“Following the many sessions that Dad had, giving readings to a variety of people in New York while staying at the home of David and Lucille Kahn or occasionally some other member of the A.R.E., we would visit with Dr. Reilly at his Sun Air Farm. There were many such visits—sometimes Dad and Mother and Gladys Davis and myself; at other times whoever happened to be with him in New York at the time.
“The readings didn’t tire Dad so much as the talking with people after the readings. They insisted of course in describing in detail their symptoms, which Dad really didn’t want to hear about . . . He would be very tired and he enjoyed the opportunity of getting away . . . So the relationship between my father and Dr. Reilly developed.
“He particularly enjoyed the meals that Mrs. Reilly arranged. She was an excellent cook and so was her mother whom we all called Ama. They had been in the restaurant business . . . Father particularly enjoyed the biscuits, and I can still remember how big they were; they rose to prodigious heights and Dad used to enjoy them so much and cover them with gravy which was against everybody’s dietary recommendations—including Dad’s suggestions from the readings, Reilly’s rules of diet, and even Mrs. Reilly’s. Nevertheless all would enjoy the delicious meals that were served. Dad would praise Mrs. Reilly and Ama, knowing they would outdo themselves to top their latest culinary triumph, and I quickly caught on and would join him in fulsome praise of the household chefs.
“Dad also enjoyed talking with the people at Reilly’s who were there for treatment . . . They didn’t know he was a psychic and that suited him. Of course, in those days he wasn’t as famous as he later became and they would just talk to him about their problems and business, and he loved to sit around and talk with them . . . he enjoyed long walks in the woods with all kinds of people and he loved the birch and beech trees which surrounded the lake . . . I remember him talking with many different types of people that Reilly had up there. Some of them had problems with drinking, some of them were quite famous and sometimes they would be very surprised to learn that they had been talking to a psychic.”
As Hugh Lynn recalled, his father would be exhausted after spending two or three weeks in the city giving readings and then they would go to Sun Air Farm to rest. He sometimes would have a cold or chest congestion.
“Dad, like many psychics, had an amazing capacity for recovery,” he said. “He could be very sick one moment and completely recovered the next. He had the power to give himself self-suggestion in the unconscious state or to accept suggestion in that state from someone beside him who was told to give him a suggestion to increase circulation to a certain part of the body. I have seen this happen.
“In readings up there at Sun Air Farm he would include either at the beginning or the end an instruction that the circulation of the body should be increased to remove the congestion or cold. And I could watch the color in that particular part of the body involved in the suggestion change as the blood flowed. He was an excellent subject in terms of having his unconscious accept suggestions. He could change the whole nerve energy flow.”
But Cayce never changed his lifestyle to conform to his own suggestions about health. Hugh Lynn said that his father liked to eat certain foods that he had grown up with back in Kentucky. “He loved certain things that my mother would fix for him, for example, pork. He told everyone not to eat pork, but Dad enjoyed it and he particularly enjoyed pig’s feet. He enjoyed wild game, and he did recommend that. He drank coffee and he recommended this in moderation. He recommended smoking in moderation. Many people have raised questions about his smoking, and I suspect that during those early years when Dad was recommending moderation, tobacco was not being treated in the same way as it is now. You must remember, Dad grew up on a tobacco farm. He was a chain smoker.
Edgar Cayce at Sun Air Farm
Dad was a most unassuming person and I think this is one of the interesting facets of Dad’s relationship with Dr. Reilly—meeting and seeing the unusual people that Reilly had at the Reilly Health Service in Rockefeller Center in New York—and frequently at the farm. They were name personalities. He would come back after spending a whole day up there getting everything they offered in physiotherapy; baths, fume baths, massage—sun lamp—and then when he came home he was all excited about having seen some well-known entertainer or motion picture personality. There were always a great many people from the Broadway stage there. Dad was a great admirer of the theater and so enjoyed seeing some of these people from time to time.
—Hugh Lynn Cayce
“Yes, Dad ate what he pleased and occasionally he suffered for it. He would have irritation and stomach pains and congestion. But then he would go into a trance state and get up completely free of whatever he happened to have.
“Dad always insisted that if he couldn’t raise his vibration over a piece of meat that there was something wrong with him.”
Gladys’s Dream
It was at Sun Air Farm that Gladys Davis had a remarkable psychic experience. She saw a dream come true. Gladys had more or less systematically recorded her dreams since 1924—one year after she had become Cayce’s private secretary. As she tells it:
“In late January of 1934 Edgar Cayce, Hugh Lynn Cayce, and I were visitors for the weekend at the Ladd home on Long Island. They were both dear friends and Cayce followers. Late Sunday night Mrs. Ladd was telling me about her husband’s financial difficulties; his job was insecure, and they were about to lose their home. As I got into bed, I remember wishing I could do something to help the Ladd family. It turned awfully cold that night and I was very uncomfortable. Early the next morning I was awakened by this dream:
“A knock on the door. I said, ‘Come in.’ Mr. Ladd stood there with a coal scuttle in his hand and wearing a lumber jacket. (I had never seen him in anything but a business suit.) He came in and made a fire in a little coal stove which stood in the room, saying, ‘Now the room will soon be warm so you can get up.’”
Miss Davis related the dream to Mr. Cayce and Hugh Lynn on the train back to New York that morning, and she agreed with them when they attributed it to her discomfort. “Still, I remember remarking how strange it was that the room should be different from the one I was occupying, which had two radiators on opposite walls.”
In early April 1935 Miss Davis was a guest at Sun Air Farm. “On Sunday morning,” Gladys recalls, “when I said, ‘Come in,’ to a knock on the door, there stood Mr. Ladd in his lumber jacket, a coal bucket in his hand, and he said, ‘I thought you’d like a little fire in your stove to take the chill off while you get dressed.’ I noticed that the little room was exactly the same as I had dreamed it over a year before.”
In January of that year Ladd had become manager of Sun Air Farm.
It was on his first visit to Sun Air Farm that Cayce gave me my life reading, which began at 11:50 A.M. November 12, 1933, and ended at 12:40 P.M., a very long period. My wife and daughter were present, and so were my brother Pat and his wife. The reading is too long to reproduce here, but certain observations had a bearing upon my future work. Cayce noted that “from Jupiter there are those things that gather around the body; and individuals of affluence, position, power, place, in the affairs of all walks of life,” a good description of the Reilly clientele, especially those who would be patronizing the Reilly Health Service in Rockefeller Center (at that time just a hope).
The reading went on: “Hence those that are in that position of being influenced by wrath, or temper, or activities within selves that have brought about detrimental influences in their experience, will be drawn to the body’s association. Not those of mental derangements, but those of mental weaknesses in and through the weaknesses of the body-physical. These, we find, will be the greater attraction towards the entity, because of the entity’s ability to aid such relations, such associations ...” (438–1)
Cayce said that