[Footnote 20:  Hudson:  The Law of Psychic Phenomena, p. 44.  Quoted from Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Vol.  I, p. 117 (edit. 1847).]

A young girl of nineteen, a patient of mine, lapsed for several weeks into a dissociated state in which she forgot all the memories and ideas of her adult life, and returned to the period of her childhood.  She used to say that she saw things inside her head and would accurately describe events that took place before she was two years of age,—­scenes which she had completely forgotten in her normal life.  One day when I asked her to tell me what she was seeing, she began to talk about “little sister” (herself) and “little brother.”  “Little sister and brother were the two little folks that lived with their mother and their daddy and they were playing on the sand-pile.  You know there was only one sand-pile, not like all the ones they have down here (at the seaside), and they had a bucket that they would put sand in and they would dump it out again and they would make nice things, you know; they would play with their little dog Ponto and he was white with black and brown spots on him.  Little brother had white hair and he was bigger than little sister and he had a little waist with ruffles down the front and around the collar and a black coat that came down to his knees and it had two little white bands around it.  Some of the waists he wore had blue specks and some had red and black specks in it.

“Little sister had yellow curls and she had a blue coat with jiggly streaks of white in it, and she had a little white bonnet that was crocheted, and she had little blue mittens on that were tied to a string that went around her neck and down the other arm.  It got pretty cold where they lived.  Little sister and little brother would go out to the pile of leaves and jump on them and bounce and they would crackle.  The leaves came down from the trees all of a sudden when they got tired, and they were different colors, brown and red.  Little sister could walk then but she could not walk one other time before then; she could stand up by holding to a chair, but she could not go herself.  One morning Big Tom said ‘Run to Daddy’ and she went to her daddy, and after that she always walked; they were glad and she was glad.  She walked all day long.  Big Tom was a man who used to help Daddy and little sister always liked him.  He was a nice man.”

The mother verified this scene of the first walking, saying that it had occurred on her own wedding-anniversary when the child was twenty-three months old.

One night I heard the same patient talk in her sleep in the slow and hesitating manner of a child reading phonetically from a printed page.  I soon recognized the words as those of a poem of Tagore’s, called “My Prayer,” and remembered that a magazine containing the poem had been lying on the bed during the day.  When she had finished I wakened her, saying, “Now tell me what you have been dreaming.”