Observations placeholder

The Life of a Sensitive – Madame Michael Bouissou

In order that the images might appear to me with a maximum of clarity I had to see them unfold on a perfectly, flat surface. At the beginning I was content with a wall bare of pictures, or the panel of a door, but I swiftly realised that as dark a background as possible facilitated the appearance of the images and I ordered from a picture framer a mount of velvety black paper about twenty inches square. Placed flat before me on a table or a desk it reflected as on a cinema screen the succession of images which appeared during the seance. Starting in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame, they gradually reached the centre, remained there for a certain time-during which, on occasion, complementary details would appear-then made for the upper right-hand corner and disappeared as though they were being wound round some invisible spool.

These images were vividly coloured, not reduced to the dimensions of the frame, but life-size and accompanied by symbols. A curious optical effect made them appear as though seen in relief at the end of a cylinder and not drawn flat in the frame. I think that this effect was obtained or facilitated by the gleam of the glass and the smooth blackness of the paper. During this unwinding, some inner sense made me understand and explain to my listener what I could not see on the screen-the psychic and moral state of the people who appeared, the accidents or illnesses in store for them.

As a beginner I did not know how to find my bearings chronologically in this other world, and I had to ask the interested person to locate in time the scenes I described.

Eventually a kind of vertical stick with notches on one side appeared in the left-hand corner of my frame. A convention, the reasons for which remained unknown, made me locate the present in the centre of this kind of scale, the past becoming more remote to the extent that my eyes wandered down the notches. This pin-pointed the past event with a certain accuracy, since an inner warning stopped me somewhere down this scale. I located the future in the same way by going up the notches to the top of the frame. But if I could in this way date the past with great accuracy, I could do so only very approximately as regards the future. Guided by the symbols previously explained, I managed to define the seasons quite clearly and thanks to their relationship with the date of the vision I could easily fix the time of year: beyond that the determination of time lapsed or time to come remained vague. In the course of the seances I shall mention I shall return to this curious mental process which required a long apprenticeship before I finally knew how to use it.