It is well known that tales of the occult and the supernatural provided Charles Dickens with an ideal forum in which to explore the mysterious workings of the human mind, body, and nervous system. Although Dickens’s imaginative explorations of spectral encounters can be firmly tied to his preoccupation with the operations of the mind, this chapter demonstrates that Dickens nonetheless actively drew upon spiritualist modes of thought and practice in his writing. This is most notable, I argue, in Dickens’s meditations on the nature of the creative ‘spirit’ as a kind of presence to be overheard and in his use of sound in facilitating strange or seemingly supernatural experiences. A self-confessed voice-hearer and ghost-seer, Dickens frequently positions both himself and his characters, most especially those upon their deathbeds, as highly sensitive listeners, alert to, indeed eager to encounter, the possibilities of vibrations beyond the ordinary.

This chapter examines late nineteenth-century instances of a fictional trope of “mind invasion,” in which the white male unconscious is controlled by the very subaltern mind that Western science associated with “primitive” levels of mental and cultural evolution. The psychical automatism of mind invasion sometimes reproduces the power dynamics of colonialism, but the chapter examines countervailing examples in which the colonizer’s unconscious is dominated by mental powers and occult knowledge attributed to the colonized. It also explores depictions of extraterrestrial or future-human mind invasion, which redraw the racialized hierarches of mind constructed by Western scientists. Reiterations of the mind-invasion trope satirized the claim of educated white males to possess superior rationality, detached objectivity, and the ability to resist automatist mental states. The chapter analyses the multivalent aims of this reversal, including antimaterialism, a defense of paranormal experience, and a decolonizing attack on the very concept of racial hierarchy.