H and Diane have congratulated me on my first successes. This comes at a time when I feared I had disappointed H, and all of the others who have persisted for so long. I cannot tell you how much their approval has meant. But they assure me that I am at the threshold of the truly wondrous, and am receiving the early intimations.
And yet it happened as I was resting after a long and fruitless day, in which I was sedated twice with two inducements. The second dose made me terribly sick, frightened and paranoid. But as I lay down that evening, I became aware of being entirely raised up and off the bed. At least two feet of space existed between my body and my consciousness.
The second time, I was again completely exhausted in mind and body, and suddenly found myself to be hovering over the bed and looking down at myself. I looked into my own eyes and knew at once that I was absent from them.
I sat up, but my body remained prone. I lay down and repeated the action twice, but I stayed detached.
The same woman had filed over a dozen reports across two years. Seb could only assume that she’d been a patient in a facility, or the subject of an experiment. Or perhaps all of the information was submitted by volunteers to be collated by this SPR.
[SPR. Vol. 16. Case No. 79. 1964.
Mrs Ruby McDougal]
I saw the room as it had been, though it was much brighter, clearer, with every object illumined from within and made vivid, almost sparkling. The dust motes were a cascade of gold before the window. My face upon the bed was the most surprising thing. Without doubt that was my head upon the pillow, and yet my face seemed so different to the one that I had looked upon in mirrors, so many times before in my life.
The room I fell asleep in had been dark, but during the experience the room could have been bathed in an unworldly form of moonlight, or illumined by the glow from a soft and magical nightlight. The light was opalescent. But when I saw myself inside the bed, I panicked and woke with a jolt. I opened my eyes and the room was black. Nothing inside the room was visible.
Seb discovered that the same woman had progressed to mastering an astonishing feat.
[SPR. Vol. 12. Case No. 29. 1965.
Mrs Ruby McDougal]
I stood in the room and watched the session. They were all sitting and continuing with the formulation of the image-making while repeating the renunciation. But I had already left my body and stood behind myself.
I instinctively became aware of H and turned to see him and Katie. They were outside the room, standing at the window and were smiling at me.
I felt superior to the other people around me for the first time in my life. Suddenly, I knew that I must get past my husband’s decision to leave. This is what we had come here for. This is what I had stayed for. All of our sacrifices to this point were worthwhile. My sense of succeeding and of belonging created an emotional reaction of such force that I returned to my body with a jolt. When I looked up, I was sat upon the floor again, amongst my group. I looked to the window but could see no one outside.
How is it that H and Katie can stay outside themselves for so long? If it kills me I will master this!
Seb abandoned Ruby and picked up with an individual who, he later discovered, had been the subject of over one hundred reports.
[SPR. Vol. 18. Case No. 31. 1964. ‘V’]
As I ventured further than my room, the whole house was alight with the same misted radiance, pearl coloured, tinged with grey. My individual senses became one, what H calls the ‘supersense’. I could see everything in the building, but through everything too, through the very walls if I wished. I felt as though I could see the outside and inside of every simple, ordinary object, while instinctively understanding its form and texture. No barriers stood before me. Whatever was behind me I already knew was there without looking. The feeling was incredible.
The world was the same but fundamentally changed. The world was charged with an energy from somewhere else entirely.
I could have been joy incarnate. My very being was so buoyant, and I was in command of four dimensions.
When I thought of my husband, whom I had left in the bed, I at once came to be standing beside the bed in our room, and looking down upon him as he lay next to my physical body. That had never happened before, but I pitied my poor body and its sense of vacancy, while wishing for my husband to wake and to see me.
My mind has never been so clear as it was that night, so active but unstained by doubt. All was comprehensible instantaneously – myself, the world, my relationships, the past, the point of everything. It was incredible and yet I was entirely passive, a mere observer, and not thinking of my environment analytically at all during the experience.