=Out of the Corners of Our Eyes.= In the first place, we are much more observing than we imagine.  We may be so interested in our own thoughts that details of our environment are entirely lost on the conscious mind, but the subconscious has its eyes open, and its ears.  People in hypnosis have been known to repeat verbatim whole passages from newspapers which they had never consciously read.  While they were busy with one column, their wide-awake subconscious was devouring the next one, and remembering it.  Prince relates the story of a young woman who unconsciously “took in” the details of a friend’s appearance: 

I asked B.C.A. (without warning and after having covered her eyes) to describe the dress of a friend who was present and with whom she had been conversing perhaps some twenty minutes.  She was unable to do so beyond saying that he wore dark clothes.  I then found that I myself was unable to give a more detailed description of his dress, although we had lunched and been together about two hours.  B.C.A. was then asked to write a description automatically.  Her hand wrote as follows (she was unaware that her hand was writing): 

“He has on a dark greenish gray suit, a stripe in it—­little rough stripe; black bow cravat; shirt with three little stripes in it; black laced shoes; false teeth; one finger gone; three buttons on his coat.”

The written description was absolutely correct.  The stripes in the coat were almost invisible.  I had not noticed his teeth or the loss of a finger and we had to count the buttons to make sure of their number owing to their partial concealment by the folds of the unbuttoned coat.  The shoe-strings I am sure under the conditions would have escaped nearly every one’s notice.[22]

[Footnote 22:  Prince:  The Unconscious, p. 53.]

Automatic writing, the method used to uncover this subconscious perception, is a favorite method with some investigators and is often used by Morton Prince.  The hand writes without the direction of the personal consciousness and usually without the person’s being aware that it is writing.  A dissociated person does this very easily; other people can cultivate the ability, and perhaps most of us approach it when we are at the telephone, busily writing or drawing remarkable pictures while the rest of us is engaged in conversation.

The present epidemic of the Ouija board shows how many persons there are who are able to switch off the conscious mind and let the subconscious control the muscles that are used in writing.  The fact that the writer has no understanding of what he is doing and believes himself directed by some outside power, in no way interferes with the subconscious phenomenon.

=Everyday Doings.= Besides perceptions which were originally so far from the focus of attention that the conscious mind never caught them at all, there are the little experiences of everyday life, fleeting thoughts and impressions which occupy us for a minute and then disappear.  Every experience is a dynamic fact and no matter how trivial the experience may be or how completely forgotten, it still exists as a part of the personality.