Let us conceive of sleep less narrowly than we are accustomed to:
think of it only as one phase of the phenomenon of pause, of
arrested physical activity, universal throughout nature. The cell
itself experiences fatigue and goes to sleep--"perchance to dream,"
Modern experimental science in the domain of physiology and
psychology proves that we see and do not see, hear and do not hear,
feel and do not feel, in successive instants. We are asleep, in
other words, not merely hour by hour, but moment by moment--and
perhaps age by age as well.
Where is consciousness during these intervals, long or short, when
the senses fail to respond to the stimuli of the external world? It
is somewhere else, awake to some other environment. Though we may
not be able to verify this from our own experience, there are
methods whereby it can be verified. Clairvoyance is one of these,
hypnotism is another--that kind of hypnotism whereby an entranced
person is made to give a report of his excursions and adventures in
the mysterious House of Sleep. It is a well-known fact that these
experiences increase in intensity, coherence and in a certain sort
of omniscience, directly in proportion to the depth of the trance.
The revelations obtained in this way are sometimes amazing. The
inherent defect of this method of obtaining information is the
possibility of deception, and for that reason science still looks
askance at all evidence drawn from this source. But in essaying to
write a book about the fourth dimension from any aspect but the
mathematical, the author has put himself outside the pale of
orthodox science, so he is under no compulsion to ignore a field so
rich merely because it appears to be tainted by a certain amount of
fallibility and is even under suspicion of fraud. Diseased oysters,
though not edible, produce pearls, and a pearl of great price is the
object of this quest. Let us glance, therefore, at the findings of
hypnotism and kindred phenomena.