Science and Fairies

‘Supernatural’ Lapse of Time

It has already been made clear that in the dream or somnambulic state there are invariably modifications of time and space relations; and these give rise to what has been termed the ‘supernatural lapse of time’. Two conditions are possible: either a few minutes of waking-state time equal long periods in the non-waking state; or else, as is usually the case in the Fairy-Faith, the reverse is true.

The first condition, which we shall examine first, occasionally appears in the Fairy-Faith through such a statement as this :– ‘Sometimes one may thus go to Faerie for an hour or two’ (p. 39). Similarly, as physicians well know, patients under narcotics will experience events extending over long periods of time within a few minutes of normal time. De Quincey, the famous opium-eater, records dreams of ten to sixty years’ supernatural duration, and some quite beyond all limits of the waking experience. Fechner records a case of a woman who was nearly drowned and then resuscitated after two minutes of unconsciousness, and who in that time lived over again all her past life. 1 Another even more remarkable (p. 470) case than this last concerns Admiral Beaufort, who, having fallen into the water, was unconscious also for two minutes, and yet he says that not only during that short space of time did he travel over every incident of his life with the details of ‘every minute and collateral feature’, but that there crowded into his imagination ‘many trifling events which had long been forgotten’. 1

We shall now present examples to illustrate the second condition. Höhne was in an unbroken magnetic sleep from the first of January to the tenth of May, and when he came out of it he was overcome with surprise to see that spring had arrived, he having lain down — as he believed — only the day before. 2 Had Höhne been an Irishman, he might very reasonably have explained the situation by saying that he had been with the fairies for what seemed only a night. The Seeress of Prevorst, in a similar sleep, passed through a period of six years and five months, and then awoke as from a one-night sleep with no memory of what she did during that time; but some time afterwards memory of the period came to her so completely that she recalled all its details. 3 Old people, and some young people too, among the Celts, who go to Fairyland for varying periods of time, sometimes extending over weeks (as in a case I knew in West Ireland), have just such dreams or trance-states as this. Another example follows :– Chardel, in fleeing from the Revolution, took ship from Brittany and was obliged to induce somnambulism on his wife in order to overcome her horror of the sea. When the couple landed in America and Chardel awakened his wife, she had no recollection whatever of the Atlantic voyage, and believed herself still in Brittany. 4

Both Helmholtz and Fechner show 5 that the functions of the nervous system are associated with a definite time-measure, so it follows that consciousness in an organic body like man’s depends upon the nervous system; but, as these (p. 471) examples and similar ones in the Fairy-Faith show, certain conscious states exist independently of the human nerves, and they therefore set up a strong presumption that complete consciousness can exist independently of the physical nerve-apparatus. And in proceeding to submit this presumption of a supersensuous consciousness to the further test of science we shall at the same time be testing the statements made by wholly reliable seer-witnesses, like the Irish mystic and seer (p. 65), that not only can men and women enter Fairyland during trance-states for a brief period, but that at death they can enter it for an unlimited period. Further, what is for our study the most important of all statements will likewise be tested, namely, that in Fairyland there are conscious non-human entities like the Sidhe races.