But what few people know is that she had an extremely profound spiritual experience whilst at the dentist, as she came round from having had gas. A spiritual experience which she never forgot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONjT2YJGOrc
The account is mentioned about 7:30 into the above youtube video.
I hadn't heard about this so I checked Barbara Stoney's Biography (page 208 pdf copy) :
Enid Blyton:
I feel I would also like to comment on your ‘presque vu’ reports.
For some reason I had not heard the experiences called by that
name, but it is really a very good definition. I have only once had this
experience, in my teens, under ‘laughing gas’. I have had gas many
times, but only once did I ever experience ‘presque vu’ – and then it
was in one respect different from the things you report in that instead
of ’almost seeing’, I did see and grasp everything, or so I thought! –
and then lost it. This is what happened. I have never forgotten it and
its extraordinary clarity has always remained with me. I found myself
(apparently bodiless but still firmly myself) being drawn through
space at a speed so great that I thought I must be going at the pace
of light itself.
I seemed to go through vibrating waves of light, and
thought that I must be passing many suns and many universes. (I
love astronomy, hence my suppositions, I suppose!) Finally, after a
long, incredibly long journey in an incredibly short time I arrived
somewhere. This Somewhere was, as far as I could make out, in my
dazed and amazed state, a place of wonderful light (not daylight or
sunlight) – and I saw, or knew, that there were Beings there – no
shape, nothing tangible – but! knew they were great and holy and
ineffable.
Then I knew I was going to hear the secret of Everything –
and Everything was explained to me, simply and with the utmost
lucidity. I was overjoyed – filled with wonder and delight. I knew the
reasons behind existence, time, space, evil, goodness, pain – and I
rejoiced, and marvelled that no one had guessed such things before.
Then I knew I must go back to my body, wherever it was, through all
the long eras of time and vastness of space, and as I left in sorrow,
my spirit cried out, or seemed to cry out ‘Let me tell everyone this
wonderful thing I know, this secret that explains everything and will
bring such rejoicing and happiness!’ And as I went back down aeons
of time, I was told I must not divulge the secret and I cried out why –
and as I went, I was told why, and I said ‘At least let me always
remember’, but no, I was not even to be allowed to remember even
one small detail myself, and I cried out again – ‘But why may I not
remember?’ And then, just at the very moment when I returned to my
body in the dentist’s chair, I was told why I must not even hug the
knowledge to myself, and it was such a logical and wonderful reason
that I accepted it joyfully, in the fullest understanding, and found
myself opening my eyes, and smiling happily in the chair, completely
overcome with what I thought had been a true and overwhelming
revelation.
This is the only presque vu experience I have had, and as
you will agree, it was more than presque vu – it was ‘complètement
vu’ – and yet ended by being completely lost. I can still get back the
feeling at the end of it of acquiescing joyfully in my forgoing of the
secret, and yet hugging to myself the certainty that ‘all’s well with the
world’, despite everything!*
This experience has nothing to do with religion, it wasn’t a ‘vision’,
only something amazingly produced by the gas – but I kept hold of
my identity all the time, and did not lose the reporter sense of the
practised writer, who instinctively retains all that is essential to her
true ‘newsstory’. I have told only two or three people of this
experience, as I did not think it sounded believable …
Your mescaline experiences must have been rather terrifying.
They would be to me. I dread the feeling of losing my identity, of not
being able to control my own mind!
*Enid related this experience to her daughter Gillian, but substituted the garden seat at
Green Hedges for the ‘dentist’s chair’ and placed the time of this experience as the middle
1950s.
