There is evidently something in the "mind" which fabricates these "real" sensations, or which inhibits them, and this something has been especially studied by G. N. M. Tyrrell.16 For the understanding of Swedenborg it is important to try to follow Mr. Tyrrell.
The latter's theories dovetail nicely with those of Mr. Carington. Mr. Tyrrell, however, deals with more advanced combinations of the psychon-systems that may exist within the individual mind. To the subsystem that is able to fabricate sense impressions so real that they are called hallucinations he gives the name of the "producer," and to the subsystem which provides the producer with an infinite richness of (often symbolic) data he gives the name of the stage-carpenter.
Mr. Tyrrell's point is that there are hallucinations and hallucinations. Those which interest the psychical researcher are the ones which can be proved to have contained correct information that could not have been obtained by any other means—the others he leaves to the psychiatrist, generally speaking.
These "veridical" hallucinations—or "spontaneous cases"—most often have to do with news of danger or of death. There is a great abundance of verified cases of this kind in which "apparitions" have brought such news to people who could not normally have known or inferred it. Such people sometimes have made a note of the event before it was verified. Mr. Tyrrell tells of such a case:
A lady opens her eyes, still half awake, yet she sees on the pillow a slip of paper on which she reads the words: "Elsie was dying last night." Rousing herself fully, she sees that there is no slip, it was an hallucination. But—"Elsie" had died last night, as she later found out.
In Mr. Tyrrell's opinion, this and many similar cases are also telepathic in nature, but cooperative. That is, the agent, "Elsie," consciously or subconsciously thinks of the lady whom she wants to know of her plight. Some link exists between them ("K" idea) which makes it possible for the news to come to the attention of the "producer" in the lady's mind (psychon-system), and the news comes in dramatized form during that half-awake morning period known to favor hallucinations, because the central government is not yet entirely in control.
The producer has rigged up the device of the slip on the pillow,
