Real Ghost Stories | Page 6

as real to
him as the life which he lived when awake. It was actual, progressive,
continuous, but entirely different, holding no relation whatever to his
waking life. Of his two existences he preferred that which was spent in
sleep, as more vivid, more varied, and more pleasurable. This was no
doubt an extreme and very unusual case. But it is not impossible to
conceive the possibility of a continuous series of connected dreams,
which would result in giving us a realizing sense of leading two
existences. That we fail to realize this now is due to the fact that our
memory is practically inert or non-existent during sleep. The part of our
mind which dreams seldom registers its impressions in regions to
which on waking our conscious personality has access.
The conception of a dual or even a multiple personality is worked out
in a series of papers by Mr. F. W. H. Myers[1], to which I refer all
those who wish to make a serious study of this novel and startling
hypothesis. But I may at least attempt to explain the theory, and to give
some outline of the evidence on which it is based.
[1] "Human Personality" (Longmans, Green & Co.)
If I were free to use the simplest illustration without any pretence at
scientific exactitude, I should say that the new theory supposes that
there are inside each of us not one personality but two, and that these
two correspond to husband and wife. There is the Conscious
Personality, which stands for the husband. It is vigorous, alert, active,
positive, monopolising all the means of communication and production.
So intense is its consciousness that it ignores the very existence of its
partner, excepting as a mere appendage and convenience to itself. Then
there is the Unconscious Personality, which corresponds to the wife
who keeps cupboard and storehouse, and the old stocking which
treasures up the accumulated wealth of impressions acquired by the
Conscious Personality, but who is never able to assert any right to
anything, or to the use of sense or limb except when her lord and
master is asleep or entranced. When the Conscious Personality has
acquired any habit or faculty so completely that it becomes instinctive,
it is handed on to the Unconscious Personality to keep and use, the

Conscious Ego giving it no longer any attention. Deprived, like the
wife in countries where the subjection of woman is the universal law,
of all right to an independent existence, or to the use of the senses or of
the limbs, the Unconscious Personality has discovered ways and means
of communicating other than through the recognised organs of sense.
How vast and powerful are those hidden organs of the Unconscious
Personality we can only dimly see. It is through them that Divine
revelation is vouchsafed to man. The visions of the mystic, the
prophecies of the seer, the inspiration of the sibyl, all come through this
Unconscious Soul. It is through this dumb and suppressed Ego that we
communicate by telepathy,--that thought is transferred without using
the five senses. This under-soul is in touch with the over-soul, which,
in Emerson's noble phrase, "abolishes time and space." "This influence
of the senses has," he says, "in most men, overpowered their mind to
that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and
insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is in the world
the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the
force of the soul." It is this Unconscious Personality which sees the
Strathmore foundering in mid-ocean, which hears a whisper spoken
hundreds of miles off upon the battlefield, and which witnesses, as if it
happened before the eyes, a tragedy occurring at the Antipodes.
In proportion as the active, domineering Conscious Personality
extinguishes his submissive unconscious partner, materialism
flourishes, and man becomes blind to the Divinity that underlies all
things. Hence in all religions the first step is to silence the noisy,
bustling master of our earthly tabernacle, who, having monopolised the
five senses, will listen to no voice which it cannot hear, and to allow
the silent mistress to be open-souled to God. Hence the stress which all
spiritual religions have laid upon contemplation, upon prayer and
fasting. Whether it is an Indian Yogi, or a Trappist Monk, or one of our
own Quakers, it is all the same. In the words of the Revivalist hymn,
"We must lay our deadly doing down," and in receptive silence wait for
the inspiration from on high. The Conscious Personality has usurped
the visible world; but the Invisible, with its immeasurable expanse, is
the domain of the Sub-conscious. Hence we read in the Scriptures of

losing life that we may find it; for things of