Premonition

A supernormal indication of any kind of event still in the future.

Preversion

A tendency to characteristics assumed to lie at a further point of the evolutionary progress of a species than has yet been reached; opposed to reversion.

Proleptic

Anticipatory; assuming a knowledge of a fact not yet communicated. A dream is called proleptic when it assumes some fact which is only made known to the dreamer later in the dream. For instance, a person in one's dream may ask one a riddle, and not tell one the answer for some time; yet a knowledge of that answer must have existed in one's mind all the time, since one did in fact ask the riddle oneself.

Promnesia

The paradoxical sensation of recollecting a scene which is only now occurring for the first time; the sense of the déjà vu. The term paramnesia, which is sometimes given to this sensation, should, I think, cover all forms of erroneous memory, and cannot without confusion be used to express specifically this one anomalous sensation.

Pseudo-Hallucination

See Hallucination.

Psychorrhagy

A special idiosyncrasy which tends to make the phantasm of a person easily perceptible; the breaking loose of a psychical element, definable mainly by its power of producing a phantasm, perceptible by one or more persons, in some portion of space. Cf. Phantasmogenetic centre.

Psychorrhagic Diathesis

A habit or capacity of detaching some psychical element, involuntarily and without purpose, in such a manner as to produce a phantasm.

Psycho-Therapeutics

"Treatment of disease by the influence of the mind on the body" (Tuke's Diet.). All suggestion of course comes under this head.

Quasi-Percept

The more or less objectified phantasm, which the percipient does, in a certain sense, perceive.

Reciprocal

Used of cases where there is both agency and percipience at each end of the telepathic chain, so that (in a complete or developed case) A perceives P, and P perceives A also.

Retrocognition

Knowledge of the Past, supernormally acquired.

Secondary Personality

It sometimes happens, as the result of shock, disease, or unknown causes, that a man or a woman experiences an alteration of memory and character, amounting to a change of personality, which generally seems to have come on during sleep. The new personality is in that case termed secondary. It generally disappears after a time, or alternates with the original, or primary, personality.

Secondary Sensations

(Secundärempfndungen audition colorée, sound-seeing, synoesthesia;, &c)With some persons every sensation of one type is accompanied by a sensation of another type; as, for instance, a special sound may be accompanied by a special sensation of colour or light (chromatisms or photisms). This phenomenon is analogous to that of number-forms, a kind of diagrammatic mental pictures which accompany the conception of a progression of numbers. See Galton's Inquiries into Human Faculty.

Shell-Hearing

The induction of hallucinatory voices, etc, by listening to a shell. Analogous to crystal-gazing.

Spectrum Of Consciousness

A comparison of man's range of consciousness or faculty to the solor spectrum, as seen by us after passing through a prism or as examined in a spectroscope.

Spiritualism Or Spiritism

A religion, philosophy, or mode of thinking, based on the belief that the spirits of the dead communicate with living men. Since the words spiritualisme and spiritualiste have long been used in France for a school of philosophy opposed to materialism, there is some advantage in choosing the word Spiritism for the belief in spirit intercourse.

Stigmatisation

The production of blisters or other cutaneous changes on the hands, feet, or elsewhere, by self-suggestion or meditation. These marks were said to have been produced on St. Francis of Assisi, on Louise Lateau, etc, by meditation on the sufferings of Christ. Similar marks are producible by suggestion in some hypnotic subjects, and even vesication (the formation of blisters) seems to have been thus induced.

Subliminal

Of thoughts, feelings, etc, lying beneath the ordinary threshold (limen) of consciousness, as opposed to supraliminal, lying above the threshold. Excitations are termed subliminal when they are too weak to rise into direct notice; and I have extended the application of the term to feeling, thought, or faculty, which is kept thus submerged, not by its own weakness, but by the constitution of man's personality. The threshold (Schwelle) must be regarded as a level above which waves may rise, - like a slab washed by the sea, - rather than as an entrance into a chamber.

Suggestion

The process of effectively impressing upon the subliminal intelligence the wishes of the man's own supraliminal self or of some other person. The mechanism of this process is obscure, nor is it known why some persons are much more suggestible than others. Self-suggestion (sometimes called auto-suggestion by a barbarism easily avoidable in English) means a suggestion conveyed by the subject himself from one stratum of his personality to another, without external intervention.

Supernormal

Of a faculty or phenomenon which goes beyond the level of ordinary experience, in the direction of evolution, or as pertaining to a transcendental world. The word supernatural is open to grave objections; it assumes that there is something outside nature, and it has become associated with arbitrary interference with law. Now there is no reason to suppose that the psychical phenomena with which we deal are less a part of nature, or less subject to fixed and definite law, than any other phenomena. Some of them appear to indicate a higher evolutionary level than the mass of men have yet attained, and some of them appear to be governed by laws of such a kind that they may hold good in a transcendental world as fully as in the world of sense. In either case they are above the norm of man rather than outside his nature.

Supraliminal

See Subliminal.

Synesthesia

See Secondary Sensations.

Synergy

A number of actions correlated together, or combined into a group.

Telekinesis

Used of alleged supernormal movements of objects, not due to any known force.

Telepathy And Telcesthesia

It has become possible, I think, to discriminate between these two words somewhat more sharply than when I first suggested them in 1882. Telepathy may still be defined as "the communication of impressions of any kind from one mind to another, independently of the recognised channels of sense." The distance between agent and percipient which the derivation of the word - "feeling at a distance" - implies, need, in fact, only be such as to prevent the operation of whatever known modes of perception are not excluded by the other conditions of the case. Telepathy may thus exist between two men in the same room as truly as between one man in England and another in Australia, or between one man still living on earth and another man long since departed. Telcesthesia - perception at a distance - may conveniently be interpreted in a similar way, as implying any direct sensation or perception of objects or conditions independently of the recognised channels of sense, and also under such circumstances that no known mind external to the percipient's can be suggested as the source of the knowledge thus gained.

Telergy

The force exercised by the mind of an agent in impressing a percipient, - involving a direct influence of the extraneous spirit on the brain or organism of the percipient.

Veridical

See Hallucination.