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Man Outside Himself

Prevost Battersby

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the man took no notice. Then he wondered if he were "dead", or in danger of premature burial. Remembering an appointment at his College, he willed himself to wake, but, to his intense surprise, nothing happened. "It was," he says, "as though a man actually wideawake willed to awake. I began to feel terribly lonely. This experience was quite new to me: always before, I had been able to see when I cared to will it—indeed the trouble had been that I woke too easily. Now I was afraid, and it was difficult to keep control and not give way to panic. Desperately I willed to wake, again and again, until a climax was reached. Something seemed to snap. Again I had that queer sensation of a 'click' within my brain. I was awake now—yes, but completely paralysed! I could not open my eyes. I could not speak. I could not move a muscle. I had a slight sense of daylight shining through my eyelids, and I could distinctly hear the clock ticking, and my grandfather moving about in the adjoining room." He tried in vain to move his body, but presently, by concentrating all his mental energy upon it, he managed to raise his little finger, and so gradually regained control. He was still blind, and the rest of his body seemed made of iron, but, as his effort continued, quite suddenly the trance was broken. His eyes were open to the light, and he was sitting up. For a few moments he was deathly sick and it was three days before he regained his accustomed health and spirits. He had a second cataleptic experience which deterred him for several years from risking another, and accepted the pain in his forehead as a warning to return to his body. Later on he discovered that, when in the cataleptic state, he had only to doze off again to become normal on waking. At the conclusion of his College days he regarded, as
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