By David John Oates
Ever since the late 60s when the Beatles first experimented with a recording
technique known as backward masking, people have had a
fascination with recordings played backwards. In the late 70s
and early 80s religious fundamentalists preached from the
pulpits that occultic forces were hiding sinister backwards
messages in rock and roll records. In the early 90s their cries
reached the US courts when the rock group Judas Priest was sued
by distraught parents whose teenage sons had suicided whilst
listening to their album, Stained Class. They claimed the album
contained subliminal backward messages that encouraged suicidal
behaviour. Judas Priest prevailed in the case with the court
ruling they had not intentionally placed these messages on the
album but the Judge also concluded that the backward messages
did exist.
So what are these backward messages? Do they exist and if so what do they
mean and how are they getting there?
In early 1984, while I was running a halfway house for street kids in rural
South Australia, I first heard about this phenomenon when I had
several frightened teenagers in my office saying they could hear
the voice of devil talking backwards to them on their records.
Naturally I was skeptical, but my curiosity was sufficiently
aroused to explore further. I have always had an interest in
electronics and audio. I was (and still am) a licensed amateur
radio operator with a good ear for sound, so I went home that
night, rewired some audio equipment, and started to play some of
the suspect records backwards fully expecting to hear nothing
but gibberish.
Much to my surprise, from the very first record I listened to I began to
hear clear, grammatically correct sentences, mixed amongst the
backward gibberish. My first thought was the sound track must
have been altered but subsequent tests revealed no manipulation.
Suspecting an over active imagination I asked friends if they
could also hear the backward messages. Most of them could with
no prior prompting on my part. This was indeed most curious.
Over the next few weeks, I had reversed most of my musical collection finding
these backward messages to be prolific, occurring in almost 50%
of all the records I looked at. The messages they contained were
not necessarily evil, as the fundamentalists had claimed, but
rather covered a wide range of subjects such as love, politics
and other general topics.
Shortly afterwards, my little hobby took a dramatic turn when I
accidentally stumbled across the phenomenon in normal human
speech. One of the first examples I found in speech was in Neil
Armstrong’s famous first words as stepped onto the lunar
surface. Forwards he says, “That’s one small step for
man,” and when this same track is played backwards, the
words “Man will space walk” can be clearly heard. Another
early example found occurs as a live commentator is describing
the scene in Dallas Texas 1963 when President John F. Kennedy
was shot. Forwards he says, “Parkland hospital, there has
been a shooting, Parkland hospital has been advised to stand by
for a severe gun shot wound.” When this same track is played
backwards the words, “He’s shot bad, hold it! Try and look up,”
can be clearly heard.
Suddenly my little hobby had turned into an obsession. I began taping as
many people as often as I could and I found backward messages to
be prolific, many of them as clear as the forward dialogue,
occurring in grammatically correct sentences that often related
to what was being said forward. I searched libraries and
bookshops trying to find any other work on the subject and could
find none. It then became obvious to me that this was a field
that was totally new.
Then in 1987, I was encouraged by my good friend, Greg Albrecht, to write a book
about the topic. Together we worked on the project and gave the
book an initial working title of “Beyond Backward Masking.”
We complied backward messages from both music and speech and
found many common trends, most principally the fact that these
backward messages usually related to what was spoken forwards.
We found that if a lie was spoken in forward speech, the
backwards speech would often correct that lie and speak the
truth instead. Additionally, we found that if pertinent facts
were left out of the forward speech, the backward speech would
often put them in. We also noted that the backward messages
occurred approximately once every 15-20 seconds of normal
relaxed conversation and less often in a public speech, maybe
once every 60-90 seconds. Greg and I became convinced that we
had discovered something extremely significant. We needed to
call it something and explain it in simple terms.
The answer came to me at 3 o’clock in the morning sometime in April 1987 when I
work up with a jolt with 2 words burning in my mind. The words
were “Reverse Speech”. I got up immediately, went to my
computer, and wrote the very first draft of what was later
called “The Theory of Reverse Speech and Speech
Complementarity.”
In short this theory states that the process of spoken communication is two
fold, forwards and backwards. As the human brain is constructing
the sounds of speech, it is putting those sounds together in
such a way that two messages are communicated simultaneously,
one forwards from the conscious mind and the other in reverse
from the unconscious mind.
The theory also stated that Reverse Speech was a communication process. The
backward messages can be received and understood by the human
mind. We know this because many instances of reversed
conversation have been found in Reverse Speech, where questions
are asked and answers subsequently given, all in reverse. Also,
EEG testing that was undertaken in 1988 showed the brain clearly
responding to backward messages.
I later theorized that the existence of Reverse Speech may explain many
aspects of human intuition, why we can often get a gut feeling
when talking to someone that they can or cannot be trusted, or
that there is more to the conversation than they are telling us.
Unconsciously, we are receiving the reversed messages and
recognizing the feelings they create in us as human intuition.
We released our book late 1987 with the subtitle of “Reverse Speech, The
Voice Of The Inner Mind.” Within only a few weeks of its
release we were approached by the Aussie press and did several
TV current affairs programs and dozens of radio interviews. Greg
subsequently went onto other affairs and I continued the
research alone. In 1989, the initial media coverage reached the
United States and I was invited for a lecture tour. It was an
outstanding success and I moved there to live shortly afterwards
and stayed for 10 years, lecturing, teaching and continuously
researching this amazing field. I returned to Australia in late
1999 with several trained Reverse Speech Analysts continuing the
work in the U.S.
Since 1987 my understanding of Reverse Speech has grown considerably and its
practical applications have become very apparent to me.
On the surface level Reverse Speech acts almost like an ultimate truth
detector. Its uses in law enforcement alone are awesome. It can
reveal the guilt or innocence of a suspect. It can reveal the
location of missing evidence and the motives for a crime.
Certified Reverse Speech Practitioner, Jack Johnston in Ashland
Oregon, has been using Reverse Speech in investigative work with
several attorneys. His results have been amazing. In one case,
he found information in reverse that was subsequently verified
by DNA testing. So impressed have the authorities been with
Jack’s work that Reverse Speech training has been added to the
Oregon Police’s training program as an optional extra in their
course of study.
My own personal love of this technology, however, is in the therapeutic area.
Much of the messages contained in Reverse Speech come from
deeper areas of the human mind. In fact less than 10% of all
reversed language is from the conscious mind. By far the vast
majority of backward messages are coming from either the
unconscious mind, or what Carl Jung coined as the Collective
Unconscious. When they come from these areas they can often
reveal information unknown to the conscious mind. This can prove
to be extremely beneficial in working with psychological or
physical illness.
In one case a client who came for Reverse Speech session work to discover the
cause of her asthma, talked forwards about unusual mould smells
in the house. She had a reversal on this section that said, “Under
the floor, puss in my head.” We were all puzzled about the
meaning of the reversal until the husband, out of curiosity,
looked under the floorboards of the house only to discover 18
inches of mould growing under the house. He cleared out the
mould and within a couple of weeks the woman’s asthma had
completely disappeared. Why did this information appear in
reverse even though the conscious mind did not know? Because the
unconscious mind knew. Using traditional therapy this might have
never been discovered.
In another case, when a woman was talking about depression and her need to
get her life in order, a reversal appeared that said “Need
more sunlight.” The woman subsequently took the curtains
down from her windows, cut down the trees around the windows,
and let more sunlight into her house. Within a couple of weeks,
her disposition had considerably improved and her life began to
shine again. The reversal accessed unconscious information that
provided her with a solution to her problem.
According to my discoveries with Reverse Speech, the unconscious mind contains a
wealth of information. It knows all about us, what we need, our
wants and desires, and often the solutions to many of our
problems. Reverse Speech directly accesses this information and
hence can shorten the therapeutic process by months if not
years.
In a case I recently worked on, I found a reversal that said “I have been
molested.” This was information known to the client but not
told to me. It revealed an event that was extremely important to
the whole therapeutic process. This knowledge was obtained with
just one tape recording and may not have been revealed for a
long time using traditional therapy. Another case had a reversal
that said “Hid the bad orphan.” This reversal prompted my
client’s memory of an event in her childhood where she had been
naughty, punished, and her father had subsequently died of heart
attack a few days later. Unconsciously she had blamed herself
for her father’s death and this blame was affecting her to this
very day. With Reverse Speech we were able to isolate this event
in just one tape recording and make appropriate corrective
measures.
The above are just a few of the 1000s of case studies that I have in my files.
In my practice as a therapist and hypnotherapist I literally see
miracles unfolding before me as Reverse Speech reveals the
amazing gems contained in the unconscious mind. This makes my
work very effective and extremely rewarding. Every day I am
eternally grateful for my discovery of this magnificent
phenomenon.
In recent years, I have taken Reverse Speech one step further than this by
developing a technique that is very effective in changing human
behaviour.
A significant proportion of speech reversals speak in metaphoric language,
using phrases such as “The wolf has fallen in the lake,”
or “My goddess has a spear in her heart.” At first
the meaning of these phrases were a mystery to me but as the
years of research passed I began to notice a trend with these
metaphors. For example, every time someone used the word wolf in
reverse, they were usually talking forward about motivation or
the desire to get ahead. The word Goddess often occurred when
someone was talking forward about hope for the future, and lake
frequently occurred when they were talking forwards about
emotions.
As time went on I discovered that many of these words were universal in their
meaning from person to person and even (as I began to train
bi-lingual students) from culture to culture. I started to
compile a reverse speech metaphor dictionary which today has
more than 2,000 references documented of common metaphors that
occur in reverse speech.
Of even more significance I discovered that not only were these metaphors
Universal in their meanings but they also represented, and even
caused, certain aspects of human behaviour. I theorized that at
the deepest levels of the human psyche the human mind thought in
pictures or metaphor. When I was working with clients who used
metaphors that were not conducive to their behavioural outcomes,
I wondered if it was possible to change the metaphor, hence the
behaviour.
Thus was born a brand new therapeutic technique that I entitled “Metaphor
Restructuring.” It went something like this.
First I would conduct a reverse speech session with my client and find the
metaphors they were running. In a subsequent session I would ask
my client how could these metaphors be changed to achieve their
desired behavioural outcomes. Much to my amazement, speech
reversals would come back that would tell me exactly what to do.
For example, the man whose wolf had fallen into the lake might
produce a reversal that said “Give the wolf a stick and pull
him out.” I would then place my client in a light meditative
state and ask him to visualize the wolf in the lake. Then,
following the instructions contained in the follow up tape, I
would ask my client to take the wolf out the lake. I called this
metaphoric journey a “Metawalk.”
The results I obtained were amazing. Firstly the client experiences a very
vivid metaphoric journey. Many times they would see the images
before I suggested them. For a few days following the Metawalk,
they would experience a sense of relief and lightness of mood.
This mood would then gradually fade and 2-3 weeks later the real
changes would begin. They seemed to start deep down inside and
gradually grew in intensity until the behaviour they were
seeking to change had almost completely vanished.
Thus I had developed a very powerful technique that was completely free of
operator bias. It used the unconscious mind itself to both show
us what was wrong and also how to rectify the problem.
This is where the research now stands after almost 20 years of work. Reverse
Speech is an awesome discovery that has the potential to
revolutionize our understanding of how the human mind works, and
possibly bring society into an age of truth and awareness. For
further information you can contact our offices in Adelaide
Australia at (08) 8382-4372 (International 61 8 8382-4372) or
visit the website (which contains 1000s of examples of speech
reversals) at:
http://www.reversespeech.com
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