Holland Suggestions Read Online Free PDF Page B

drink away to the far corner of the desk. Then, in an unsteady voice that seemed to belong to someone else, I told her the story of Robert Holland.
    “The first time I saw Robert was in the fall of 1955. He was my psychology prof, you know. He’d been on the skids in the early fifties—Robert had a bad drinking problem all his life—and it had been up and down for him ever since his graduation. Mostly down, from what he’d told me. His friends tried to help him; they did what they could, but there wasn’t really anything that anybody could do. Robert Holland was a drunk, plain and simple.
    “By 1952 he had pulled himself together and had taken a job as an account executive with a little advertising agency in suburban Washington. The following year he got back into teaching, when the chancellor at Schuster gave him an associate prof’s job. The chancellor was a real bastard; he kept two or three guys like Robert around all the time, just to help feed his ego. Warren Rice, his name was; Warren Rice. Yeah, well, this Rice never let Robert forget that he could be sent back to the skids with one little stroke of the pen. Robert worried all the time about his job; Rice terrified him. He had reason to worry, because he was into hypnosis again and Rice had ordered him to drop it. That was about the time of the Bridey Murphy thing, you know; the publicity on that was still going strong. And some of it wasn’t very good publicity. There had been a move to discredit Bridey, and Rice never liked the hocus-pocus that seemed to go with hypnosis anyway. So he ordered Robert to cease and desist; to stop all experimentation and all classroom discussion on hypnosis at once. But Robert couldn’t stop. By fall, when I arrived, Robert was conducting secret experiments with a few select students—those who had checked out in class as good subjects and could be counted on to keep their mouths shut. I became his best subject. I could go into a trance immediately, three and four levels deep. Most people, even good subjects, never accomplish that.
    “We began doing some strange things. I would go to his house, at first alone, then later with Vivian, and we fooled around with age regression. Robert believed that a good hypnotic subject could relive any experience from his past, in all five senses. When the Bridey book broke—Do you remember the story about the girl who was sent back under hypnosis to a previous life?”
    “I read it last year,” Judy said.
    “Good. Well, Robert always believed in Bridey—not necessarily in that experiment, but in the concept. At first we used fairly simple techniques, like automatic writing. …”
    She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”
    “It’s just another way the conscious mind can communicate with the subconscious. You go into a light trance and soon you begin to write. What you write is a direct message from the subconscious.” I saw her doubt and tried to emphasize my point. “Listen, it’s really a valid force. Psychologists use it all the time now. Look it up yourself if you don’t believe me.”
    “Okay,” she said, still not convinced.
    “Let me tell you what I did once with automatic writing. My dad once gave me a gold watch. It was one of those heirlooms that had passed from father to son for I don’t know how many generations. One day it suddenly disappeared; I couldn’t find it anywhere. It had a strong sentimental value and I felt lousy about it for weeks. For a while I even suspected that Vivian had sold it without telling me, but that was one time she wasn’t guilty. I found it through an automatic-writing experiment. It was in the watchpocket of a pair of plaid slacks that Vivian had bought me that fall. I hated them, but wore them once, just to please her. Wearing my dad’s gold watch seemed to make the slacks more bearable, so just that once I took it out of its case and carried it with me. By noon I’d completely forgotten that I had it. Later I hung up those