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most of the cases that have been studied involve schizophrenics, and says: ‘They converse, threaten, curse, criticise, consult, often in short sentences. They admonish, console, mock, command, or sometimes simply announce everything that’s happening. They yell, whine, sneer, and vary from the slightest whisper to a thunderous shout. Often the voices take on some special peculiarity, such as speaking very slowly, scanning, rhyming, or in rhythms, or even foreign languages. There may be one particular voice, more often a few voices, and occasionally many …’
    The voices described by Crabtree do not sound in the least like this bewildering babble; they apparently conversed like any normal person. And the same applies to the housewife who held long conversations with her grandmother as she was making the beds. There is no reason, of course, why ‘phantom voices’ should not sound like those of a normal person; but it seems to be a fact that most of them don’t.
    This is confirmed by a study made by another clinical psychologist, Dr Wilson Van Dusen, formerly of the Mendocino State Hospital in California. Van Dusen spent sixteen years observing the effect of hallucinations, and he describes his findings in a chapter called ‘The Presence of Spirits in Madness’ in his book
The Presence of Other Worlds
. His conclusions are, perhaps, even more startling than those of Julian Jaynes.
    Van Dusen explains that most patients who are hallucinating prefer to keep their experiences to themselves, since they know it will be taken as a proof that they are mad. However, one unusually cooperative patient asked him if he would mind talking directly with her hallucinations, and he did. Naturally, the hallucination could not answer Van Dusen direct; he had to ask the patient to give an account of what he could hear and see. But there was nothing to stop Van Dusen addressing the hallucination directly. ‘In this way I could hold long dialogues with a patient’s hallucinations and record both my questions and their answers.’ And, like Adam Crabtree, he insists: ‘My method was that of phenomenology. My only purpose was to describe the patient’s experiences as accurately as possible. The reader may notice that I treat the hallucinations as realities — that is what they are to the patient.’
    One consistent finding, says Van Dusen, was that the patients felt as if they had contact with another world or order of beings. ‘Most thought these other persons were living. All objected to the term “hallucination”.’
    For most individuals the hallucinations came on quite suddenly. One woman was working in the garden when an unseen man addressed her. Another man described sudden loud noises and voices he heard when riding in a bus. Most were frightened, and adjusted with difficulty to this new experience. All the patients described voices as having the quality of a real voice, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, than normal voices. The experience they described was quite unlike thoughts or fantasies; when things are seen they appear fully real. For instance, a patient described being awakened one night by air force officers calling him to the service of his country. He got up and was dressing when he noticed their insignia wasn’t quite right, then their faces altered. With this he knew they were of the Other Order and struck one hard in the face. He hit the wall and injured his hand. He could not distinguish them from reality until he noticed the insignia …
    Most patients soon realise that they are having experiences that others do not share, and for this reason learn to keep quiet about them. Many suffer insults, threats and attacks for years from voices with no one around them aware of it.
    Perhaps Van Dusen’s most significant finding is that he learned that his patients seemed to experience two distinct kinds of ‘voices’; he speaks of these as the ‘higher order’ and the ‘lower order’:
    Lower order voices are