It is no news to students of modern psychology that the subconscious has a photographic memory. Strong evidence for this comes from studies in multiple personality,31 where some segment of the personality can remember things under hypnotism which the conscious mind cannot possibly recall. Hans Driesch puts it this way: "The enormous extension of simple memory in hypnosis allows us to establish the hypothesis that, at the very bottom, the soul is able to retain everything that has ever been experienced during the whole mental life . . ." 32
Swedenborg distinguishes between the interior photographic memory and another "more interior," which includes all of experience. That the latter has a resemblance to modern views of the subconscious is shown by his assertion that in it man's experience is arranged in such a way that emotions constitute "the nucleus," and "scientifics" (facts) occupy the "surface." 33 For him it was indeed the very nature of a man, and he said that this memory-disposition was actually visible to the higher beings of the spiritual world.
"Man cannot ever think anything which does not come into clear light after death, yea, into so clear a light that nothing at all is hid of the least of all that he has thought; it is inscribed on his disposition, and, if it may be credited, this is what is understood by everyone's book of life." 34
People who had succeeded in concealing their evil deeds in this life, and who persisted in denying the charges in the other, were confounded by having their actions represented before them visibly (as if seeing a modern film). Swedenborg cites several such cases, which, he said, he had witnessed. It was also a kind of punishment.
Apart from having been told about the all-recording memory by his friends in the other world, Swedenborg believed that mankind possessed it because of dreams. While dreaming, he said, such portraits were made as the waking mind could not produce. "For in a dream a man is wont to appear as the very same with all his lineaments, together with every condition of his body, his speech, his gait and many other particulars, which one never could know from the memory of material things, nor is man able to describe any such faculty.35
