From Swedenborg's own testimony it is clear that he was a medium, though far from an ordinary one, because he was an extraordinary man.
Of course he cannot be called an "automatist" just because he says that the words he writes are not his own; that they are inspired by the Lord, either directly or through various angels. That could be a manner of speaking. But he explicitly says of the ten pages which he has just written: "These words . . . were said to me verbally and almost enunciated, and this by infants who were then with me and who also spake by my mouth and moreover directed my very hand." 12 That is clear enough, yet there is much more supporting evidence.
In this form of automatic writing, he hears the words with his "inner ear," seeming to get either a few words or a sentence at a time from a dictation that appears to him to come from an external source (elsewhere he speaks of getting the text only "piecemeal"), but he passed into other, more advanced kinds of dissociation.
"Nay I have written entire pages, and the spirits did not dictate the words, but absolutely guided my hand, so that it was they who were doing the writing." 13
Here he apparently still knew what was being written as it came word for word on the paper, but, once in a while, not only "was the finger led to the writing by a superior force so that if it wished to write something else it could never do so," but it was done even without his knowing what he had written, "so that I did not know the series of things until after it had been written; but this was extremely rare, and was merely for the sake of information that revelations have been made in this way also." 14
This sounds as if he had been in that state of extreme dissociation from consciousness known as trance, but, as he says, it was very rare with him. Usually he seems to have remembered everything that took place, which trance mediums do not, any more than people who have been in deep hypnosis.
These notes of his have another characteristic of automatic scripts, their repetitiousness; and still another, which is the frequent reference to whether it be "permitted" 15 to reveal this or that. "I do not know if it be allowed to publish this," 16 and he also says he must "consult" before he can find out what something means.
