After my husband, who was a major in the Thirty-seventh Engineers with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918, had been overseas for about two months, I passed through a great difficulty. Every night I would awaken from a sound sleep with the ugly suggestion that I was in great danger, even in more danger than the men in the trenches. The fear was accompanied by acute dizziness. As soon as I would get up and start to read from our textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, the distress would stop. This condition filled me with such fear that I dreaded to go to bed. and a great deal of the time I sat up in bed, reading all night. I lost my appetite, and the fear increased until it became an obsession. I went to Chicago to see a very good friend, who was a practitioner and my teacher. I tried my best to convince him that I was in a very serious condition, and although he treated me very lovingly and kindly, he refused to be convinced that the error was real. That night I went to my hotel carrying a heavy load of self-pity, disappointment, discouragement, and fear. I read all night, but was unable to gain any relief. The next morning I took the first train out of the city for my home in Ohio.
In the small town in which I then lived, there was but one other Christian Scientist, and she lived seven miles out of town on a farm. I drove out to her place, arriving about dark. As soon as I got in the house I said to my friend: "I am sick and tired. I am terribly afraid, I cannot sleep, I cannot eat, I cannot even lie down, and I have come out here to die." Then I tried to convince her that I was in a critical state of mind and body, but she knew too much of the truth to accept my fear-laden arguments. She insisted upon my going to bed, which was the last thing that I wanted to do. She had some outside work to do on the farm, so she asked me to read Science and Health while she was gone. I read for half an hour, after which I deliberately shoved my head into the pillows, thinking that I might just as well get it over, because lying down had such a terror for me. I slept soundly, not awakening until late the next morning, and that was the end of the error.
I have often thought of this healing, for it illustrates what fear tries to do through aggressive mental suggestion, and it showed me how very necessary it is to defend ourselves daily against these suggestions. I was not in danger at any time, but fear had mesmerized me into believing I was, and I had suffered as long as the belief lasted. I was mesmerized into thinking that my teacher's work was not helping me, that my friend's loving thoughts were not effective, and that the reading of our precious books, the Bible and Science and Health, was unavailing, all of which was untrue.
