M.J. Rose

A 19th century exploration into “forces unrecognized by our senses” —

Detail from a depiction of thought-transference, the man behind dictating the movement of the other, from Magnetismus und Hypnotismus (1895) by Gustav Wilhelm Gessmann

From The Public Domain Review,

Worlds Without End
“At the end of the 19th century, inspired by radical advances in technology, physicists asserted the reality of invisible worlds — an idea through which they sought to address not only psychic phenomena such as telepathy, but also spiritual questions around the soul and immortality. Philip Ball explores this fascinating history, and how in this turn to the unseen in the face of mystery there exists a parallel to quantum physics today.

William Barrett was puzzled by flames. As the young assistant of the eminent John Tyndall at the Royal Institution in London in the 1860s, he noticed that flames seemed to be sensitive to high-pitched sounds. They would become flattened and crescent-shaped, as Barrett put it, like a “sensitive, nervous person uneasily starting and twitching at every little noise”. He was convinced that this “unseen connection” was mediated by some immaterial intangible influence — it was, he admitted, an effect “more appropriate for a conjuror’s stage than a scientific lecture table”.

Certain people, Barrett decided, were analogues of the sensitive flame, exquisitely attuned to vibrations that others could not perceive, to “forces unrecognized by our senses”. He considered these persons able to receive messages from super-normal spirit-beings existing in an intermediate state between the physical and the spiritual — a phenomenon that might account for telepathy…”

For the rest, click here.

It’s December. We all feel a little nutty this time of year. But not all of us experience real actual psychosis, and even fewer of us will ever experience the particular psychosis known as “Cotard’s delusion” — in which the patient believes that she is dead.

From The Toast,

Perdition Days: On Experiencing Psychosis

By Esmé Weijun Wang

“Let’s note that I write this while experiencing psychosis, and that much of this has been written during a strain of psychosis known as Cotard’s delusion, in which the patient believes that she is dead. What the writer’s confused state means to either of us is not beside the point, because it is the point. The point is that I am in here, somewhere: cogito ergo sum.

*

In October 2013 I attended a speakers’ training at the Mental Health Association of San Francisco. As a new hire at the bureau, I would begin, in 2014, to deliver anti-stigma talks for schools, government agencies, and other organizations around the city. Part of this training included a lesson on appropriate language use — to say, “person with bipolar disorder,” or “person living with bipolar disorder,” or “person with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder,” instead of “bipolar” as predicate adjective. We speakers were told that we are not our disease, our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing, and the illness is another, just as a person with cancer is not a “cancer” herself, but a person who has had, through misfortune, a condition at the cellular level.
This hypothetical person with cancer is still the same person. This person with cancer will die or go into remission or be cured of the unwanted guest.

Of course, the unwanted guests are her own cells.

I had endured the longest period of psychosis of my life earlier that year, from February through August, and after trying every atypical, i.e. new-generation, antipsychotic on the market, I began taking Haldol, a vintage antipsychotic, which cleared my delusions until November 4th. On that morning, I looked at the antique sewing table in my office, seeing red wood without seeing it, and felt the old anxiety of unreality. The full delusion would not come until a day later, but I knew what this meant; to look at the table and suddenly realize that the past few weeks were not simply feeling “scattered,” as I repeatedly told others, but were pre-psychosis signals and warnings.

Such signals seem ordinary to other people, and were ordinary to myself…”

For the rest, click here.

Have you experienced sleep paralysis? If so, imagine for a moment that you are living in ancient times, with no scientific explanation for such terror. To what or whom would you attribute the experience? Demons? Witches? Angry souls of the dead? The hallucinations are often accompanied by a distinct sense of impending doom – a dread so palpable that you are absolutely positive you are about to die.

Could it be possible that the science we have now is merely attempting to explain the more sinister or paranormal nature of these experiences?  Do scientists really know the answer?

If you’ve ever had sleep paralysis, one thing is for certain, it feels as real as real can get.

Here is one of the best articles we’ve seen on the phenomenon in terms of offering a scientific explanation:

Understanding Sleep Paralysis: A Terrifying But Unique State Of Consciousness
by Dan Denis (ifls)

“I awake in bed … In the corner of the room there are two men. I cannot see them but I know that they are there, and what they look like. I can hear them talking. They are talking about murder. I cannot move. One of the men comes and stands directly above me … He spits, and his spit lands in the socket of my closed eye. I can feel the impact, the wetness, the trail of slime.”

This may sound like a scene from the X-Files, but it is actually a personal account of a real experience – told as part of a project on sleep paralysis. This is an unusual condition where one wakes up in the night, unable to move, and often experiences a wide range of bizarre and terrifying hallucinations.

On October 9 a new documentary, The Nightmare, directed by Rodney Ascher, is being released in the UK. The film tracks eight people’s experiences of sleep paralysis, brilliantly recreating their terrifying visions on screen. However, it does not touch on the increasing amount of scientific study into the condition. This is a shame, as researchers are slowly getting closer to unravelling its mystery….”

For the rest, click here.

Click here for a very fascinating video on the subject.