Although cases of children’s spontaneous past life memories no doubt provide the strongest evidence for reincarnation, such cases are relatively rare, particularly in this country. A second, and much more common broad group of past life memories are those emerging under hypnosis. As we have seen with Bridey Murphy such cases often offer quite detailed glimpses into our past. However, there are serious questions as to how accurate hypnotic recall actually is. Considerable research and clinical experience with hypnosis indicates that people under hypnosis become more inclined to accept suggestions uncritically, confuse sources of memory, exhibit an enhanced capacity for imagery and role enactment, and are totally convinced that imagined events are real. Thus, there is a considerable tendency for someone under hypnosis and wanting to get in touch with a past life for his or her own interest or to please the hypnotist, to unconsciously identify with some known historical or fictional character, or to create one with a full range of details and trappings picked up from any number of sources, or simply imagined. To provide evidence for actual reincarnation the hypnotized person would have to provide specific details about the supposed past life that could be verified and, at the same time, determined to be such that they could not have been obtained in any ordinary way.
One of the most interesting and most convincing cases of a past life memory emerging during hypnosis is described by Fenwick as the Case of the Spanish Adventuress. The main character, Laurel Dilmen (pseudonym), was born and raised in Chicago during the Depression years. She was a precocious child who claimed to have experienced life as an adult, although she never apparently talked in detail about a past life. She did though show an unusual interest in weapons, clothing, buildings and other items of the sixteenth century. In school she disliked history because, she said, “they made it dull, not at all like what really happened.” She never studied Spanish history nor did she learn Spanish.
In the mid-1970s Laurel joined a club of amateur hypnotists in the hope that hypnosis might help her lose weight and also cure her headaches. Some of the members were studying past-life regression, and she volunteered as a subject. She had eight sessions during which she experienced herself as a woman called Antonia, the daughter of a Spanish officer and his German wife, born in 1555 on a small plantation on the island of Hispaniola. Her life, as it unfolded in Laurel ’s hypnotic sessions, was full of torrid passion and high adventure. At one point due to her freethinking ideas and rebellious spirit she was summoned for questioning by the Spanish Inquisition, arrested, tried, and made to pay a heavy fine and perform other penances. Later on Antonia fell deeply in love with a powerful man. Together they embarked on many more adventures around the world until she was drowned near a small island in the Caribbean .
Following her regression sessions Laurel started to have dreams and daytime flashbacks of Antonia’s “life.” These soon became for her more vivid and far more worthwhile than the affairs in her normal life. Laurel began to realize she was in danger of jeopardizing her present life by neglecting her friends and activities. At this point, three years after the regression sessions, she decided to seek help and turned to Dr. Linda Tarazi who had been a member of the original hypnosis group.
Dr. Tarazi felt that the best way to persuade Laurel to give up her obsession and return to reality would be to convince her that Antonia’s life was pure fantasy. In the next two years she regressed Laurel 36 times to her life as Antonia. The tape recordings of these sessions contained a huge amount of information about Antonia’s supposed life, which Dr. Tarazi set about to investigate. She spent numerous hours of library research, consulted with historians who had specialized knowledge of Spain in that period, and even paid a visit to Cuenca, Spain, to examine the town’s archives and Inquisition records. She also carefully checked how easy it might have been for Laurel to have acquired her information. While some 50 or 60 facts could have been easily obtained from most history books or encyclopedias, 25 to 30 Dr. Tarazi only discovered with difficulty through searching in rare books in specialized research libraries. Over a dozen facts she discovered were only published in Spanish. A few were not even published, but were only located by checking local archives. Overall, among the hundreds of detailed facts that Laurel provided about Antonia’s life, all were correct. (Fenwick, 1999, pp. 129 – 145)
Another case investigated by Stevenson, also involving memories emerging during hypnosis, featured what’s known as responsive xenoglossy. In these rare cases an unlearned foreign language is actually spoken and understood. In the Swarnlata case, previously mentioned, there is no indication she actually knew what the words in her songs meant.
As summarized by Almeder, the case unfolded as follows:. Lydia Johnson, wife of a respected Philadelphia physician, in 1973 agreed to help her husband with his experiments in hypnosis. She turned out to be an excellent subject, and, he decided to try to take her back in time. However, in the middle of one regression she suddenly flinched (as if struck), screamed, and clutched at her head. Although he ended the session immediately, she was left with a headache that persisted. Twice more her husband attempted to repeat the session, but the same thing occurred. Lydia each time, upon being awakened, described a scene with water where someone was trying to drown her. Another hypnotist was called in who repeated the regression, but before the point where she had cried out, he told her, “You are ten years younger than that.”
She suddenly began to talk in words and occasional phrases, some of which was in broken English, but much of which was in a foreign language that nobody at the session could understand. Her voice was deep and masculine, and she identified herself as “Jensen Jacoby.” These sessions were tape-recorded, and linguists were consulted to translate Jensen’s statements. The language turned out to be Swedish, which was totally foreign to Lydia. A Swedish speaker was present at subsequent sessions, who posed questions in Swedish that were answered by Jensen in Swedish. The information he provided was consistent with what peasant life in Sweden at that time is known to be. When Lydia, still entranced, was asked to open her eyes and look at objects presented, she correctly identified a model of a seventeenth-century Swedish ship, a wooden container used then for measuring grain, a bow and arrow, and poppy seeds. However, she did not know how to use such modern tools as pliers. (Almeder, 1992)
The most usual explanation for past life memories, after such obvious things as fraud have been ruled out, and that avoids any notion of the paranormal, is cryptomnesia. This is the resurfacing of information that had been acquired at one time in life then so deeply forgotten that when it emerges, it is experienced as having no identifiable source in one’s life. To illustrate the capacity of the human brain to absorb information, whether or not a conscious effort is made to retain it, how deeply it can be buried, and how genuinely unaware the person may be that he or she has ever acquired it, Fenwick described the remarkable case of Blanche Poynings, originally published in the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research in 1911.
Miss C., the subject, was described as a simple, straightforward character with a good sense of humour, a good general education, and a strong interest in psychical matters, who agreed to be hypnotized by a doctor for a series of experiments. During one of the sessions she found herself in a different place and timewhere she met and fell into conversation with a woman who gave her name as Blanche Poynings.
Blanche told Miss C. about her life with staggering detail, her connections with the court of Richard II, and her great friend Maud, Countess of Salisbury. She talked about members of her own family and of Maud’s, giving their names and the names of members of their households, describing their family affairs, activities and fortunes. Blanche herself seems to have been no intellectual. She was impressed that the countess could write her own name, and although she described the earl, Maud’s husband, as a cultivated man and a poet, she could not quote any of his poems because “she never remembered that sort of thing.”
She was, however, full of information about the clothes that were worn. “She used to wear brocaded velvet with ermine, and a high-peaked cap of miniver: She wore blue velvet, embroidered with gold. Men wore shoes with long points, which were chained to their knees, and had long hair cut straight across the forehead. She described the food that was eaten: “three kinds of bread, simmel, wastel and cotchet, eaten by different classes,” and her favourite dish, lampreys stewed in oil. She described the medical treatments of the day, saying the doctor “used to bleed them for everything,” and talked about the time she had spent at court and the royal figures she had met.
Dr. G. Lowes Dickinson, who investigated the case, found that the historical information relayed by Blanche was astonishingly accurate. In instance after instance what she had apparently told Miss C. about the Earl and Countess of Salisbury proved to have been true. However, all he could discover about Blanche Poynings herself was that she had indeed been one of the ladies-in-waiting at Richard II’s court.
Miss C. could not account for her apparent knowledge of the period. She had never studied it, and the only historical novel she remembered reading about the period, when examined, could not have provided her with the facts and framework for her story. Dickinson remained convinced that there must be some rational explanation. Because Miss C. had an interest in spiritualism, he suggested that she try to communicate with Blanche Poynings employing a planchette used in séances. In doing so she immediately made contact with Blanche who Dickinson then questioned. Asked how he could confirm the information she had related, the response was to read the will of Blanche’s husband. Further questions yielded information about where this could be located.
The planchette session evidently struck the chord in Miss C.’s memory that previous questioning had failed to do. Both she and her aunt had, she thought, read a book called Countess Maud some years earlier, though she had completely forgotten about it and couldn’t even remember whether it had mentioned Blanche Poynings. Once a copy of the book, a historical novel written in 1892, had been acquired, it was easily established that this must have been the source of the memories of Blanche. Emily Holt, the author, was a novelist who paid particular attention to the historical accuracy of her books. In an appendix she had listed everything known about the Earl of Salisbury’s family, including a mention of Blanche Poynings and her four husbands. Blanche herself played only a small part in the story, but otherwise the people and events she had described were all accurately portrayed in the novel.
Dickinson then encouraged Miss C. see if under hypnosis she could recover the memory of when she first read the book. She described the appearance of the book, which she had seen when she was twelve, saying that she didn’t actually read the appendix but knew it was about the people in the book. Blanche Poynings was in the book, she said, but there wasn’t much about her. Asked how much of her account of Blanch she got from the book her response was
early all the events from the book, but not her character … There was a real person called Blanche Poynings that I met, and I think her name started the memory, and I got the two mixed up.
Fenwick noted the following in his discussion of the case.
Twelve is an impressionable age, and if Miss C. had been particularly interested in the novel it wouldn’t have been surprising that she would have remembered it in the detail she recounted under hypnosis. . . . It’s possible that Miss C. had a photographic, or eidetic, memory. Only a few people have this kind of memory, which enables them to look at a page of a book and later recall and read the image of the page from memory. It is a capacity which is strongest in childhood and usually fades with age, but Miss C. was only twelve when she read Countless Maud and may still have had the ability. At any rate, she clearly remembered enough of the events in the book to create a background for Blanche Poynings. She had, however, imposed some personality changes on the character of Blanche, who is described as pious and discreet in the book, (Fenwick, p.73)
To the layman cryptomnesia may seem as difficult an explanation to swallow as reincarnation. How can such detailed memory be stored and then accessed without the conscious mind being aware of it at all? And if it is, surely the recovered memories would then stir such a chord in the conscious mind that their source would be remembered. Even if you have genuinely forgotten someone or something, when your memory is jogged memories of the person or event usually comes flooding back. (p. 74)
For those willing to entertain the possibility that consciousness in some way and form can survive the death of the body, an alternative to the reincarnation explanation for past life memories often posited is that of possession.