Letter to former undergraduate tutee about how I got into a certain field of research as a result of my terrible education, and various fields of research in which I would be (should be) working if I were not prevented from doing so by lack of money.

It is probably easier to give a preliminary outline of my work (that is, potential fields of work) in writing because it needs some past history.

Lucid dreams and other hallucinatory phenomena are not of great importance to me; it was a very accidental thing that I ever worked on them. I think of them as things that could only be interesting as part of a very large-scale programme of laboratory work aimed at understanding perception or psychosis. Since I have worked on them, I see their potentialities for work in those areas. They were very much a thing I would only do for career progression and I was trying to get funding to do research which would enable me to apply to get back into a career. So it was actually horrifying to find that I had succeeded in setting up new fields of research – for other people already safely in salaried academic careers.

The end of the initial ten-year hiatus (between the publication of the book and the first research starting on it in universities) was no relief so far as we were concerned; it brought no funding or appointments to us. In fact it made things worse because we were expected to spend our still totally unpaid time corresponding with overseas academics, having expert opinions about the crappy ‘research’ they were doing, and dealing with an increasing volume of enquiries from the media and members of the public, all of which I regard as an appalling waste of time, although if I were fully salaried I suppose I would accept the interactions with other academics. However, the research which I might be doing would be qualitatively different from anything that anyone else has done, or is doing. I don’t really think of other people as able to do research at all.

I do still want to be doing theoretical physics and it has always been a primary aim of this place to carry out experimental work on an adequate scale and with sufficient ancillary staff to provide the advantages of an institutional environment, hence one which would permit the doing of theoretical physics and writing of books as well as the supervision of experimental work. However, it has been a primary aim of everybody else to keep us as small and constricted as possible and this is still not an adequate environment even for writing books.

So far as ESP and PK are concerned; the fact that I do have precise ideas about how they would work if they exist depends on the fact that I know about some psychological dimensions which nobody else does; they are probably of more fundamental importance than any that have so far been recognised. There is no way of getting these dimensions integrated into modern experimental psychology (at least, not by entering the field of experimental psychology, only by an independent large-scale operation which might establish relationships with what is currently accepted.Assuming ESP and PK to exist it is very probable that they would provide the possibility of breakthroughs in those areas.

Actually I do not assume the existence of ESP or PK, and if I were able to carry out experimental work on those areas I would devise experiments that were providing useful information independently of such factors so the work would not be wasted even if nothing came of that part of it.

The reason I know so much psychology is that my education was, in a way, not unconstructive. That is to say, its destructiveness took the form of ingenious psychological attacks. A successful child prodigy may have certain psychological advantages which everyone else wishes them not to have, and it happens that these are related to the important psychological dimensions referred to. I contrived to resolve the conflicts I had been given and regained the psychological advantages in a highly developed form.

So far as I can see, these dimensions would have no particular relevance to hallucinatory phenomena, psychosis or perception. Bur relevance might emerge if any adequate research could be undertaken; the new psychological dimensions are of more fundamental importance than might appear at first sight.

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If they had left me alone to take my exams at thirteen, and if they had let me go on after that as fast as I wanted to, I would have taken an awful lot of exams and probably got a degree at about seventeen. It would have been very exciting and a lot of fun, but it wouldn’t have made a breakthrough in psychology.

Not that, at the time, I appreciated in any way being given the opportunity to do so. As I explored the variants of nightmare and claustrophobic despair I resented being provided with so much information about how wrong everything could get if it wasn’t right. But I wasn’t prepared to live in nightmare for ever, and the psychological solutions which were proposed to me were not even possible, apart from involving giving up on everything I set any store by.

So psychology was what I would have to think about, as my only hope of getting back into a position to think about anything more interesting. Psychology was scarcely a science at all, I thought, and of no possible theoretical interest. On a par with studying the behaviour of chimpanzees, and I wouldn’t have been tempted by that.

The war was long and terrible, and great ingenuity was displayed by both sides. I positively admired their skill in setting up psychological conflicts that were as nearly as possible insoluble; they were much more insightful (whether it was conscious or subconscious) than the crude fictitious psychology they advocated would suggest. I turned this to my advantage. If it was clear that they wanted me to think in a certain way, it must be bad, so inverting it might be good, although I did not see why it should be. But try it anyway.

Of course having a few new psychological dimensions wasn’t going to do me any good with academic psychologists. This area of psychology was subject to extraordinary taboos, and if people had reacted so strongly to them in an embryonic form when I was twelve, they were hardly going to like them in a highly evolved and clearly stated form. The modern ideology could be seen as defined by the wish that they should be suppressed. Of course, they ought to be added to the existing personality dimensions, but it would be difficult to develop questionnaires when they are so weakly present in the great majority of people. It would be a large-scale operation, and no academic psychologist would be likely to approve of it.

In itself, this caused me no regret; psychology still seemed a dull field for research and only potentially interesting with large-scale facilities. What I did regret was that I could not do large-scale research on anything, whether or not experimental psychology; running a research institute would suit me very well. Nor, even, could I have an adequate academic career with which to work towards more adequate opportunities of that kind.

* * * * *

A by-product of my psychological techniques was a solution to pain which I got when I found I had to have two teeth out. It is actually the case that eliminating the emotional conflict makes pain sensation as unpainful as, say, visual sensation. In the event, I had the teeth out without an anaesthetic and I certainly didn’t suffer. In fact I regretted that it had been so easy; I thought it had hardly been a proper test of the system at all. But on reflection I could imagine it being sufficiently unpleasant; it was just that the quality of the experience was so radically modified.

It would be well worth somebody’s while (if anyone cared about the advancement of science) to provide me with a research institute to develop methods of pain control; I think my system is potentially communicable or reproducible and doesn’t depend on unusual psychological factors. This, however, is not one of the things I feel particularly frustrated about; it isn’t unfinished business, I got the solution I was trying to get. The research that would go into getting to understand it well enough to make it generally available would not, so far as I can see, be of any great theoretical interest. (But you never can tell, if I was directing the research.)And people other than myself do not set any store by the theoretical interest of research; if they pretend to see any interest in it at all, it is only in its practical usefulness.

I have never been able to get physiologists with a supposed interest in pain or anyone else to take the slightest interest in my technique; they only want to find some derogatory way of dismissing it as self-hypnosis, etc., which it certainly is not.

And somebody ought to think it worthwhile to provide me with a research institute large enough to work on psychosis; I am pretty sure that it would be possible to get to understand it well enough to eliminate it as a problem.

Actually (if I had to choose) I would rather work on perception; I think there is a very fundamental and revolutionary issue not far away; at least, not far away with a reasonably sized research institute. I would, of course, rather work on perception, psychosis and pain. That would require a much larger institute.