8 - Astral Projection And Human Doubles

On July 8, 1896, a perplexed William MacDonald sat in a New York City courtroom and heard himself formally accused of attempting to burglarize a house on Second Avenue. According to several witnesses, MacDonald had been discovered bumping about in a room, apparently trying to make off with valuable items. The witnesses had tried to grab him, but MacDonald had somehow managed to escape. All the witnesses testified, however, that they had had opportunity for a good look at him.

When the puzzled MacDonald had been arrested by the police and had been taken before the witnesses, they were unanimous in swearing that he was definitely the man they had seen in the house on Second Avenue.

Although MacDonald could offer little by way of alibi without the testimony of a certain corroborating witness, his defense attorney found that this key witness was most willing to appear on the accused man's behalf. This witness was Professor Wein, a noted New York hypnotist, who enjoyed a good reputation in the world of conventional scientific medicine.

"On the very hour in which Mr. MacDonald is accused of attempting to burgle the house on Second Avenue," Professor Wein told an astonished courtroom, "he was in reality on the stage of a Brooklyn vaudeville house, which is more than five miles away from the aforementioned house. What is more, Mr. MacDonald was under the close scrutiny of an audience of several hundred people. You see, he was assisting me in my performance, and I had placed him in a deep hypnotic trance."

The judge frowned, rapped his gavel for silence as excited murmurs arose from spectators in the courtroom. The prosecuting attorney seemed stunned by such a pronouncement.

With the permission of the court, the defense attorney called ten reputable Brooklyn residents before the judge's bench. Professor Wein explained that these men and women had served as a committee on the stage while he was performing. It had been their function to see that his claims for hypnosis were not implemented by any sort of trickery. Now, the members of the committee could serve quite another purpose: they could identify William MacDonald as the man Professor Wein had placed in a deep trance.

The prosecuting attorney sat very still for a few moments after the defense attorney had indicated that he might cross-examine the witness. He had walked into the courtroom with what had seemed like an open and shut case. Now, in a most incredible way, his task had been made much more difficult.

"Professor Wein," he asked the witness, "do you mean to tell the court that it was possible for Mr. MacDonald to be in two places at the same time?"

"The physical Mr. MacDonald never left the stage of the Brooklyn vaudeville house," the professor told the attorney. "It may have been a non-physical image of Mr. MacDonald that the residents at the house on Second Avenue saw."

"Do you mean," the prosecutor pressed on, "that it was possible for Mr. MacDonald's spirit to wander while his physical body was on the stage of the theater?"

"Yes," Professor Wein nodded. "This is quite possible."

Once again the judge had to sound his gavel for silence in the courtroom.

The prosecutor scratched his chin reflectively, continued his cross-examination. "What, Professor Wein, did you suggest that Mr. MacDonald do while under your hypnotic trance?"

"I only placed him in a deep sleep."

"Did you suggest that he go to New York?"

The professor was firm on this point. "No. I neither suggested that he should go to New York, nor did I speak of New York to him. In fact, I did not even think of New York while I had Mr. MacDonald in trance."

"As a part of your performance," the prosecutor asked, "did you command Mr. MacDonald to commit a crime or to act out the perpetration of a crime?"

"Most certainly not!"

The prosecutor paused in his questioning, as if he had expected the defense attorney to object to his line of questioning. No objection came. The defense was allowing Professor Wein's testimony to establish its case and had no fear that the prosecutor might be able to confuse him or trip him up.

"Is Mr. MacDonald a good subject?" he asked, breaking his silence.

"One of the best that I have ever encountered in the course of my experience."

"Does he follow all the commands which you give him?"

Professor Wein paused, thoughtfully considering his answer. "I am convinced that Mr. MacDonald, while in the hypnotic state, would carry out all my suggestions within certain limits. I must stress, however, that I would never suggest that any subject commit or dramatize the perpetration of any criminal act. I consider that my subjects are in cataleptic states and are deprived for a certain time of all sensations other than those which I impose upon them. Such an out-of-the-body experience as that which Mr. MacDonald underwent is not without precedent in the annals of hypnosis."

Although the prosecuting attorney did his best to undermine the professor's testimony by attempting to portray such an experience as fantastic and unbelievable the jury returned a verdict of "not guilty." For the first time, a New York jury placed credence in a case of "psi" phenomena and acquitted a man because he liter-ally had been in two places at one time.

The strange phenomenon of astral projection, or bilocation, is another aspect of "psi" which does peculiar things to the conventional concept of a three-dimensional world and the space-time continuum. Although man people regard the ability to project one's "astral self as something lifted directly from a science-fiction writer's imagination, the phenomenon - like all aspects of "psi" - has been noted for centuries.

On October 25, 1593, a strange soldier suddenly appeared among the sentries on guard in front of the palace in Mexico City. The bewildered man stared around him as if he were in a dream. The soldiers on guard duty could certainly commiserate with him, because they were just as baffled as he. One moment they had been chatting idly before the palace, the next, a strange soldier had appeared in their midst dressed in the uniform of a guard for the Governor's Palace in the capital of the Philippines!

"My name is Gil Perez," he told the men who challenged him. "This morning I was ordered to stand guard at the doors of the Governor's Palace in Manila. I know that this is not Manila, but this is a palace of some kind, so I am doing my duty as well as I can."

When astonished guards told Perez that he was in Mexico City, thousands of miles away from Manila, the man could not believe it. Neither could the Holy Office. All the man's identification indicated that he had indeed "left" Manila that morning and had accomplished a several-thousand-mile trip in a matter of moments. The clergy quickly had Perez jailed as an agent of the Devil and began at once to attempt to shake his testimony.

Two months later a galleon arrived from the Philippines. Fortunately for the hapless Perez, the galleon had among its passengers an official of the court in Manila, who recognized him as a palace guard and testified that he had seen the man shortly before he embarked for Mexico on official business.

Confronted with such testimony on the part of such an eminent witness, the Holy Office decided that Perez had been an innocent victim of the Devil and allowed him to return by ship to the Philippines.

In 1774, while in prison at Arezzo, Italy, Alfonso de Liguori awakened one morning and proclaimed that he had been at the bedside of the dying Pope Clement XIV. The prisoner was laughed at and mocked and his delusion was attributed to a fast that he had imposed upon himself. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed that those present at the Pope's bedside had actually seen Alfonso de Liguori standing among them.

Often such "out-of-the-body" experiences are encountered by individuals who have come close to death. Whether or not such experiences prove survival beyond the grave is a matter of individual interpretation. Such cases are striking and quite provocative and most have the similarity of mentioning a "silver cord" that connects the free floating "astral" self to the physical body. A case from Volume viii of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research offers an illustration worth examination.

A Dr. Wiltse of Skiddy, Kansas, felt himself to be dying and bade good-bye to his family and friends. Dr. S. M. Raynes, the attendant physician, said that Dr. Wiltse passed four hours without pulse or perceptible heart-beat. The doctor said he thought he perceived an occasional very slight gasp.

Dr. Wiltse, meanwhile, had regained a state of "conscious existence" and discovered that he no longer had anything in common with his body. In this new state of consciousness, he began to rock to and fro, trying to break connection with the body's tissues. He seemed to "feel and hear the snapping of innumerable small cords," and began to retreat from his feet toward his head "as a rubber cord shortens."

At last he "felt" himself in the head, emerging through the sutures of the skull. "I recollect distinctly," Wiltse said, "how I appeared to myself something like a jellyfish as regards color and form ... As I emerged from the head, I floated up and down and laterally like a soap bubble attached to the bowl of a pipe until I at last broke loose from the body and fell lightly to the floor, where I slowly rose and expanded into the full stature of a man. I seemed to be translucent, of a bluish cast and perfectly naked."

Wiltse decided that he should exit at once and headed directly for the door. When he got there, he found himself suddenly clothed. Two of his friends stood soberly before the door and were completely oblivious to his presence. To Wiltse's surprise, he found that he passed through them and out of the door.

"I never saw the street more distinctly than I saw it then," he recalled. It was also at this point that Wiltse noticed that he was attached "by means of a small cord, like a spider's web" to his body in the house. Then, as if magically propelled, Wiltse soared into the air and found himself surveying various locales and scenery.

At last he found himself on a road that had steep rocks blocking his journey. He tried to climb around them, but at that moment, "a black cloud descended on me and I opened my eyes to find myself back on my sick bed."

In an address before the Royal Society of Medicine on February 26, 1927, Sir Auckland Geddes told of an out-of-the-body experience that had occurred to him one midnight when he had suddenly begun to feel very ill.

By two o'clock, it was obvious that he was suffering from acute gastroenteritis. By morning his pulse and respiration were too faint for him to count. He wanted to ring for help, but found that he was unable to do so. He concluded that he was dying and "quite placidly gave up the attempt" to summon assistance.

He was then aware that his ego seemed to be separating from another consciousness that was also his. "Gradually," Sir Auckland said in his address, "I realized that I could see not only my body, and the bed it was in, but everything in the whole house and garden, and then I realized that I was seeing not only 'things' at home, but in London and in Scotland, in fact wherever my attention was directed ... I was free in a time-dimension of space, where 'now' was in some way equivalent to 'here' in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life."

Sir Auckland then told of seeing someone enter his bedroom, regard his appearance with shock, and summon a doctor with the words, "He is nearly gone!" The physician came and injected camphor into his veins.

"As the heart began to beat more strongly, I was drawn back, and I was intensely annoyed, because I was so interested and just beginning to understand where I was and what I was 'seeing.' I came back into the body really angry at being pulled back, and once I was back, all the clarity of vision of anything and everything disappeared and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness, which was suffused with pain."

The Reverend L.J. Bertrand, a Huguenot minister, while on a holiday in the Alps, found himself drifting into the "sleep of the snows" after he had sat down to await the arrival of his guide and a number of students, who had accompanied him on a mountain climbing expedition.

Reverend Bertrand felt his body gradually becoming immovable and realized with a start that he had sat still too long and was freezing to death. There was a violent burst of pain, which he interpreted as the act of death, then he suddenly found himself bobbing above his physical body like a balloon on a silver string.

He thought of his students, and his "mind" was suddenly with them, watching them make wrong turns, observing their amateurish climbing methods. Piqued, Bertrand watched the guide retreat behind a rock to eat the lunch he was supposed to have brought up the mountain for the Reverend.

His thoughts were then of his wife, who was to join him in Lucerne three days later. He was surprised to see her arriving ahead of schedule in a carriage with four others.

At about the time he was observing his wife checking into the hotel, the students and the guide came upon his frozen body. At once the guide began to rub his body with snow, and - experiencing the same sort of reluctance which Sir Auckland Geddes had felt - Reverend Bertrand came to himself.

No sooner had he regained consciousness than he began to berate his students for not following his instructions and for not taking the correct turns. Leaving them stunned and frightened, he turned his attention to the guide and belabored him for nibbling at his lunch. The superstitious guide was ready to flee instantly from the man "who sees everything." Bertrand's wife was more than a little disconcerted as well, when her husband later described the carriage in which she had arrived and the other four members of her traveling party. Reverend Bertrand declared that he had at last found personal proof for that which he had been preaching all of his life.

The Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Volume 34, carried the case of an armored-car officer, who, on August 23, 1944, received a direct hit from a German anti-tank gun. The car, which had been filled with explosives, blew up. The force of the explosion threw the officer about twenty-five feet away from the car and over a five-foot hedge.

According to the officer: "I was conscious of being two persons - one, lying on the ground in a field where I had fallen from the blast, my clothes on fire, waving my limbs about wildly, at the same time uttering moans and gibbering with fear. The other 'me' was floating up in the air, about twenty feet from the ground, from which position I could see not only my other self on the ground, but also the hedge, the road, and the car, which was surrounded by smoke and burning fiercely. I remember quite distinctly telling myself, 'It's no use gibbering like that - roll over and over to put the flames out.' This my ground body eventually did, rolling over into a ditch under the hedge where there was a slight amount of water. The flames went out, and at this stage I suddenly became one person again.

"Of course, the aerial viewpoint can be explained up to a point as a 'photograph' taken subconsciously as I was passing over the hedge as a result of the blast. This, however, does not explain the fact that I saw 'myself on the ground quite clearly and for what seemed a long time, though it could not have been more than a minute or so."

Although these cases deal with the inadvertent projection of an "astral" self, occurring during acute illness or danger, a great many people have exercised this peculiar function of the transcendent self to the extent that they can project their "phantoms" at will.

The famous early "psi" researcher, Edmund Gurney, told of the incredible experiments of a Mr. S.H. Beard in his Phantasms of the Living, published in 1886.

Beard began his experiments with "astral projection" in November of 1881 on a Sunday evening after he had been reading of "the great power which the human will is capable of exercising." Exerting the "whole force" of his being on the thought that he would be present "in spirit on the second floor of a house at 22, Hogarth Road, Kensington, England, Beard managed to project a "phantom" that was visible to his fiancee, Miss L.S. Verity.

Three days later, when Beard went to call upon Miss Verity, a very excited young woman told him that she and her eleven-year-old sister had nearly been frightened out of their wits by an apparition that had looked just like him. Beard felt quite pleased with the success of his experiment. Miss Verity's sister confirmed his "phantom's" appearance, in fact the whole matter of a spectral visitation had been brought up without any allusion to the subject on Beard's part.

Miss Verity later told Edmund Gurney that she "distinctly saw Mr. Beard in my room, about one o'clock. I was perfectly awake and was much terrified. I awoke my sister by screaming, and she saw the apparition herself. Neither my sister nor I have ever experienced hallucinations of any sort."

Although Beard did not disclose his intentions to Miss Verity, he was by no means finished with his experimentations. The second time he was seen by a married sister of Miss Verity's, whom he had met briefly only once before. Beard walked up to the bed on which the sister lay, took her long hair into his hand, and, a bit later, took her hand into his.

When investigator Gurney learned of Beard's second successful projection, he wrote him a note and urged him to let him know the next time that he planned to experiment. Beard complied, and, in a letter dated March 22, 1884, he told the "psi" researcher simply, "This is it."

Gurney next heard from Beard on April 3rd. A statement from Miss Verity was enclosed:

"On Saturday night, March 22nd ... at about midnight, I had a distinct impression that Mr. S.H.B. was present in my room, and I distinctly saw him whilst I was widely awake. He came towards me and stroked my hair ... The appearance in my room was most vivid and quite unmistakable."

Again, Miss Verity testified that she had voluntarily given Mr. Beard the information without any prompting on his part. Mr. Beard concluded his experiments after this episode for Miss Verity's nerves "had been much shaken, and she had been obliged to send for a doctor in the morning."

A paper entitled "On the Evidence for Clairvoyance" by Mrs. Henry Sidgwick, which appeared in Volume vii of the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, includes a vivid example of an out-of-the-body experience that was hypnotically produced.

A woman named Jane was put into hypnotic trance by a Dr. F., who was experimenting with "traveling clairvoyance." The doctor had arranged to have one of his patients, a Mr. Eglinton, sit in his apartment that night so that Jane might clairvoyantly come calling on him. Jane had never met Mr. Eglinton, who was thin and weak after a bout with a serious illness, nor had she ever been to the district in which he lived.

After she had been placed in trance, Jane was told to "travel" to Mr. Eglinton's apartment. She accurately described the approach to the house, the knocker on the door, and the furnishings in the room. But when she described the appearance of Mr. Eglinton, Dr. F. felt that the experiment had failed. According to Jane's description, Mr. Eglinton was fat and had an artificial leg. Dr. F. recalled Jane, puzzled that she should go so far astray on the appearance of the man when she had described everything else so exactly.

It was not until the next day that he discovered that Mr. Eglinton had grown weary with waiting up for the experiment and had fashioned a dummy of himself to maintain a vigil in the sitting room. He had stuffed his clothes with several pillows and had propped the mannikin up beside a glass of brandy and some newspapers. Hence, the "Mr. Eglinton" Jane had seen in the apartment had indeed been fat and possessed of artificial limbs.

The American novelist, Theodore Dreiser, often told of the night in which he had entertained the English writer, John Cowper Powys. The Englishman had had to leave rather early and both men expressed regret that their evening had been so short.

Seeing that Dreiser's concern was genuine, Powys told him: "I'll appear before you, right here, later this evening. You'll see me."

"Will you turn yourself into a ghost?" Dreiser asked, chuckling at the Englishman's peculiar sense of humor.

"I'm not certain yet," Powys told him. "I may return as a spirit or in some other astral form."

Several hours later, as Dreiser sat reading in his easy chair, he glanced up and was startled to see Powys standing before him, looking exactly as he had appeared earlier that evening. When the writer moved toward the apparition and spoke to it, the astral projection of Powys disappeared.

Sylvan J. Muldoon is one of those who claim that astral projection can be learned, developed, and mastered by the serious-minded. In his two books, The Projection of the Astral Body (1929) and The Case for Astral Projection (1936), Muldoon offers a detailed record of many experiments he has personally conducted, and provides a systematic method of inducing the conditions necessary for astral projection. According to Muldoon it is possible to leave the body at will and retain full consciousness in the "astral self."

Muldoon is also cognizant of the "silver cord," mentioned earlier as connecting the phantom body and the physical body. This cord, says Muldoon, is extremely elastic and permits a journey of considerable distance. Muldoon claims to have been able to move objects while in his astral self and to have gained information that he could not have acquired via any of the normal sensory channels.

Muldoon is generous in providing the reader with copious descriptions of the mechanism of astral projection in order that the truly interested student can follow the procedures and attempt his own experimentation. The fundamental law of projection, according to Muldoon, is expressed in these words: "When the subconscious will becomes possessed of the idea to move the body, and the physical body is incapacitated, the subconscious will moves the astral body out of the physical."

Frederic W.H. Myers has written that cases of astral projection present perhaps not the most useful, "but the most extraordinary achievement of the human will. What can lie further outside any known capacity than the power to cause a semblance of oneself to appear at a distance? What can be more a central action - more manifestly the outcome of whatsoever is deepest and most unitary in man's whole being? Of all vital phenomena, I say, this is the most significant; this self-projection is the one definite act which it seems as though a man might perform equally well before and after bodily death."

Another phenomenon, which must be closely related to the projection of the astral self, is that of the appearance of one's own double.

The Archbishop Frederic wrote to Sir Oliver Lodge in 1929 to tell him of a most peculiar incident which had occurred on the evening of January 14th. He had returned to his home feeling very tired, sat down in a favorite easy chair, and immediately fell asleep.

"I was sharply aroused," he wrote in the letter, "in about a quarter of an hour (as I perceived by the clock). As I awoke I saw an apparition, luminous, vaporous, wonderfully real of myself, looking interestedly and delightedly at myself. Some books lying on a table back of my ghost I could see and identify.

"After I and myself had looked at each other for the space of about five seconds, my ghostly self vanished for a few seconds, only to return in a more definitely clear way ..."

Goethe, the great German poet, had the astonishing experience of meeting himself as he rode away from Frederika at Strassburg. The phantom wore a dress - pike grey with gold lace - which Goethe had never seen before. Eight years later, as Goethe was on the same road going to visit Frederika, it occurred to him that he was dressed in precisely the same dress that his phantom had been wearing on that earlier occasion.

Such weird phenomena are termed autoscopic hallucinations. They serve no dual purpose, such as providing a warning or disclosing valuable information, but only seem to present a projection of one's own body image, One sees oneself, as it were, without a mirror.

In the April, 1966, issue of Fate, Dr. Edward Podolsky has compiled a number of cases of people who have re-ported seeing their own ghosts, in an article entitled "Have You Seen Your Double?"

Dr. Podolsky records the experience of a Mr. Harold C. of Chicago, Illinois, who, in March, 1958, returned home after a hard day at the office with a splitting migraine. As he sat down to dinner, he saw, sitting opposite him, an exact replica of himself. This astonishing double repeated every movement he made during the entire course of the meal. Since that tune, Mr. C. has seen his double on a number of occasions - each time after an attack of migraine.

Samuel V. of Kansas City, Missouri, was startled to see an exact double of himself duplicating his every movement as he went about gardening chores. The double was visible for about two hours.

Most frightening is the case of Mrs. Jeanie P. As she was applying makeup, she saw an exact duplicate of herself also touching up her features. Mrs. P. reached out to touch the double, and the image reached out to touch her. Mrs. P. actually felt her face being touched by her mysterious double.

According to Dr. Podolsky, there are two main theories about the cause of autoscopy. One theory regards the phenomenon as being due to "the result of some irritating process in the brain, particularly of the parieto-temporal-occipital area (the visual area)." The other, a psychological theory, sees in autoscopy "the projection of memory pictures. Certain pictures are stored in the memory and when conditions of stress or other unusual psychological situations arise these memories may be projected outside the body as very real images."

Neither theory explains the "Vardogr" of the Norwegians. Wiers Jensen, editor of the Norwegian Journal of Psychical Research, wrote a series of articles on the Vardogr as early as 1917. The possessor of a Vardogr unconsciously employs it as a type of spiritual forerunner to announce his physical arrival.

"The Vardogr reports are all alike," wrote Wiers Jen-sen. "With little variation, the same type of happening occurs: The possessor of a Vardogr announces his arrival. His steps are heard on the staircase. He is heard to unlock the outside door, kick off his overshoes, put his walking stick in place, etc. The listening 'percipients' - if they are not so accustomed to the prelude of the Vardogr that they remain sitting quietly - open the door and find the entry empty. The Vardogr has, as usual, played a trick on them. Eight or ten minutes later, the whole performance is repeated - but now the reality and the man arrive."

Being of Norwegian and Danish descent (it seems that only the Norwegians and the Scotch experience this particular type of "psi" phenomenon), I can relate my personal experiences with the Vardogr.

One Saturday night when I was about sixteen, I managed to arrive home before my parents. I went upstairs to my room and lay down on the bed to thumb through a new magazine I had purchased that evening. I had not lain there long when I heard the front door open and the sounds of my parents moving about downstairs. The sounds had been quite clear. First the opening of the front screen door, then the individual squeaking of the inside door. The sound of footsteps mounting the three steps to the inner hallway had been very audible, as had been the subsequent sounds of footsteps moving about the various rooms.

"Goodnight!" I shouted down the stairs after a few moments.

There was no answer. I flipped through a few more pages of the magazine, thinking that my parents had not heard me as they prepared for bed.

"Goodnight down there!" I shouted after a few moments, a bit louder this time.

Again no answer. And by now it had become very silent downstairs. Too silent if those footsteps had really belonged to my parents. My mind was instantly flooded with a variety of startling images. Burglars, thinking the home deserted and not seeing my light, had decided to enter the house. My shouts had alerted them to the presence of a lone occupant. What would their next move be? Icy ringers traced a slow, deliberate path up the length of my spine.

At the moment I was about to reach for my .22 rifle to do battle, I once again heard the familiar sounds of my parents arriving home. The noises were precisely as they had been before, only this time when I shouted down my "goodnight," the voices of my parents quickly responded.

The second time I heard the Vardogr of my parents was no less eerie, and neither were any of its subsequent arrivals. Each time it tricked me as thoroughly as it had done before. My sister fell victim to its spooky pranks fully as often as I. One night my parents arrived home to find her in a state of near panic. She had been sitting in a chair with her back to the door. She had heard the door open and close and the sound of footsteps enter the house and approach to the spot directly behind her chair. As she was engrossed in the book she was reading, she had not bothered to turn around at the sound of the opening door. After a few moments had passed, she began to wonder why her mother and father preferred to stand behind her chair in complete silence. Imagine her surprise and horror when she turned around and saw that no one was there.

Weirs Jensen, in one of his articles, notes the fact that, as a rule, the Vardogr announces itself only by imitating the sounds made by inanimate objects, such as "the sound of the key in the lock, the placing of overshoes and stick in their proper spots, the stamping of shoes on the floor. The jingle of horsebells and the cracking of whips may also be heard."

At times, though, the Vardogr may materialize into such an independent apparition that it may be mistaken for the real man.

In the summer of 1955, Mr. Erkson Gorique decided to visit Norway to investigate the possibilities of importing Norwegian china and glassware. A successful businessman in his fifties, Mr. Gorique had traveled widely but had never been to Norway. Each summer for several years he had declared his intention of making the trip to the land of fjords and icy streams, but something had always interfered with his plans and the trip had never been accomplished.

In July he landed in Oslo, inquired where he might find the best hotel, and took a taxi directly to the recommended lodgings. He knew absolutely no one in Norway and was prepared to go about his business in no great haste.

When Mr. Gorique registered at the desk, the clerk greeted him with a pleasant smile. "How nice to see you again, Mr. Gorique. It is so good to have you back."

Gorique stared at the man, managed a thin smile. "But I have never been here before. You must mistake me for someone else."

The clerk frowned, shook his head resolutely. "Surely you remember, sir. It has only been a few months since you dropped by one morning to make a reservation and told me that you would be along about this time in the summer."

Gorique could do nothing but blink incredulously.

Uneasy under the importer's peculiar stare, the clerk stammered. "Well, sir, that is, well, your name is a bit unusual. That's why I was able to remember it."

"This just cannot be!" Gorique said firmly. "I have never been to Oslo nor to Norway in my entire life!"

Mr. Gorique's voice had carried across the lobby and the manager had appeared in the background, narrow-eyed and nervous. The clerk caught a glimpse of the manager out of the corner of his eye and offered a wide smile to the American importer. "I must be mistaken, sir. Please forgive me."

Gorique walked away from the desk with the distinct impression that although the clerk had confessed his error, he thought the American either mad or attempting to travel incognito.

Matters did not improve for Mr. Gorique when he visited the wholesale dealer whom he had planned to see about arranging for the importation of glassware. Mr. Olsen, a white-haired, friendly man, rose from behind his desk and offered the importer his hand in a hearty handclasp. Before Gorique could speak, Olsen exclaimed: "How wonderful that you did get back, Mr. Gorique. You were in such a hurry the last time that we were not able to conclude the final details of our business."

Completely stunned, all the argument sapped from his body, Gorique slumped into a chair in Olsen's office. "Tell me," he said weakly. "When was I here?"

"Why," Olsen answered, looking puzzled, "just a few months back."

With a sigh of resignation, Gorique appealed to the Norwegian glassware dealer. He protested that he had never been to Norway before in his life and that he could prove it; yet everywhere he went, the hotel clerks, the waiters, and now Mr. Olsen, recognized him and spoke of former visits.

Olsen listened to the bewildered man's story without interruption, then told him about the Vardogr.

"I can offer no explanation for the Vardogr," Olsen told the baffled Mr. Gorique, "but it is really not such a rare thing as psychic phenomena go. You really shouldn't let such an experience disturb you unduly."

Perhaps this attitude is not a bad one to hold as one continues to explore deeper into the world of ESP.