Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/368

346 a bystander on the alert quite fails to notice, the hypnotic subject, to all appearance sunk in stupor, perceives and acts upon at once.

Side by side in the hypnotized with such trigger-like action toward his hypnotist goes in the initial cases an utter deadness to everything and everybody else. For him nothing exists but his hypnotizer. Through this person's fiat, and only through it, may anything enter the subject's world. At a word from this man other things and other people are perceived, either when directly pointed out or when indirectly involved in the execution of the suggestion itself. They can also be made to remain incognito by the same process. Still further, imaginary things can be made to seem real to the subject; their non-existence in fact forming no bar to their existence in his consciousness. If the operator says they exist, for him they do exist. In the full hypnotic state this is no mere nominal acquiescence, for the subject will go on to detail their characteristics and retail their subsequent actions without further prompting, showing that to him they are thorough-going realities.

Now this abnormal action of the mind in