Here's an interesting example of past life recollection under hypnosis combined with xenoglossy — the ability to speak a language that one has never learned — as reported in Chapter 14 of Robert S. Bobrow's worthwhile book, The Witch in the Waiting Room: A Physician Investigates Paranormal Phenomena in Medicine. Bobrow, an M.D., covers a wide variety of paranormal phenomena with an inquiring mind and a puckish sense of humor.
This particular case concerns Dolores Jay of Mt. Orab, Ohio. In 1970 her husband — a Methodist minister and amateur hypnotist — hypnotized Delores in the hope of curing her back pain. Bobrow writes:
During this session, when her husband [Carroll Jay] asked her if she still had pain, Dolores replied "nein" — the German word for "no."
The problem was that neither of them spoke German. Intrigued, Reverend Jay re-hypnotized his wife three days later and tried to expand upon what had happened. Encouraged to speak German, in trance, she did. The minister asked the questions in English; Dolores replied largely in German, and in the voice of a young child. Since he could not understand her, Carroll found some friends who could speak German and had them listen to the sessions, which he had taped.
Dolores spoke German, under hypnosis, responsively, meaning she answered in German whether the query was posed in English or in German (some sessions were attended by German-speakers). Only she wasn't Dolores; she was Gretchen. And the time in which she lived, placed by events of which she spoke, would have been the late 19th century.
Bobrow acknowledges the difficulties in confirming past life regressions: the known tendency of hypnotized subjects to confabulate, and the scarcity of historical records necessary to verify the patients' claims. He goes on:
Suffice it to say that Gretchen's accounts were more or less consistent, including her last name (Gottlieb), the town in which she lived (Eberswalde), and her death — a murder — at about the age of sixteen. Not to mention the fact that she could speak German, and even used some archaic and obscure words.
At this point, Ian Stevenson enters the picture. Stevenson was a University of Virginia professor of psychiatry who traveled the world studying cases of children who spontaneously remembered past lives. He collected more than 2500 such cases, many of which included verifiable details.
What mainly interests me about Stevenson's involvement is the extraordinary effort he made to investigate the case. Bobrow tells us:
After a letter from Reverend Jay, about his wife, appeared in a psychic magazine, Stevenson contacted the Jays. His report of "The Case of Gretchen" was published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research in 1976….
Stevenson speaks German, and first ascertained that [Dolores] was, in fact, responding to coherent German in her "Gretchen" mode. He then obtained assurances from the couple that neither had ever had any prior knowledge of the language; they even signed affidavits to this effect. Mrs. Jay would eventually take a lie-detector test in New York City, which showed that she believed she was telling the truth about never having learned German.
The focus of the paper is an investigation into whether to Dolores Jay could have learned to speak German at some juncture in her past, and perhaps had forgotten about it. She was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, and at the age of two moved to a neighboring town. Her only German ancestry consisted of two great-great-grandparents on her mother's side, who had died many years before her birth. Stephenson interview [Dolores's] mother, who told him that she had never heard any family members speak German.
Carroll Jay … was from the same area of West Virginia. He and Dolores were high-school sweethearts and married soon after graduation. Stevenson went back to the Clarksburg area where both Jays had grown up and interviewed nineteen relatives and neighbors of Dolores Jay, including her parents and a younger sister. All denied having any family or acquaintances who spoke German. No German books had ever been in the house. Young Dolores could not have toddled off to learn a foreign language unbeknownst to her parents, who kept a close eye on her (the parents also signed affidavits as to the truth of their reports).
Stevenson even found statistics as to the number of German-speaking persons in Harrison County, West Virginia, where the Jays' hometowns were located, but could find no one conversant in this language anywhere near the wondering range of a young, supervised child. Even the schools of Harrison County did not teach German at the time the Jays were enrolled there.
This certainly sounds persuasive, but before we draw any conclusions, we might consider some contrary information courtesy of Wikipedia. The online encyclopedia summarizes the Gretchen case as follows:
Gretchen, an American woman named Dolores Jay who presented the life of a teenage girl in Germany while hypnotized by her Methodist minister husband. Stevenson reported that the subject was able to converse in German. Mrs. Jay did study a German dictionary at one point during the sessions, but Stevenson pointed out that she had already spontaneously produced 206 words before this event. [Sarah] Thomason's reanalysis, while acknowledging that the evidence against fraud was convincing, concluded that Gretchen could not converse in German. Her speech was largely the repetition of German questions with different intonation, or utterances of one or two words. Her "German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty". When asked what she had for breakfast, she answers ‘Bettzimmer’, which is a non-existent word made up of the two words for 'bed' and 'room'. Moreover she had some previous exposure to German in TV programmes and a "look at a German book".
Wiki is not always the most reliable source, so I took a look at the paper cited, "Xenoglossy," by Sarah Grey Thomason (PDF here). Thomason writes,
Mrs. Jay's previous (remembered) acquaintance with German was confined to television programs and a look at a German book…. Mrs. Jay studied a German dictionary at one point during the relevant period, in an effort to learn enough German to please her ailing husband during subsequent hypnotic sessions; but Stevenson points out that Mrs. Jay had already produced 206 words spontaneously before this event…. Stevenson made great efforts to rule out fraud as a possible explanation for the subject's linguistic performance. His conclusion that there was no fraud is convincing … though [Dolores'] desire to please [her husband] by manifesting the foreign [personality] might have encouraged [her] to pay close attention to any stray … German phrases that came [her] way….
[Gretchen's] answers are largely confined to utterances of one or two words, and many of them are simply repetitions of the interviewer's question (but with declarative sentence intonation rather than question intonation). Gretchen's German vocabulary is minute, and her pronunciation is spotty….
Some of her pronunciations seem to be influenced by German spelling rather than by German sounds….
Gretchen says that she is illiterate, but at one point she writes about forty words (some of them repetitions) in German, with spelling errors that one might expect from an English speaker who had learned only a little German…. Stevenson is confident about the need for a paranormal explanation for the subject's linguistic performance. In a letter responding to criticisms of the Gretchen case, he says that `[a]lmost anyone might pick up casually a little German, but not the amount (small as it was) that Gretchen knew.'
This is the trouble with xenoglossy cases. Even experts differ as to how fluent in the language the speaker really is. And the possibility that the speaker acquired some of the language from forgotten sources — such as TV shows or books — can never be ruled out entirely. In this case, it's unclear to me what sort of television programs Mrs. Jay had watched. Are we talking about German-language TV shows, or (more likely) American movies and shows where some characters speak a smattering of German? I have seen movies with some German dialogue (in fact, I just watched one last night, Patton), yet I could not respond to questions posed to me in German, nor could I fake any knowledge of German.
Then again, maybe under hypnosis I could.
Stevenson's conclusion about the Dolores Jay case was simply "that responsive xenoglossy derives from some paranormal process." Even this relatively cautious statement may be going too far.
Bobrow adds:
As for the reverend, although he had dabbled in hypnotic regression previously, he had made no attempt to accomplish this with his wife. In fact, [he] found the idea reincarnation somewhat incompatible with the teachings of Christianity, nor did he care for the concept of possession, which bespeaks of the devil. The couple also had no involvement with parapsychology or cults. But despite their own bewilderment, the Jays felt that something had transpired that was worthy of scientific study.
On this, at least, all open-minded inquirers can probably agree.