ic writing as understood by a
tough-minded neurologist with no faith in the supernatural. It was
really a masterly performance in its way, for he avoided the jargon of
science and cut down to essentials.

"Conlon," he said, "you've often forgotten something, tried to recall
it, and finally given it up. We all have. And then some day, when you
least expected it and were thinking of something else, that forgotten
something has popped into your mind again--eh? All right. Where was it
in the meantime, when you couldn't put your finger on it? Since it
eventually came back, it must have been preserved somewhere. That's
plain enough, isn't it? But when you say something you've forgotten
'pops into your mind' again, you're wrong. It's never been out of your
mind. What too many of us still don't know is that a man's mind has two
parts to it. One part, much the smallest, is consciousness--the part
we're using now, the part we're always aware of. The other part is a big
dark storehouse, where pretty much everything we've forgotten is kept.
We're not aware of the storehouse or the things kept in it, so the
ordinary man doesn't know anything about it. You're not aware of your
spleen, and wouldn't know you had one if doctors hadn't cut up a lot of
people and found spleens in every one of them. You believe you've got a
spleen because we doctors tell you so. Well, I'm telling you now that
your mind has a big storehouse, where most of the things you've
forgotten are preserved. We mind-doctors call it your Unconscious Mind.
All clear so far?... Good.

"Now then--when a man's hypnotized, it means his conscious mind has been
put to sleep, practically, and his unconscious mind has, in a sense,
waked up. When a man's hypnotized we can fish all sorts of queer things
from his big storehouse, his unconscious mind; things he didn't know
were there, things he'd forgotten.... And it's the same with what we
call trances. A man in a trance is a man whose conscious mind is asleep
and whose unconscious mind is awake.

"That's exactly Miss Blake's condition now. The shock of what she saw
last evening threw her into a trance; she doesn't know what's going on
round her--but her unconscious mind has a record, a sort of
phonograph-record of more or less everything that's ever happened to
her, and if she speaks or writes in this trance state she'd simply play
one of these stored-up records for us; play it just like a phonograph,
automatically. Her will p