During eight sessions conducted between June 1977 and January 1978, Dilmen gave a great deal of information about Antonia’s life. But the one that interested her the most, and the one to which she kept returning, was that of a sixteenth-century Spanish woman named Antonia. During Dilmen’s first round of hypnotic sessions, she related former lives from a variety of historical periods and geographic locations. She joined some amateur hypnosis groups, which Tarazi also had joined, and eventually they and some other members began exploring past-life regressions. In the mid-1970s Dilmen investigated hypnosis for controlling weight and headaches. Dilmen embarked on her teaching career after a few years in show business, and at the time of Tarazi’s report she was married with two children. Her ancestry is German and her religious background is Lutheran, although at the age of twenty she became a Methodist. After attending public schools, she graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in education. 6 Dilmen was born and raised in the Chicago area during the Depression, and she lived in that general vicinity all her life. The subject’s name is Laurel Dilmen, and her reported former life was investigated by psychotherapist Linda Tarazi. The ‘Antonia’ case is exceptionally rich in intriguing detail, and cannot be assessed without considering those details carefully. Some sort of psi hypothesis seems mandatory, even if it is posited in addition to an appeal to latent creativity – or in other words, some combination of latent creativity and either survival-psi or living-agent psi. As the following remarkable case of ostensible reincarnation illustrates, hypnosis may lead to behavior and displays of propositional knowledge that apparently cannot be explained away in terms of latent capacities.
Nevertheless, we should also not be blindly sceptical about hypnotic regressions. 4 A substantial body of evidence indicates that ostensibly regressed subjects do not, in fact, regress, but instead draw on presumably latent creative capacities in order to simulate regression. 3 In fact, it has been known at least since the time of Mesmer that hypnosis in particular and dissociation generally are psi-conducive states.
2 For example, under the influence of stage hypnotists, good hypnotic subjects do things they have never done before, such as dance the tango, accurately imitate their boss or farm animals, behave in an overtly seductive manner, and more generally display dramatic and creative abilities they might otherwise be too inhibited to express. Moreover, as a large body of research has documented in detail, it is clear that hypnosis often liberates a person’s latent creativity and imagination. Hypnotized subjects may creatively embellish material which they have forgotten and which hypnosis helps recover, and it may take considerable research to demonstrate that nothing paranormal was going on. Many ‘past life’ accounts elicited in this way have been traced to published fiction. It is well-known that hypnosis provides no guaranteed or reliable access to the truth. General Concerns about Hypnotic Regression General Concerns about Hypnotic Regression.
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