From time to time the medium mentions other people "around him", who were "on the other side", and reports what they are saying.
After a while there come initials and names, and he is interested to hear some rather unusual family nicknames.
As the hour progresses, the sensitive seems to probe more deeply and to make more personal and specific statements.
There are a few prognoses of coming events.

Another medium, another sitter, would produce a somewhat different content, but in general it would probably sound much like the foregoing reading.
Some mediums speak in practical, down-to-earth terms, while others may stress the spiritual.
Not all, as a matter of fact, consider themselves "mediums" in the sense of receiving messages from the deceased.
In fact, some sensitives rule this out, preferring to consider their expression as strictly extra-sensory perception (ESP), on this side of the "veil".
However that may be, people are known to go to mediums for diverse reasons.
Perhaps they are mourning a recent death and want comfort, to feel in touch with the deceased, or seek indications for future plans.
They may, of course, be curiosity seekers -- or they may just be interested in the phenomenon of mediumship.

The mediums with whom the Parapsychology Foundation is working in this experiment are in a waking or only slightly dissociated state, so that the sitter can make comments, ask and answer questions, instead of talking with a "control" who speaks through an entranced sensitive.
What we have here is in some ways more like an ordinary conversation.

But it is not really only a conversation.
Many a sitter (in a personal sitting) has been amazed to realize that the medium was describing very vividly his state of mind.
He himself might not have been really aware of his own mood;
it had been latent, unspecified, semi-conscious and only partly realized -- until she described it to him!
Most striking indeed is this beyond-normal ability to put a finger on "pre-conscious" moods and to clarify them.

However, in the next visit that the researcher made to the medium, he did not receive a personal reading.
Instead he brought with him the names of some people he had never met and of whom the medium knew nothing.
For this was to be a "proxy sitting".

As was noted earlier, it is important that in valid, objective study of this sort of communication, the interested sitter should be separated from the sensitive.
Dr. Karlis Osis, Director of Research at the Parapsychology Foundation, described the basis for the experiment in a tomorrow article, ("New Research On Survival After Death", Spring 1958).
He remarked: "It has been clearly established that in a number of instances the message did not come from a spirit but was received telepathically by the medium from the sitter".

The possibility has to be ruled out that the medium's ESP may tap the memory of the sitter, and to do this, the two central characters in this drama must be separated.

One way to do this is by "proxy sittings", wherein the person seeking a message does not himself meet with the medium but is represented by a substitute, the proxy sitter.
If the latter knows nothing about the absent sitter except his name (given by the experimenter), he cannot possibly give any clues, conscious or unconscious, far less ask leading questions.
All he can do is to be an objective and careful questioner, seeking to help the sensitive in clarifying and making more specific her paranormal impressions.

Sometimes in these experiments "appointment sittings" are used.
Here the absent sitter makes a "date" with a communicator (someone close to him who is deceased), asking him to "come in" at a certain hour, when a channel will be open for him.
In this case the proxy sitter will know only the name of the communicator, nothing else.
He gives this to the medium at the appointed time, and the reading then will be concerned with material about or messages from the communicator.
As always, a tape recording or detailed notes are made, and a typescript of this is sent to the absent sitter.

So this proxy situation has set up at least a partial barrier between the medium's ESP and the absent sitter's mind.
It is now harder to assume telepathy as a basis for the statements -- though research still does not know how far afield ESP can range.

Now the original absent sitter must decide whether the statements are meaningful to him.
Here again laboratory approaches are being evolved, for it is recognized how "elastic" these readings can be, how they can apply to many people, and are often stated in general terms all too easily applied to any individual's own case.
If you look at a reading meant for someone else, you will probably see that many of the items could be considered as applicable to you, even when you were not in the picture at all!
An interested sitter may think the sensitive has made a "hit", describing something accurately for him, but can he really be sure that another sitter, hearing the same statement, would not apply it subjectively to his own circumstances?
It is, of course, easy to see how "J" will mean Uncle Jack to one person and little Jane to another.
"A journey", "a little white house", "a change of outlook", can apply to many people.
And even more complex items can be interpreted to conform to one's own point of view, which is by nature so personal.
One sitter may think "a leather couch" identifies a reading as surely directed to him;
to another, it seems that nobody but his father ever used the phrase, "Atta boy"!

To get around this quite difficult corner, there is one first aid to objectiveness: prevent the distant sitter from knowing which reading was for him.
If he is not told which of four or five readings was meant for him, he can more readily assess each item in a larger frame: "Does that statement really sound as if it were for me, significant in my particular life?
Or am I taking something that could really apply to almost anybody, and forgetting that many other people probably have had a similar experience"?

Conversely, experimenters would consider as impressive such statements as the following, which, if they turned out to be hits, are so unusual as to be really significant:

"He had four children, two sets of twins.
After being a lawyer for twenty-five years he started studying for the ministry.
Part of his house had been moved to the other side of the road.
He died of typhoid in 1921".

Methods have been developed of assigning "weights" to statements;
that is, it is known empirically that names beginning with R are more common than those beginning with Z;
that fewer women are named Miranda than Elizabeth;
that in the United States more people die of heart disease than of smallpox.
So each reading can be given a weight and each reading a score by adding up these weights.
Specific dates would be important, as would double names.
Various categories have been explored to find out about these "empirical probabilities" against which to measure the readings.

In the parapsychology foundation's long-range experiment, readings are made by a variety of sensitives for a large number of cooperating sitters, trying to throw light on this question of the significance of mediumistic statements.
It is very important indeed, in the field of extra-sensory perception and its relation to the survival hypothesis, to know whether the statements are actually only those which any intuitive person might venture and an eager sitter attach to himself.
Or, on the other hand, are unlikely facts being stated, facts which are in themselves significant and not easily applicable to everybody?
That is one thing the experiments are designed to find out.

So, after the sitting has been held, several readings at one time are mailed, and the distant sitter (whose name or whose communicator's name was given to the medium) must mark each little item as Correct (Hit), Incorrect (Miss), Doubtful, or Especially Significant (applying to him and, he feels, not to anyone else).
He is required to mark every item and to indicate which reading he feels is actually his.
All these evaluations are then totted up and tabulated, by adding up the Hits and Significants, with the weight placed on those in the sitter's own reading.
That is, if he marks as most correct a reading not meant for him, the total experimental score falls.

Conversely, if he gives a heavy rating to his own reading, and finds more accurate facts in it than in the others, a point is chalked up for the intrinsic, objective meaningfulness of this type of mediumistic material.
And there are some positive results, though the final findings will not be known for a long time -- and then further research can be formulated.

In another approach to the same procedure, the content of the readings is analyzed so as to see how the particular medium is likely to slant her statements.
Does she often speak of locations, of cause of death?
Does she accurately give dates, ages, kind of occupation?
It is possible to find out in which categories most of her correct statements fall, and where she makes most of her "hits".
Now when, so to speak, the cream has been skimmed off, and the items in the successful categories separated out, the sitter can be asked to consider and rate only this concentrated "cream", where the sensitive is at her best.

Mediumistic impressions are evidently of all sorts and seem to involve all the senses.
"I feel cold", the medium says, or "My leg aches", "My head is heavy".
Or perhaps she hears words or sounds: "There's such a noise of loud machinery", or "I hear a child crying", or "He says we're all here and glad to see you".
Maybe an entire scene comes into consciousness, with action and motion, or a static view: "a house under a pine tree, with a little stone path going up to the door".
The sensitive often seems to smell definite odors, too, or subjectively feels emotions.
Sometimes she displays amazing eidetic imagery and seems to see all details in perspective, as if the scene were actually there.
If pressed by the sitter for more detail, she may be able to bring the picture more into focus and see more sharply, almost as if she were physically going closer.

If asked how she gets her impressions, she probably can only say that she "just gets them" -- some more vividly than others.
Perhaps this is not so extraordinary after all.
Even in normal experience one gets impressions without knowing exactly how -- of atmosphere, of one another's personalities, moods, intentions.

Of course, there is an element of training here: these gifted people, by concentration, study, guidance, have learned to develop their power.
Simply using it increases its intensity, I was told by one sensitive.

Nor does a medium automatically know how to interpret her imagery.
Impressions often appear in a symbolic form and cannot be taken at face value.
It is apparently by symbols that the unconscious speaks to the conscious, and the medium has to translate these into meaning.
If communication with an entity on the "other side" is taking place, this too may assume the form of clairvoyant symbolism.

During one reading an image appeared of a prisoner in irons.
But this did not necessarily refer to an actual jail;
taken with other details it could have referred to a state of mental or spiritual confinement.
In this connection it is worth noting how names are sometimes obtained.
Though they are often heard clairaudiently, as if a voice were speaking them, in other cases they are apprehended visually as symbols: a slope to signify the name "Hill", for instance.
One medium saw two sheets flapping on a line and found that the name Shietz was significant to the sitter.