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Rosalind Heywood – The Infinite Hive

I happened once at an appropriate moment to open a by-way to the subconscious by means of a ouija board, and I doubt whether the apparent precognition which resulted would have occurred otherwise. I will give the incident in some detail as it illustrates how many questions can be raised by one simple sentence.

A doctor asked me to show him my ouija board working, and we tried it with his finger and mine on the pointer. After it had spelt out some trite remarks I felt a sudden impulse to test what it would write if I could not see the letters. Would that concern the doctor only or me as well? To make my test I sat down on the floor with my head bent below table level, but my arms stretched up so that two fingers could still rest on the pointer. After a minute or two the doctor said that it had written that George had asked for Frank to be warned to drive with exaggerated care for the next two days. This, he said, meant nothing to him as he had no close links with a George.

What, then, was the origin of that remark, assuming that it was not due to the kind of chance that would eventually bring about the typing of Hamlet by a monkey?

George is a common enough name, but it happened to have been that of my husband's much-loved brother, who had been killed not long before. As far as one can guarantee anything, I can guarantee that the doctor, whom I had met only once, had never heard of the brother or of my husband's tendency to spirited driving.

But I cannot be sure that I had not casually referred to my husband by his name, Frank.

If I did originate the remark, some part of me must have shown considerable skill in pushing the pointer to the right letters, since my hand was above my head and the board was out of my sight. At the same time this circumstance might have helped to prevent my conscious mind from interfering.

Another possibility is that I telepathically transferred a precognition of my own to the doctor's subconscious mind, and it was then able to guide his hand to the letters. If so, why did the message come as from George? I had never had any sense of communication with him or spelt out anything purporting to come from him. In those days, too, I felt even more convinced that survival of death was unthinkable than I do now. Was the form of the message, then, a way of evading the censor? Or was my subconscious dramatizing to tease me, just because I was so sceptical of survival of death? (In me the level contacted via a ouija board has a wry sense of humour.) Or did it seriously think that I might respond more to a warning which appeared to come from a surviving George? Or - I cannot disprove this- did he survive, and had I inadvertently given him a chance to warn his brother?

As I wrote this, two other points occurred to me. The warning might have been due to my husband's own precognitive knowledge which could not emerge in him but could in me.

And to word it in that way, implying a knowledge of family affairs which the doctor lacked, might also have been a kind of answer from my subconscious - and I very much wanted one - to the question: Could I influence a ouija board which I could not see?

My courage did not quite run to dismissing the warning as nonsense but I feared that if I told my husband about it he might laugh and drive even faster. So, feeling a fool as so often before, I said to him,

 'Please, just to be kind to me, ask no questions, but for two days drive with exaggerated care.'

The following evening he came in looking really astonished,

'Do you know,' he said, 'if I had not driven with exaggerated care as you asked me to, I should have had no less than three major accidents today.'

I could not help being glad that I had had the courage to be a fool.