ruth in things erroneous in the child's
definition of memory as the thing one forgets with. To be able to forget
means sanity. Incessantly to remember, means obsession, lunacy. So the
problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for
possession of me, was the problem of forgetting. When I gamed with
flies, or played chess with myself, or talked with my knuckles, I
partially forgot. What I desired was entirely to forget.

There were the boyhood memories of other times and places--the "trailing
clouds of glory" of Wordsworth. If a boy had had these memories, were
they irretrievably lost when he had grown to manhood? Could this
particular content of his boy brain be utterly eliminated? Or were these
memories of other times and places still residual, asleep, immured in
solitary in brain cells similarly to the way I was immured in a cell in
San Quentin?

Solitary life-prisoners have been known to resurrect and look upon the
sun again. Then why could not these other-world memories of the boy
resurrect?

But how? In my judgment, by attainment of complete forgetfulness of
present and of manhood past.

And again, how? Hypnotism should do it. If by hypnotism the conscious
mind were put to sleep, and the subconscious mind awakened, then was the
thing accomplished, then would all the dungeon doors of the brain be
thrown wide, then would the prisoners emerge into the sunshine.

So I reasoned--with what result you shall learn. But first I must tell
how, as a boy, I had had these other-world memories. I had glowed in the
clouds of glory I trailed from lives aforetime. Like any boy, I had been
haunted by the other beings I had been at other times. This had been
during my process of becoming, ere the flux of all that I had ever been
had hardened in the mould of the one personality that was to be known by
men for a few years as Darrell Standing.

Let me narrate just one incident. It was up in Minnesota on the old
farm. I was nearly six years old. A missionary to China, returned to
the United States and sent out by the Board of Missions to raise funds
from the farmers, spent the night in our house. It was in the kitchen
just after supper, as my mother was helping me undress for bed, and the
missionary was showing photographs of the Holy Land.

And what I am about to tell you I should long since have forgotten had I
not heard my father recite it to wondering listeners so many times during
my ch