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Psychic Discoveries – Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder

Alla is a high-ranking physics student at Moscow University. Art really didn't interest her much. She felt she had no talent in drawing. Alla's sketches, when she volunteered for Raikov's experiments, bore out her opinion, showing only a little more feeling than stick figures.

"You are Ilya Repin," Dr. Raikov insisted to the deeply entranced Alla. Repin, a great Russian painter at the turn of the century, is still vigorously studied in the Soviet Union. "You think like Repin. You see like Repin. You have the abilities of Repin. You are Repin. Consequently, the talent of Repin is yours to command. "

After a few reincarnation sessions, anyone could see that Alla sketched much better. She began, after ten afternoons as Repin, to want to draw on her own time and took to carrying a sketch pad. In three months, when Raikov brought her to the end of her twenty-five-lesson course, Alla drew like a professional - not like Repin or Raphael, two of her many reincarnations, but as well as a competent magazine illustrator.

Her new talent exploded so vibrantly in Alla that she seriously considered chucking her physics theorems and letting loose at the easel full-time.

"Alla could not learn how to do this in the usual state of deep hypnosis, which is passive," Raikov explains.

Raikov, one of the new breed of young Soviet mind explorers, is thoroughly experienced in passive trance where his word is will to the subject. Raikov has displayed his powers with the Popov group in most of their telepathic sleep-wake experiments, and he has delivered scientific papers on his work in eliciting psychic phenomena under hypnosis. He can easily put Alla into passive trance. He commanded her to "perform" in this state for one visitor.

At Raikov's hypnotic word, Alla, her eyes shut, moved around the room with the underwater motions of a sleepwalker. Raikov handed her an invisible glass of apple juice. She gulped down the 'Juice."

"Thank you," she said, "that makes me feel much better."…

[Under deep trance], Alla is her own person - even if the person happens to be Maestro Raphael. She is alert, extraordinarily wide awake. She sees her model, her pencil, her sketch pad. She consciously composes her own drawing, pours her own feeling into the lines. Not a Svengali-turned-painter, Raikov is offstage as far as Alla is concerned. He is an observer - simply the man who turns the switch.

"[Deep trance] brought the girl to a state in which she submits to new laws that have been very little researched. The elaboration of these unknown laws is the goal of my work," Raikov states. "It is important for itself. It opens before us the unexplored side of man's psyche."

…. Alla it appears, didn’t come down from her artistic high after she was cut off from Raikov.  Neither did his other subjects.