I was doing weight-loss hypnotherapy on a new client when he suddenly seemed to lose his mind. First he talked, in the present tense, about his life in Egypt as a builder of pyramids. He included some fascinating details about antigravitational devices that were so fantastic I couldn't follow them. Next he launched into a lengthy monologue in what sounded like an endless series of nonsense syllables. I thought he was having a psychotic episode and knew it could be dangerous to him for me to interrupt him, so I listened and tried to appear calm while silently begging him not to become violent. But then, just as suddenly as he flipped out, he snapped right back to his normal, soft-spoken, pleasant self again, as if the previous half hour had never happened.
With his permission, I sent a tape of that session to a professor friend of mine at Stanford and asked for his objective evaluation. If this client needed psychiatric help, I was prepared to drive the poor man there myself.
Three days after I delivered the tape to Stanford, my phone rang, and a voice on the other end said, "Where did you get this tape?" I had never heard my professor friend sound so excited.
I responded with a noncommittal, "Why do you ask?"
It seems that in those three days, he had studied and researched that tape and shared it with colleagues who researched it as well, and they came to a conclusion that astounded us all: my client's supposed "nonsense syllables" were really an obscure seventh-century-B.C. Assyrian dialect in which any number of pyramid builders would have been fluent.
