SELF-HYPNOTISM

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 296, 10 September 1938, Page 3 (Supplement)

SELF-HYPNOTISM

Hindu’s Remarkable Powers

Frankly, 1 found Rahman Bey rather impressive, writes Stuart Fletcher in the “Daily Herald.” Consider what he did!

This olive-complexioued Egyptian with trustful brown eyes, a beard like a small square of coconut matting affixed to his chin, and an amused expression, immersed himself for 57 minutes beneath the synthetically blue surface of a London swimming bath. There was no hokey-pokey. I saw him locked into a tank, and 42 bolts were screwed tightly into position. First of all, he had thrown himself into a trance —an alarming business. He shook like a pneumatic drill and then flung himself violently into unconsciousness.

Then they bundled him into the tank, slid it down wooden planks into the water and piled weights on to it until it sank. And there he stayed for the next 57 minutes and 33 seconds.

When Rahman Bey came safely out of his tank a doctor standing next to me said: “That man, according to all the laws of medical science, is dead. There was not sufficient air in the tank to keep him alive for more than 19 minutes. He has no right: to be alive now.” Still, doctor or no doctor, he was alive, drinking milk, just a little tire<(, but prepared to spend the evening at the pictures. “My peculiar gift,” he told me, “was discovered by a- Yogi priest—what you call holy man, you know —when I was a child.”

He made a small fortune touring the world having swords plunged through his back, pins passed through his lingers, and being buried beneath sand and water. He retired to Australia, where he kept a farm with pigs and chickens and maize.

“I could,” he told me, “have stayed in the tank six hours. ..It is just a question of hypnotising myself to ration the available air supply so that it lasts out while I am iu the tank,”