It is very simple for a person to get into an animal’s valence. I knew a girl once that was in the valence of a horse. And there was a fellow that was in the valence of a pig; facial changes had taken place on this person so that he looked like one, too. It’s very interesting how all of this happens.

When you are dealing with cases of nonreality, you can best spot them by trying to find out whether they ever dare occupy their own valence. They are usually out-of-valence cases. They may be able to go into valence in the basic area but are so faintly in contact — nonsonic and that sort of thing — that they are pretty hard to work. It is a good idea to invest time on this person, just to pick up reality, communication and affinity and get him rolling.

This reminds me of another case. This person was in a dog’s valence and the dog hadn’t occupied very much time in his life so he only had about five or six spots on the time track where he could see anything. The rest of it was very badly occluded. A professional auditor worked this case for engrams (he was very anxious to get an engram to show up, because this person needed some convincing as far as Dianetics was concerned); but this fellow could have been taken into all the engrams in the world and would not have known what to do with them. He was out of valence, his sense of reality was very poor, his affinity level was very poor and he had not a friend in the world.

I took him back down the track and for about forty-five minutes did nothing but try to contact pleasure moments. I found this dog and got him out of the dog’s valence into his own valence at the age of about 4. I brought him up the track and showed him a couple more things and he was still way out of valence. Everything on that whole case from beginning to end was just way removed.

This person wouldn’t be able to contact an engram if you gave him one. He was highly skeptical and didn’t know anything about affinity, communication and reality. The funny thing was, he sat there for a moment then blinked and said, “Isn’t that funny? Everything looks more real to me than it’s looked for practically all my life. And you know, I feel I like you. I never felt I liked anybody before.”

This was a strange one. And of course he started communicating like mad, just talking like a jaybird. But that was forty-five minutes of trying to run pleasure moments, and it brought his sense of reality way up.

You can continue on with this sort of thing and try to knock out some of these light charges, try to get him in his own valence — in other words, just work with him and try to get him oriented with his own life. You don’t have to jump in and start running engrams right off the bat. Running engrams is terrifically important and that is what we are trying to do. But before you run engrams you had better get the case in shape so that it will run engrams. There is no reason to keep on trying to run engrams when you can’t run engrams.

If you have somebody who keeps telling you that he doesn’t know whether or not hey in an engram and he is having a hard time, it is worth your while to spend a little time bringing him up to a point where the next time you try to run an engram, he’s in an engram! Now his sense of reality is picked up. It does no good to run one in which you are not getting the somatic. You should be able to get at least 50 percent of the somatic out of it.One of the ways to find engrams on this type of case is to put him on a Guk freewheel and check him over every few days. You will find that he will start to run these little light somatics for a while as he’s freewheeling. (Of course you get him unstuck on the track first, because you can’t freewheel somebody who is stuck on the track.) After three or four or five days go by, all of a sudden he will start to get big somatics. He has sort of rolled the somatics out of his case enough so he is settling into his own valence. That all by itself will produce a better-running case.

Now it is an odd and peculiar thing that the strength of a somatic, all by itself, will convince people of an engram. No matter what this person’s sense of reality is, if you get him into an engram that’s hot enough he won’t be skeptical anymore. He will be convinced that engrams exist, and after that he will be pretty easy to run.

But somewhere along the line this person’s case might deteriorate. He might have an environmental upset or something of the sort, and his sense of reality would get very thin and poor. If you couldn’t get him into another engram that was good and hot, you could just start pecking away at this case by making him remember and running him through locks, and finally get him patched up. It is an odd thing that right at the beginning of Dianetics, in its researches, when I knew absolutely nothing about prenatals or birth or that these bear traps were waiting for me, I was producing results with people just along the line of running out locks.

I knew that engrams existed, but I was continually confronted with locks and would spend the beginning of most cases handling locks. This became routine. So even after I knew about prenatals and basic-basic, I would still work locks in the opening rounds of the case. I would have the person return to this and that, even them up on the perceptics and get them adjusted on the case. I turned on sonic in these people!

Sometimes I would spend 10 to 15 hours doing nothing but going back and finding the time that Mama slapped him, and the time at Halloween when the two bad boys jumped out and said “Boo! “ or the time he fell off his tricycle. I would get the person used to auditing, and only then send him all the way back down the track to an engram, move him into his own valence, run the engram out and start the case on an erasure.

One could spend 25 hours at the beginning of every case doing this and he would save a hundred hours in the process of clearing. It evidently collects a lot of attention units out of the bank, and the case doesn’t stick on the time track as easily and it isn’t likely to bog down.

There was a technique earlier in Dianetics which you might find useful. If you run out a person’s birth and it refuses to lie flat, parts of it keep going into recession and coming back again, bring the birth up to present time, run it in present time and it will knock out completely.

For instance, someone comes to you with a fine case of asthma, and you find out that you can get him to the beginning of birth. You start to run birth through and discover it is going to be a tough one; so you spend about five hours running birth until it is pretty flat, particularly those portions of it that pertain to asthma. Then you bring birth up to present time with the command “Birth will now come up to present time,” and you run it in present time. You will find out that the engram will change position on the track if you do that. This is something you can use if you get a case that is restimulated in that fashion.

In many cases you can run birth out; you discover that you can find one prenatal and that the one prenatal will erase, after which birth will reduce. Then three or four childhood locks can be flattened out, and you can bring the person up to present time, run all these things out again, and the preclear’s chronic lumbosis will disappear. You can then call this person a fairly good release.

There are quite a few things in Dianetics which have been picked up, researched and passed over. It is one of the crosses which people at the Foundation have to bear. I didn’t have time to write everything down. Dianetics was sweeping along at such a rate, people were coming at me in such streams, that I would simply make notes and try to file them. Any stenographer or secretary that I had was so busy typing up stories with which I was supporting the research, and anything I wrote in terms of words was so jealously guarded by me for stories to carry along the research, that I wasn’t putting down any research.

A university professor walked in one day and wanted to validate Dianetics. He presented me with a big list and said, “I want you to go over these and tell me about them, and then I will go ahead with my work.”

I looked over this list, and it said: “History of Dianetics: first researches; early tenets. First cases: complete description. Changes in the evolution of a technique.” It would have taken me about three months to have outlined what he wanted, and about two years to have written it. Meanwhile at the Foundation there were people to be trained, and things were going along at a terrific rate. So we adopted at that time a policy to the effect that “Hubbard will carry it around in his head and maybe in his old age he will tell us all about it. In the meantime, we will just backtrack as best we can and get this thing squared around.” I don’t have the time to sit down and talk to somebody for three months, just to make an outline of this stuff!

So there are a lot of things that have been discovered and passed over as not being optimumly workable due to bugs in them, things that didn’t lead directly on a straight, clear road to a positive solution. We get some of these in the mail quite regularly as brand-new discoveries. That is something that can’t be helped, when you consider the body of the research and the enormous spread of this field.

I am covering this for a particular reason. A student of Dianetics is going to find, many times, that he thinks he has a very valid departure from Standard Procedure which he wants to use. If he is an expert on Standard Procedure and if Standard Procedure works for him invariably, then he has written his own ticket to go and think something else up and use it. But if he is shaky with Standard Procedure and doesn’t know it cold, he must not run anything else in on it. The chances are it has already been run in on it and thrown away. It doesn’t take too long to learn Standard Procedure and to practice up to where these tools are very sure and secure in a person’s hands — perhaps a few months — and then he can cut himself loose and do what he wants to do. He will probably come back to Standard Procedure. Most students do.

But we have here in Standard Procedure something which keeps people out of trouble and gets the engrams, something which has been tested over and over again. It can be communicated to people easily. It has its various workable factors and, as far as we know today, has no bugs.

What happens on the relay of the information to new auditors, if they keep to Standard Procedure, is that they are going to get good, solid, positive results, and they will become more and more skilled in practice until they hit the limit and carry along with it. There are no uncrackable cases as far as we’ve learned. It is a mistake for an auditor to run just one case. In the first place, he learns Dianetics as it applies to this case. His tools get rusty, and his imagination stultifies on him. The best way to conduct a private practice is to start picking up people and opening their cases. Team them up and send them home to work on each other, and check-run them regularly. There aren’t enough professional auditors around for one to tie himself down to Mrs. Gotbucks. He should collect teams, open the cases of two people and get them rolling along, maybe carry them through to a point where their cases are well open or even released, and then let them audit each other. He should correct their auditing and let them pay for a case opening every once in a while to get them rolling again. He should let them call him on the phone and find out what is going on with their cases, and so on.

Occasionally he will get back one of the cases that was running so well for him and find out that the person he assigned to this case was doing nothing but pattycake, and a case which was beautifully opened is now bogged down and has to be opened up again. Then he has to spend a little time training, and so forth, in order to get people to work smoothly.

Standard Procedure will open cases smoothly and keep them rolling. One has to overcome lack of experience and build up his faith in his tools and his ability to work cases.

One of the things that an auditor builds up is a fund of phrases and experiences, so that when he looks at a case and has seen this situation before, he simply fills in what is missing, the preclear hits it, and off they go.

Before one has built all that up, there are going to be cases an auditor runs into over which he will just tear his hair out, and even cases on which he will just quit. Don’t feel that you have got to hit 100 percent average in cases. Hit 50 percent and you will be doing well. Then, go back and handle the real toughies after you have had a lot of experience.

Don’t permit yourself to bog down on a very, very tough case. All cases are somewhat complicated, but they are not all tough. And if you take unto yourself a diet of nothing but tough cases, your morale and your confidence in your tools is going to go down. Your ability to audit will then go down. So you want to pick up a variety of cases; don’t work just one. And as you work longer and longer and get better and better, then you will find out that your opinion of what is a tough case will change, until a person really has to be inaccessible, stuck on the time track after a hundred electric shocks and so on, to be what you would consider a real tough case. This is in the realm of experience.

There is one thing an auditor has to develop which is very necessary to him. It is something that everyone should know about, called “dialogue sense.” (Writers have this naturally.) You are dealing with engrams, but the personnel of engrams are human beings, and human beings talk. Until a person has been around a long time listening to people talk, with this purpose in mind, he doesn’t really register what people say. He doesn’t make the specialized observation which would then permit him to write the dialogue of these people. Unless an auditor makes a specialized investigation he will not have an instinct as to what is going to be said next, and an auditor who doesn’t have dialogue sense is a lost auditor. But every human being who talks has some little grain of this sense, and it is something that is very easily developed.

If Mama says “I just don’t have anything to wear,” and you have any idea of Papa at all, you could probably dub in “Oh, no. You’re not going to go into that again!” You spot that Papa has been talking to Mama just before this, but all of a sudden there is no more conversation. If you know the personnel in the engram at all, you know that conversations don’t end on that note. And “You’re not going to go into that again” is enough to kick the preclear out of the engram.

As an auditor you get very well acquainted with the person’s parents. You get up to a point where you know just exactly what they are going to say next, and if they don’t say it you become very sharp and take a look over this engram to find out what is happening.

The most rudimentary part of dialogue sense calls for the auditor to know how people talk when they talk to themselves and how they talk when they are talking to somebody else, so that he can spot whether or not somebody else is there. One of the main tricks that will be played on an auditor continually is for somebody to be in another valence and do nothing but run off Mama’s or Papa’s conversation, assuring the auditor that this is just monologuing. Well, it certainly isn’t monologing. Papa is right there and he is talking. In fact, his phrases are probably the superaberrative phrases on the case, but they are not being run; they are merely being restimulated.

A case can be bogged by running it way out of valence — for example, running only Mama’s conversation. The auditor must keep his ears open. Mama says, “I just don’t know whatb the matter with you.... Well, don’t say that again.... All men are alike.” This runs off as an engram, yet about 50 percent of it is missing! Papa had something to say between each one of those sentences. But, being out of valence, the preclear is not recording it and may not even be aware of the fact that Papa is there, because the preclear is not thinking very well when he runs through these engrams. So, it is up to the auditor to alert the preclear to the fact that somebody else might be present. He can even get a file clerk flash on the fact.

The severely neurotic and the psychotic have very, very sharp and solid valence walls. They get over into one of these valences and nothing else comes into this valence at all. Then the auditor must be aware of the fact that somebody else is probably talking.

Go down to an institution and listen to a dramatizing psychotic dramatize an engram. You will find out that it has got gaps in it; it is non sequitur. That is why it sounds so strange to people. The other person’s conversation is missing in the engram because the psychotic is dramatizing just one valence. It is the other valence, probably, which is holding him suppressed on the track. So it would not do anybody any good just to let this psychotic continue to go through this engram that he is dramatizing, without shifting his valence.

You can change the whole dramatization of a psychotic sometimes just by saying “Now what would your papa say?” And the person goes into a completely different dramatization of the same engram. Make him run off what Papa said a few times and you can occasionally release some tension. All you are trying to do with this fellow is get him up to present time.

It requires dialogue sense. One is listening to people talk. Don’t ever treat an engram any other way. They have human beings in them that are talking, and you should know what human beings say. Just for practice, open your ears as you walk around the town and listen to people talking. Find out what they are saying to each other. You will be amazed to find out that you have probably never listened before. They say the strangest things!

Of course, this is old data to a writer. Somebody showed me the fact that writers and engineers seem to have somewhat of a priority on being good auditors, but writers seem to be able to do it extremely well. What it finally boiled down to was dialogue sense. That is actually all a writer has got — a little more imagination on dialogue that can be fitted into a case. But you can develop that.

Look over this question of reality, communication and affinity. Check up how well the preclear is running. Try Straightwire on the auditing session which you have had with your preclear and see what happens. Watch the effect of picking up this sense of reality by running a little bit of something, even an incident of boredom or an incident of fear, if you can’t get grief off a preclear After looking these things over, reassay each case that you are working.