Double Trouble

Rodney Davies. Doubles, The Enigma of the Second Self. Robert Hale, 1998.

A study of the phenomena of the double, hallucinations or apparitions of living people who are not physically present at the time. Sceptical Magonians like yours truly will find the more believable stories in here as evidence that people have all sorts of odd virtual experiences'.

Several of the stories relate people hearing the sounds of family members getting up, so seeing them enter the room, while they are in fact still in bed asleep. Some may indeed be cases of sleep walking, but most are almost certainly good cases of false awakening on the part of the percipient. Few of the experiences also fall into the bedroom visitor category.

However as Mr Davies has done his contemplation, opened up his third eye etc and generally become an advanced occultist, he can assure me I am completely wrong on this. No these are cases of the projection of an actual physical double. This double can change shape and size to become an astral were-animal (though some were-animals we are assured are caused by occultists projecting their doubles into the corpses of recently dead animals. This is one of the reasons why so many cats are being stolen, once they have been skinned their bodies can be possessed by occultists who want to turn themselves into Surrey Pumas and Bodmin beasts).

One of the problems facing spiritualists and others who want to argue that ghosts and the like are real physical objects is that they wear clothes and may be accompanied by inanimate objects. This is usually got round by saying that the clothes etc. are thought forms composed from the astral bodies, Mr Davies knows better; they are indeed the real astral doubles of clothes. He recounts a case of an astral bus which went scooting round the streets of London, while its physical body lay sleeping in the garage. If we combine these two amazing revelations we surely have the final solution to the UFO mystery; surely flying saucers a the transmogrified astral doubles of sleeping trams, which confined in waking hours to the rut of tram lines, when asleep dream of flying wild and free through the air. – Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 65, November 1998.