The Sleep of the Great Hypnotist

George Pfoundes is the greatest hypnotist of his generation. He has invented an extraordinary machine, the Pfoudnes Oscilloscope, which uses the resources of television technology to achieve miraculous cures by hypnotism, even to healing the blind. Pfoundes believes that hypnotism can raise the dead: he is obsessed with the possibilities - so much enhanced by his invention - of this modern magic. Dying, he hypnotises his daughter, Angela, with his great Oscilloscope, and gives her a hypnotic command to find some means of bringing him back from the grave. How can Angela ever free herself from the posthumous personality of this terrible Father, who dies even as he holds her in the hypnotic trance?

In this novel Peter Redgrove explores the fascinating world of the strange powers of the mind revealed by hypnosis. He examines the dilemmas of both hypnotiser and hypnotised, as it might be any parent and any child, and takes some side-swipes at television's power over us all. With his customary mixture of bizarre invention, profound feeling and sexual gusto, he shows how even such an awesome Father can be conquered. The book comes with a new introduction by Cliff Ashcroft.

'The author is a sorcerer who entices the mesmerised reader into the realms of magic and imagination. The reader is promptly inveigled into the extraordinary world of the occult by a plainness of approach that is in itself quite uncanny.'
(The Spectator)

'Dreams, trances, heightened sexual awareness and religious ecstasy are presented with plain assurance and total conviction.' (The Observer)

Peter Redgrove (1932-2003) worked in several interlinked fields: as a poet, novelist, playwright, and in psychological practice. He believed creative, psychological and scientific work are aspects of the same common study, and his insights are profound, illuminating and constantly exciting. He received many awards during his life and was especially honoured by receiving the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1996.