Yet reading Myers’s 1903 two-volume Human Personality and Its Survival After Bodily Death, as well as Phantasms of the Living, the compilation of case histories he and his colleagues (Gurney et al.) published in 1886, one feels that the majority of “psychical” or “paranormal” experiences described are, in fact, hallucinations—hallucinations arising in states of bereavement, social isolation, or sensory deprivation, and above all in drowsy or trancelike states.
