“Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.”

Edgar Cayce was born near Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on March 18, 1877, and long before people began traveling to him for answers about illnesses, dreams, past lives, and the lost civilization of Atlantis, he was a Kentucky farm boy who claimed he could see people no one else could see.

Some of those experiences began when he was still a child. Cayce said he saw and spoke with the spirit of his grandfather after his death and described other companions who appeared completely real to him but were invisible to everyone around him. When he was thirteen, he claimed an angel appeared before him and told him that his prayers had been heard and that he should use his life to help the sick and afflicted. Cayce was deeply religious, and his Christian faith would remain an important part of his life even as his experiences became increasingly difficult to explain.

Sleep also seemed to have a strange effect on him. As a boy struggling with his schoolwork, Cayce reportedly discovered that he could sleep with his head resting on a book and wake up knowing its contents. Another story from his childhood tells of Cayce being struck in the back with a baseball and behaving strangely afterward. That night, while asleep, he supposedly told his family what was wrong with him and instructed them how to prepare a treatment. By morning, he was better and remembered none of what he had said. Years before anyone called him the Sleeping Prophet, Edgar Cayce was already doing some of his strangest work while asleep.

When his family moved to Hopkinsville in 1894, seventeen-year-old Edgar went to work at Hopper Brothers Book Store and became involved with Ninth Street Christian Church, where he taught Sunday school. He later worked as a salesman, but around 1900 he developed severe laryngitis. His voice gradually disappeared until he could speak only in a whisper. Doctors were unable to restore it, and the condition continued for months.

Eventually, a traveling hypnotist came to Hopkinsville and offered to help. Something unusual happened when Cayce was placed under hypnosis. He could speak normally while hypnotized, but as soon as he awakened, his voice disappeared again. Cayce later worked with Al Layne, a local man interested in hypnosis. While lying in the parlor of his parents’ West Seventh Street home, Cayce entered the same sleep-like state and began talking about his own throat as though he were examining someone else’s body. He described a problem with circulation around his vocal cords and instructed Layne to increase the blood flow to the area. Witnesses later claimed Cayce’s throat became noticeably red as the circulation increased. Cayce eventually announced that the problem had been corrected and instructed Layne to wake him. When Cayce opened his eyes, he could speak again.

What happened next turned an unusual cure into something much larger. Layne began asking Cayce to examine other people while in the same trance-like sleep. Cayce would lie down, close his eyes, fold his hands over his stomach, and apparently fall asleep. Once there, he could be given the name and location of someone who was sick, even someone far away, and would begin describing that person’s physical condition. He sometimes used medical terminology that those around him said he did not normally know and recommended treatments while someone nearby wrote down his words. When awakened, Cayce generally remembered nothing about what he had said.

By 1910, word had spread, and Cayce’s strange ability had attracted the attention of Dr. Wesley Harrington Ketchum, a Hopkinsville physician who investigated his readings and began discussing them publicly. That October, The New York Times introduced Cayce to a national audience with a headline that would follow his story for years: “Illiterate Man Becomes a Doctor When Hypnotized.” People began seeking him out from across the country. At first, most wanted help with illnesses. Cayce would enter his trance, describe what he believed was happening inside the person’s body, and recommend treatments. Thousands of these sessions, which became known as readings, were eventually recorded.

The questions people asked him didn’t remain medical for long. They began asking about dreams, reincarnation, previous lives, ancient civilizations, spiritual development, and the future. Cayce answered those questions the same way he answered the medical ones, lying down, closing his eyes, and speaking while apparently asleep. Among the strangest subjects to emerge from those readings was Atlantis.

Cayce didn’t talk about Atlantis as a legend. During his readings, he described it as a real civilization that had once existed in the Atlantic Ocean. His Atlantis was technologically advanced, spiritually powerful, and eventually destroyed by its own misuse of that power. He described its destruction as a series of catastrophes rather than one sudden event, with the final portion of the civilization disappearing beneath the ocean thousands of years ago. Cayce also claimed that some Atlanteans escaped before the final destruction and carried their knowledge into other parts of the world, including Egypt and the Yucatán.

According to Cayce, they didn’t leave empty-handed. He spoke about records containing the history and knowledge of Atlantis that had supposedly been hidden before the civilization disappeared. One repository was associated with Egypt and the area of the Sphinx. Another was connected to the Yucatán. A third, he said, remained associated with Atlantis itself beneath the Atlantic. One location appeared repeatedly in Cayce’s readings: Bimini.

The small group of islands in the Bahamas became connected to one of his most famous predictions. Decades before anything unusual was discovered there, Cayce said remains associated with Atlantis would become visible or be discovered near Bimini around 1968 or 1969. Then, in 1968, divers near North Bimini discovered a long formation of large limestone blocks lying beneath the shallow sea. Some of the stones were rectangular, and their arrangement resembled an underwater road or wall stretching across the seafloor. The formation quickly became known as the Bimini Road.

For people familiar with Cayce’s readings, the timing was difficult to ignore. He had spoken about Atlantis, connected it specifically with Bimini, and pointed toward 1968 or 1969. Now, in 1968, divers had found what appeared to some people to be a manmade structure beneath the water. Geologists have offered a different explanation, identifying the formation as naturally fractured beachrock created through ordinary geological processes. Cayce’s followers saw something else entirely. To them, the Bimini Road looked like the first visible piece of a civilization Cayce had been describing while asleep decades before anyone knew the formation was there. The discovery didn’t prove Atlantis existed, but it guaranteed that Cayce’s prediction would not be forgotten.

Atlantis was only one part of what he described during thousands of readings. Cayce spoke about reincarnation and told some people that their current struggles were connected to lives they had lived centuries earlier. He interpreted dreams, discussed meditation and spiritual development, recommended diets and treatments, and made predictions about events he believed were still to come. All of this came from a man whose waking life looked surprisingly ordinary.

Cayce worked as a photographer. He married, raised a family, read his Bible, and taught Sunday school. His Christian faith remained important to him throughout his life, and the strange nature of his abilities sometimes troubled him. He questioned where the information came from and whether what happened while he slept could somehow conflict with what he believed while awake. In the end, Cayce continued giving readings because he believed the purpose of the ability was to help people.

His work eventually took him away from Kentucky to Virginia Beach, Virginia. There, the Association for Research and Enlightenment was established to preserve and study his work. His readings were carefully recorded, creating an enormous collection covering everything from illnesses and dreams to reincarnation, ancient Egypt, and Atlantis.

As Cayce grew older, the readings began taking a physical toll. He had been warned to limit how many he gave, but requests continued arriving, particularly during the final years of his life. His health declined, and on January 3, 1945, Edgar Cayce died in Virginia Beach at the age of sixty-seven. His body was returned to Hopkinsville and buried in Riverside Cemetery, bringing him back to the Kentucky community where a young man who had lost his voice discovered that he could speak perfectly well while asleep.

Thousands of his readings still survive today, along with the questions that surrounded him during his lifetime. People continue debating what happened when Cayce closed his eyes, where the information came from, and whether any of his predictions reached beyond coincidence. Beneath the water near Bimini, the strange line of stones discovered in 1968 is still there. Cayce believed it was only the beginning of what Atlantis had left behind.