DREAM A LITTLE DREAM OF ME
The Search for Bridey Murphy – Morey Bernstein
My grandma, Joan, died in mid-2017 aged 90-something. (Unclear: she lied about her age so much and I don’t like to fact-check her on it as she always kind of liked the surprise of being older or younger than she was expecting.)
She was a vivacious, sparkling woman: always armed with a story or joke; popular with family, friends and in the community; into sherry, amateur dramatics and competitive church-flower-arranging. She taught me how to bake, told me tales of fairies at the bottom of her garden, and, later, introduced me to the curative powers of a ‘hair of the dog’.
When I was aged around eight, nine or 10, she liked to regale me and my younger brother with an episodic story that she said was a dream. She’d sit in her armchair, post-John-Wayne-movie, while we sat cross-legged on the floor, listening, enthralled, telling us of this ‘dream’. My memory is, of course, hazy and imperfect, but it was her ‘dream’ of a grand old house of which she was the mistress. It was more about scene-setting – of the layout, décor, furniture, and accessories; of the day-to-day practicalities and details – than a particularly gripping story.
We visited my grandma every fortnight or so, and I used to look forward to the next instalment of her dream: entering into her world was vivid yet relaxing. While it’s possible grandma was updating us on an ongoing lucid dream, I suspect that this was more likely a daydream that she chose to articulate to us. Her mother had been a cook employed at aristocratic houses, with grandma full of anecdotes of her mother serving royalty and receiving second-hand finery. Grandma had been sent into domestic servitude at a young age, too, and benefited from a friendly mistress of the house before marriage beckoned. Ultimately, I think it’s fair to say that my grandma had aspirations and tastes beyond her class and means, and that this ‘dream’ house – and life – was reflective of a lot of unfulfilled fantasies.
Indeed, my last conversation with my grandma was a poignant end-of-life one in which, in a lucid moment, she, unprompted, said: “A woman begins her life with such dreams, and that’s all she ends with: dreams.”
Reading Morey Berstein’s classic of hypnotic past-life regression, The Search for Bridey Murphy, serialised in 1954 and published as a book in 1956, brought my grandma and her ‘dream’ to mind.
Berstein is a young and charismatic businessman working for his family business when he develops a penchant for hypnotism, and commences his amateur investigations. The book – which was an absolute sensation upon publication – charts this journey, from how he came to know ‘Ruth Simmons’ aka Virginia Tighe aka Bridey Murphy as the perfect somnambulistic subject during his early hypno-dabblings, to his abandonment of atheism for parapsychology.
I want to focus on ‘Ruth’, the pseudonym for the young Colorado housewife Berstein met by chance at a dance at the start of his hypno-journey. She was the life and soul of the social gathering – much in demand as a dance partner – and was part of a gang of friends who begged Berstein for a hypnotic demonstration. He refused anything other than a relaxing ‘trance’ induction, with Ruth almost instantly disappearing into a deep trance. She remained in the back of his mind as a somnambulist adept as he fell down the rabbit hole on hypnotic thought transference, J B Rhine, and Edgar Cayce.
Berstein writes insightfully of his childhood indoctrination into religion – believing the teachings of the bible to simply be morality fables. But he applies none of this critical thinking to his slide from atheism into parapsychology. When he is won over by the concept of reincarnation, Ruth springs to mind as the ideal subject with whom to explore hypnotic past-life regression.
Ruth duly conjures up ‘Bridey Murphy’, an Irish woman living in the 1800s in Cork, Ireland. Prompted by Berstein, Bridey shares anecdotes and banalities from her childhood and adulthood through to her death and beyond. The heart of the book is transcriptions of the recordings with Ruth, where Berstein fixates upon provable biographic dates and facts, and keeps testing Ruth on things she’s previously stated – what’s her older brother’s name, that her younger brother is deceased, her father’s profession, etc.
What shines through the subtext is that Ruth is irked by this line of questioning, and that the ‘witnesses’ – her husband ‘Rex’ and what sounds like a bunch of their mates rather than ‘objective’ parapsychology observers – are irked, too. When Berstein curtails a tidbit about Bridey’s father in favour of pressing her about ‘the waiting room’ where souls exist between bodily lives, even he admits that witnesses would rather hear Bridey’s humdrum story than focus on his ethereal investigation.
Berstein’s leading questions prompt Ruth to come up with another past life – she was born in America between Bridey and her present life, but died in infancy. She is vague about this, plus her husband, Rex, believes she exhibits pain at experiencing this recollection, and so bans Berstein from exploring further.
Indeed, Rex controls all the sessions – Berstein is careful to explain that the couple have a hectic social life and are in no way interested in hypnosis. Rex motions, mid-way through Berstein’s investigations, to cease the sessions: “I just want to sell insurance and be a regular guy; I don’t want to be dubbed a crackpot or a screwball.” What brought my grandma to mind is that, perhaps, Ruth, deep down, wanted a life less ordinary – and that ‘Bridey Murphy’, and all the attention Ruth garnered during this investigation – provided that without threatening Ruth’s marriage, identity, or place in society.
Berstein states that the facts of Bridey are to be independently investigated, partly due to the publishing timeline. However, he writes a glowing final section on how it all totally fits… except it doesn’t, of course – see the Wikipedia link for how the Bridey story fails on all the most basic of timelines and facts. I somewhat appreciate the earnestness and conviction with which Berstein approaches reincarnation, having previously been an atheist. But, in later life, even Ruth was deeply sceptical of her apparent past life, and I struggle to understand what Bridey fanatics cling to as ‘proof’ of reincarnation, such is the sketchiness of the account.
What we can applaud Berstein for, however, is his commitment to trying to become a good hypnotic subject. As a believer in the, frankly, deranged and dangerous psychiatric practices of the times, he tried (BRACE YOURSELF) electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), carbon dioxide treatment, the ‘truth serum’, and a pressure chamber. I’ve read a few histories on psychiatry and I haven’t even heard of carbon dioxide treatment – where 80% oxygen and 20% carbon dioxide are deployed in a mask at increased intervals until you possibly don’t die or maybe get brain damage preferable to your current state of mind. I mean, words fail me that Berstein persuaded friendly psychiatrists to give him – and his wife! – a whirl with this stuff. Apparently the happy couple both had a blissful time not breathing via the pressure chamber. But Berstein describes carbon dioxide treatment as pure torture and reportedly said nothing of interest while under the influence of ‘truth serum’. He temporarily lost all his memory after ECT but claims he got it all back – though his positive and non-mad-sectioned bias would have been interesting to scrutinise given the memory-wiping effect ECT has on most people. Ultimately, these have zero influence on his hypnotisability – including the fact that sometimes no one was available to hypnotise him afterwards. Hey – never let anyone tell you parapsychology isn’t science, folks!
Ultimately I see a misguided man and a woman unfulfilled. Bridey Murphy remains a famous case still cited by some hypnotists and believers as evidence of past lives. Irrespective of the myriad holes in Bridey’s story, I think my grandma is proof that hypnosis has little to do with this very human phenomena; the mingling of facts, pasts, fictions, and fantasies – of unfulfilled hopes, dreams, lives, and personas. Ruth apparently resented the spotlight Bridey brought; perhaps that’s because she did not consciously welcome the alternative reality my grandma so willingly and consciously shared? ‘Everything you can do with hypnosis you can do without hypnosis.’
