In the eighteenth century, before the discoveries of Mesmer and de Puysegur, a pioneer named Maxwell said, “There is no disease which is not curable by a spirit of life without help of a physician . . . The universal remedy is nothing but the spirit of life increased in a suitable subject.” Mesmer found a means of stimulating this natural healing force and called the process “magnetism.” In 1784 de Puysegur, attempting to magnetize Victor, the shepherd boy, discovered hypnotism: Victor, falling into a deep trance, began to speak and diagnosed the ailment of the person next to him. During the next generation persons with similar sensitiveness were found in France, Germany, and England. They were studied carefully; the best men of science gave them their attention and wrote books about them. Somnambulism became fashionable. People went by preference to a somnambulist rather than to a physician, and the results apparently were as efficacious as they were amazing. The somnambulists seemed infallible in diagnosis, and the remedies they suggested were simple and, according to the evidence, helpful.Predictably the medical mafia, even though enjoying nowhere near the terrifying monopoly on human health that it holds today, managed to debunk, discredit and finally destroy this burgeoning threat. To quote further:
As the books on somnambulism rolled off the presses, orthodox medicine rallied to the opposition. Mesmer was condemned as a fraud, and the diverse phenomena discovered by other investigators were damned along with him. The hope for a new system of diagnosing physical ills—a system already inherent in man and magically sure—began to fade.
He had little education, though probably much more than he and his friends pretended. In 1843 he heard lectures in Poughkeepsie on animal magnetism, as the phenomena of hypnotism was then termed, and found that he had remarkable clairvoyant powers. In the following year he had, he said, spiritual messages telling him of his life work. He eventually became known as "the Poughkeepsie Seer".Both these books should be interesting reads. All this has rekindled my interest in hypnotism which I dabbled with earlier in the year when I was having trouble remembering my dreams. I used an hypnotic suggestion method outlined in a book and had immediate success. The technique can be used to facilitate lucid dreaming.
I prepared a self-hypnosis walk-through to improve my dream recall and activate lucid dreaming. It's a bit rough but it's a start. I played it through once tonight so we'll see if there are any immediate results. However, it will definitely need refining, possibly using Garage Band.
