Coming up behind my chair, it bent low over me, and placing its long, cool spirit hands over my eyelids, imparted to me a steadily increasing sense of numbness. All thought was gradually annihilated; it was succeeded by a blank, just such a blank as suddenly comes to one when in the hands of the anæsthetist. Now, up to this evening, I had presumed, as nearly everybody does presume, that, in the case of mental blanks, every particle of consciousness is lost, totally arrested, and held, for the time being, in complete subjection. But on this occasion -- at the very moment memory reasserted itself -- I had recollections of some great metempsychosis, some stupendous change in my entire constitution, a change that affected all that we term mind, and spirit, and soul.

I struggled earnestly and desperately to recall the exact nature and process of that change, which I now believe underlies all so-called blanks, and I achieved this much: I recalled travel -- a mad,[11] rushing plunge or descent into something -- something quite different from anything I had known before -- a descent into some plane, or sphere, or condition, wholly and completely apart from the physical, and what is generally understood and classified as the mental plane, sphere, or condition. In my efforts to recollect, I have arrived at that same pitch since; but whenever I have been on the verge of getting beyond it, of forcing back a minute recollection of how that metempsychosis was enacted, of all the stages in it, there has been a lapse -- my memory has dimmed. Yet brief and slight as these remembrances have been, they have assured me of one great truth, namely -- that the state of blank never actually exists. Some part of us -- the part that alone retains consciousness -- is extracted and borne far away from the actual material body; but on its return, on its reunion with the physical -- with our gross and carnal, earthly self -- all memory of this delicate and finely poised consciousness is at once swallowed up and obliterated. If such were not the case, if everything were indeed a blank, and the spiritual as well as the material part of us were suspended during what we term unconsciousness, we should be forced to the conclusion that the soul has no separate existence, that it cannot survive the body, and that the immortality of man, the infinite perpetuation of our identity, in which we have so fondly believed, is but a chimera. I am, however, certain -- I could, if need be, swear to it -- that even in the deepest slumber, in the wildest delirium, in[12] the most seemingly omnipotent and annihilating blank, all is not lost, something remains, and that something is the psychic and spiritual consciousness, the very thing that constitutes what we term soul. In the first stage, then, of my cognisance of thought, again I struggled with memory, and the struggle overcoming me, I gradually lapsed into the mere consciousness of existence without thought. How long this condition lasted I cannot say, but with startling abruptness thought returned, and I became madly anxious to ascertain my present state -- how it differed from my former -- and my whereabouts. I was conscious of sound and light and motion, but conscious of them merely from the point of observation, as things quite outside myself -- things that in no way sensibly affected me. What particularly impressed me was the silence -- the passivity -- of what, I believed, constituted my body. I could detect no heart movement, no pulsation whatever. I seemed to be there -- to have a very familiar form -- but to be nothing more than form -- to have no tangibility. So far my eyes had seen; but, purposely, I had not allowed myself to discriminate objects. I was intuitively certain my power of vision had become supernormal; and I dreaded to employ it for fear I should see too much -- too acutely. I had a stupendous sense of impending horror. At length, however, I was impelled by an irresistible fascination to look. I did so, and in an instant became the spectator of a drama.

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