I have tried to make clear the subject of hysteria for the following reasons: There is at the present day no school of believers desirous of attributing supernatural causes to the disease, and therefore I am spared the task of attacking a mass of credulity; and, further, the mental processes are identical with those shown in other phenomena concerning which credulity is still powerful. I can now proceed to show how the theory of dissociation explains the production of the spuriously supernatural by the apparently honest. CHAPTER X EXPERIMENTS, DOMESTIC AND OTHER There are certain parlour tricks which have an attractive flavour of the occult and sometimes form an introduction to it. Most of us have seen children mystified by a thought-reading performance depending upon a more or less obvious code, but sometimes we are treated to one which is more genuine. The procedure is something like this: One person goes out of the room and the others decide that on his return he shall perform an action such as unlacing a shoe or pushing on the hands of a clock to a certain hour. Then he returns and, according to arrangement, may be blindfolded or not, and one of the party may or may not place a hand upon his shoulder; the audience next 'concentrate their minds' upon what the performer is to do, whilst he 'makes his mind a blank'. Sometimes success follows, and the result is taken as proof of 'thought-reading'. Now let us examine the process in the light of what we have assumed in previous chapters. To make the mind a blank, if it means anything, means to cut off the stream of consciousness, and we straightway have our old friend a dissociation. The performer is then in a state resembling hypnosis, and, as we have seen before, in hypnosis the senses may be abnormally sharpened. This sharpness, together with the receptivity of the subject, makes him ready to pick up the faintest signs, and in the case where the hand of a second person, also concentrating his mind on the desired action and therefore to a certain extent dissociated, is placed upon his shoulder, there are easily conveyed enough pressure-signs to indicate when he is going right or wrong. When there is no actual contact other indications than touch are not lacking. The passing expressions of pleasure or disappointment on the faces of the audience, the sigh of relief when a wrong step is retraced, the glances at the object to be handled, are all picked up by the dissociated stream whilst the main personality of the subject is for the time almost obliterated. We must bear in mind that all the audience are concentrating their minds, that concentration of mind upon an action is likely to be followed by movements corresponding to the action, and that no one is watching his neighbour or suspects any such unconscious indications.