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Hector DURVILLE Psychic Actions at a distance - Four personal observations (Written around 1915)

In the two previous observations, I was the experimenter; in this case I was the subject, that is, the telepsychic action was exerted on me by another person. This is an extraordinarily remarkable fact, making it perfectly clear that the agent, the force that sustains material life in us, does not belong exclusively to the individual who possesses it, but that, in certain circumstances, it can pass, even at a distance, from one individual to another, which seems to justify the fantastic stories relating to vampires.

After Mrs. Durieu, the subject of the previous observation, has returned to Paris, I resumed her treatment, which lasted 2 days, with all the energy I was able to use, because she was very ill.

Coming to my house on the morning of the 30th, she would spend all day there and I would not leave her. In sleepwalking, she announced that the healing was very close and that she would end in a frightening crisis in which her life would be very seriously threatened; but she could not see when and how it would happen.

More or less violent attacks, followed by sweating, fever, diarrhea and a wide range of ailments, already showed that nature was making great efforts to get rid of the disease. These seizures became more and more numerous and violent, and the patient seemed to gradually weaken. In the evening at 9 a.m., her husband sent for a car and took her back to their apartment. As soon as she arrived, she had heart problems and serious arrythmia.

Aware of the danger that seemed to threaten her, she wanted to react; but for that, she lacked the strength. She then had the idea of thinking of me, as if to call for my help. A moment of tranquility came to her. Encouraged by this first result, she figured she was close to me, took long breaths with a strong desire to magnetize herself to me, to take the strength she was missing. The effect was immediate.

 "A strong current," she told me the next day, "happened to me; and after a few moments, I felt that I no longer had anything to fear. Encouraged by this second result, she continued several times her long inspirations as energetically as she could, and the night ended.

The next morning, feeling herself as a mixture of natural weakness and insufficiently assimilated strength, the patient was in a state of extraordinary nervousness. Affected by mistrust and fear, as if she had really been aware of an inevitable disaster, she had diarrhea and quickly went from hot sweat to cold sweat. Her face and her whole attitude expressed a deep depression and after a few moments, revolting against this abatement, she entered into a deep anger. Such was the state, she was in, when she arrived at about one o'clock in the afternoon, for the last session.

Not reporting on this surprising healing, I ignore the terrifying phenomena that occurred in the presence of her husband, for more than an hour, over 3 and half hours that this inescapable session lasted.

If, on that night of the struggle for healing against the disease, the patient really absorbed my energy, I had to be affected. This is indeed what happened. At one point, certainly at the very moment when she received "this current of force", under the action of the kinds of aspirations she exerted on me, I was suddenly awakened under the clear and precise impression that I was weakening extraordinarily quickly, under an influence that I did not understand.

I tried to react by shaking myself on my bed, as if to get rid of a painful embrace; and after very great efforts to remain in control of myself, it seemed to me that a flow of energy that was escaping from me was becoming less intense. After a few minutes, it stopped almost completely, to resume, but with a little less intensity. I got out of bed.

A cold sweat was running down my forehead, and, hallucinating, I had to go back to bed. There, after a few moments, I was perfectly aware that it was my patient who was voluntarily absorbing my energy. It seemed to me that she was a few metres away from me, when, in reality, she was at least 2 1/2 kilometres away as the crow flies, that she was making great efforts to do so, and that she was reaping the benefits directly.

Finally, I remember very well in writing this report, after 34 years passed, that at that moment I compared its action on me to that of a suction pump on a vase filled with liquid.

To study this strange phenomenon that I have observed several times, but to a much lesser degree, and also not to completely deprive my patient of the strength that was certainly essential to her recovery, I surrendered to a large extent, while trying to understand how this communication could occur.... I experienced this energy withdrawal twice, but to a lesser degree than the first time.

As for understanding the mechanism of this action, I will admit in all humility that if it was not an aspiration of something of myself made in a moment of biological distress by a will exalted by the fear of death, I understood absolutely nothing.

When I arrived the next day for the last session, of which I have just given an idea, I asked the patient what and who she had been thinking about last night. She answered me with the greatest frankness:

"My God, I could only think of you and my healing!" –

And, what were you thinking of me for? Her answer, in two words, says more than can be said in a long speech: "I was pumping!"