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similar to drunken bums at a bar who like to tease and torment just for the fun of it. They suggest lewd acts and then scold the patient for considering them. They find a weak point of conscience, and work on it interminably. For instance, one man heard voices teasing him for three years over a ten cent debt he had already paid. They call the patient every conceivable name, suggest every lewd act, steal memories or ideas right out of consciousness, threaten death, and work on the patient’s credibility in every way. For instance, they brag that they will produce some disaster on the morrow and then claim credit for one in the daily paper. They suggest foolish acts, such as raise your right hand in the air and stay that way, and tease if he does it and threaten him if he doesn’t.
    In fact, it seems clear that these ‘lower order’ hallucinations behave exactly like bored children with nothing better to do.
    The vocabulary and range of ideas of the lower order is limited, but they have a persistent will to destroy. They invade every nook and cranny of privacy, work on every weakness and belief, claim awesome powers, make promises, and then undermine the patient’s will …
    A few ideas can be repeated endlessly. One voice just said ‘hey’ for months while the patient tried to figure out whether ‘hey’ or ‘hay’ was meant. Even when I was supposedly speaking to an engineer … the engineer was unable to do any more arithmetic than simple sums … The lower order voices seem incapable of sequential reasoning. Though they often claim to be in some distant city, they cannot report more than the patient hears, sees or remembers. They seem imprisoned in the lowest level of the patient’s mind …
    The ‘lower order’, then, are basically tormenters. But about one fifth of the hallucinations seem to be of a higher order, and they, on the other hand, seem concerned with helping the patient. The ‘higher order’ is much more likely to be symbolic, religious, supportive, genuinely instructive; it can communicate directly with the inner feelings of the patient. It is similar to Jung’s archetypes, whereas the ‘lower order’ is like Freud’s id. Van Dusen mentions a case of a gaspipe fitter who experienced a ‘higher-order’ hallucination of a lovely woman who entertained him while showing him thousands of symbols. ‘… his female vision showed a knowledge of religion and myth far beyond the patient’s comprehension’. After Van Dusen had been holding a dialogue with this ‘higher-order’ hallucination, the gaspipe fitter asked for just one clue to what they had been talking about.
    Van Dusen reports that he has been told by these ‘higher-order’ beings ‘that the purpose of the lower order is to illuminate all of the person’s weaknesses’. And the purpose — or one of the purposes — of the ‘higher order’ seems to be to protect people against the ‘lower order’:
    This contrast may be illustrated by the experiences of one man. He had heard the lower order arguing for a long while about how they would murder him. He also had a light come to him at night, like the sun. He knew it was a different order because the light respected his freedom and would withdraw if it frightened him. In contrast, the lower order worked against his will, and would attack if it could sense fear in him. This rarer higher order seldom speaks, whereas the lower order can talk endlessly.
    While the ‘lower order’ ‘is consistently nonreligious and anti-religious’, jeering angrily at the least mention of religion, the ‘higher order’ ‘appeared strangely gifted, sensitive, wise and religious’.
    Van Dusen made one extremely striking observation about the hallucinations. Although he was able to observe a very largenumber of them over the years, he soon realised that ‘after twenty patients, there wasn’t much to be learned’ because the hallucinations were all so similar. This in itself seems baffling.