body. It is a fully-grown but small black-haired woman, of pronounced Jewish type, clothed in white garments, her head covered with a turban. She understands and speaks the language of the spirits, “for spirits still, from old human custom, do speak to one another, although they do not really need to, since they mutually understand one another’s thoughts.” She “does not really always talk with the spirits, but just looks at them, and so understands their thoughts.” She travels in the company of four or five spirits, dead relatives, and visits her living relatives and acquaintances in order to investigate their life and their way of thinking; she further visits all places which lie