Mental Radio, by Upton Sinclair, [1930], at sacred-texts.com
Mental Radio, by Upton Sinclair, [1930], at sacred-texts.com
As I have said, I hesitate to tell about incidents such as these. They are hard to believe, and the skeptic may say that my wife was hypnotized by Jan, and made to believe them. But it happens that Craig has been able to establish exactly the same rapport with her husband, who has never had anything to do with hypnosis, except to watch it a few times. A Socialist "muckraker," much wrapped up in his job, the husband sits and reads, or revises manuscript, while the wife works her white magic upon his mind. Suddenly his train of thought is broken by an exclamation; the wife has "willed" him to do such and so—and he has done it! Or maybe she has been asleep, and come out with the tail end of a dream, and has written down what appears to be a lot of rubbish—but turns out to be a reproduction of something the husband has been reading or writing at that very moment! Hear one or two instances of such events, all written down at the time.
Colonel Lindbergh has flown to France, but Craig does not know much about it, because she
is not reading the papers, she is asking, "What is life?" A year passes, and in the mail I receive a monthly magazine, the "Lantern," published by Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers in Boston. I open it, and find an article by a young radical, assailing Lindbergh because he does not follow in his father's footsteps; his father was a radical congressman, but now the son allows himself to be used by the army and navy people, and by the capitalist press, to distract the minds of the masses from social justice. So runs the charge; and before I am through reading it, my wife comes downstairs from a nap. "What are you reading?" she asks, and I answer: "Something about Lindbergh." Says my wife: "Here are my notes about a dream I just had." She hands me a sheet of paper, I have it before me now as I write, and I give it with misspelling and abbreviations exactly as she wrote it in a hurry, not anticipating that it would ever become public:
"'I do not believe that Lindberg flew across the ocean in order to take a ransome from a foreign gov as well as from his own. Nor in order to induce the nations of the earth to a war in the air.' Words which were in my mind as I awoke from nap on aft May 25."
I should add that my wife had had no opportunity
to look at the Boston magazine, whether consciously or unconsciously. She tells me that Lindbergh had not been in her conscious mind for a long time, and she had no remotest idea that the radicals were attacking him.
Another instance: I am reading the latest "book of the month," which has just come in the mail, and to which my wife has paid no attention. She interrupts me with a question: "Are there any flowers in what you are reading?" I answer, "Yes," and she says: "I have been trying to concentrate, and I keep seeing flowers. I have drawn them." She hands me two drawings (figs. 14a, 14b):
The book was Mumford's "Herman Melville," and I was at page 346, a chapter entitled, "The Flowering Aloe." On this page are six lines from a poem called "The American Aloe on Exhibition." On the preceding page is a discussion of the habits of this plant. While my wife was
making the left-hand drawing (fig. 14a), I had been reading page 344: "the red clover had blushed through the fields about their house"; and "he would return home with a handful of clover blossoms."
Of experiences like this there have been many. Important as the subject is, I find it a bother, because I am called upon to listen to long narratives of dreams and telepathy, while my mind is on Sacco and Vanzetti, or the Socialist presidential campaign, or whatever it is. Sometimes the messages from the subconscious are complicated and take patience to disentangle. Consider, for example, a little drawing (fig. 15)—one of nearly
three hundred which this long-suffering husband has made for his witch-wife to reproduce by telepathy: a football, you see, neatly laced up. In her drawing (fig. 15a) Craig gets the general effect perfectly, but she puts it on a calf. Her written comment was: "Belly-band on calf."
While Craig was making this particular experiment, her husband was reading a book; and now, wishing to solve the mystery, she asks, "What are you reading?" The husband replies, wearily: "DeKruif's 'Hunger Fighters,' page 283." "What does it deal with?" "It is a treatise on the feeding of cows." "Really?" says Craig. "Will you please write that down for me and sign it?"
But why did the cow become a calf? That, too, is something to be explained. Says Craig: "Do you remember what I used to tell you about old Mr. Bebb and his calves?" Yes, the husband knows the story of the half-crazy old Welshman, who thirty or forty years ago was the caretaker of the Kimbrough summer home on the Mississippi Sound. Old Mr. Bebb made his hobby the raising of calves by hand, and turning them into parlor pets. He would teach them to use his three fingers as a nursing bottle, and would make fancy embroidered belly-bands for them, and tie them up in these. So to the subconscious mind which was once little Mary Craig Kimbrough of Mississippi, the idea of a calf sewed up like a football is one of the most natural in the world.
Since my wife and I have no secrets from each other, it does not trouble me that she is able to
see what I am doing. While I am away from home, she will "concentrate" upon me, and immediately afterwards write out what she "sees." On one occasion she described to me a little red book which I had got in the mail at the office. By way of establishing just what kind of book she had "seen," she had gone to my bookcase and picked out a French dictionary—and it happened that I had just received the Italian dictionary of that same series, uniform in binding. On another occasion, while making a study of dream-material, she wrote out a dream about being lost in long and involved concrete corridors —while I was trying to find my way through the locker-rooms of a Y. M. C. A. basement, running into one blind passage after another, and being much annoyed by doors that wouldn't open.
Dreams, you understand, are products of subconscious activity, and to watch them is one method of proving telepathy. By practice Craig has learned to lie passive, immediately after awakening, and trace back a long train of dreams. Here is one of the results, a story worth telling in detail—save that I fear you will refuse to believe it after it is told.
On the afternoon of January 30, 1928, I was playing tennis on the courts of the Virginia
[paragraph continues] Hotel, in Long Beach, California, and my wife was taking a nap. She did not know that I was playing tennis, and has no knowledge about the places where I play. She takes no interest in the game, regarding it as a foolish business which will some day cause her husband to drop dead of heart failure—and she declines to be present on the occasion. When I entered the house, she said: "I woke up with a long involved dream, and it seemed so absurd I didn't want to write it out, but I did so." Here are the opening sentences verbatim:
"Dreamed I was on a pier, watching a new kind of small, one or two seated sport-boat, a little water car into which a woman got and was shot by machinery from the pier out to the water, where she skidded around a minute or two and was drawn back to the pier. With us on the pier were my sister and child, and two young men in white with white caps. These appeared to be in charge of this new sport-boat. This boat is not really a boat. It is a sort of miniature car. I've never seen anything like it. Short, so that only one or two people could sit in it. An amusement thing, belonging to the pier. The two young men were intensely interested, and stood close together watching it out on the water," etc., etc.
Understand that this dream was not supposed to have anything to do with me. It was before Craig had come to realize the state of rapport with me; she had not been thinking about me, and when she told me about this dream, she had no thought that any part of it had come from my mind. But here is what I told her about my afternoon:
The Virginia Hotel courts are close to what is called "The Pike," and there is an amusement pier just across the way, and on it a so-called "Ferris wheel," with little cars exactly like the description, which go up into the air with people in them. That afternoon it happened that the tennis courts were crowded, so my partner and I waited out a set or two. We sat on a bench, in white tennis suits and hats, and watched this wheel, and the cars which went up in the air, and at a certain point took a slide on long rods, which made them "skid around," and caused the women in them to scream with excitement. Underneath the pier was the ocean, plainly visible along with the little cars.
I should also mention the case of our friend, Mrs. Kate Crane-Gartz, with whom there is a rapport which my wife does not tell her about. My wife will say to me, "Mrs. Gartz is going to phone," and in a minute or two the phone will
ring. She will say, "Mrs. Gartz is coming. She wants me to go to Los Angeles with her." Of course, a good deal of guessing might be possible, in the case of two intimate friends. But consider such guessing as this: My wife had a dream of an earthquake and wrote it down. Soon thereafter occurred this conversation with Mrs. Gartz. I heard it, and my wife recorded it immediately afterwards, and I quote her written record:
"Mrs. Gartz dreamed of earthquake. 'Wasn't it queer that I dreamed of swaying slowly from side to side.'
"'I dreamed the same,' I said. 'But I was in a high building.'"
"'So was I,' she replied."
Craig calls attention to the word "slowly," as both she and Mrs. Gartz commented on this. They didn't believe that an earthquake would behave that way; but I pointed out that it would happen just so with a steel-frame building.
