My Library

pre* liminary steps to projection, The Dream of Knowledge, Dual Consciousness, The Warning Pain, The Cataleptic State, The False Awakening, and, finally, The Trance Condition, with the apparitions, sounds and other phenomena associated therewith. But in July, 1908, after a two years' gap in which, nothing much had happened, he found himself in the Trance Condition without any of the preliminaries, when lying awake on the sofa one afternoon with his eyes shut. "I then left my body," he says, "by willing myself out of it, and experienced an extremely sudden transition to a beautiful unknown stretch of country. There I walked for some time over wild and charming ground beneath a bright blue sky in which were fleecy sunlit clouds." On his homeward journey he only remembered passing right through a horse and van standing in an unfamiliar street. The experience had taught him that the Dream of Knowledge was not essential to projection, and that seeing through closed eyes, as though an inner pair had suddenly opened, was proof that he had reached the Trance Condition, which he had never till then realized preceded the act of projection. He found, however, to his surprise that the new method required provisions which made it no more accessible than the old. A year later he experimented with chloroform, and after a few sniffs seemed to shoot up to the stars with a shining silver thread connecting his celestial self with his physical body. That appears to have been the first intimation he had of such a cord, and his description of it as a channel for communications is also novel.