More on Four and a Half Minutes Missing

Yesterday I posted a video for the song Four and a Half Minutes Missing by the band Reigns. I had forgotten that their releases often contain extensive and interesting liner notes for each of the songs, so I wanted to share that here as well. From the album The Widow Blades, the liner notes for Four and a Half Minutes Missing:

The Blades disappearance has had no shortage of theorists to painstakingly dissect every aspect of the case and most of these theories hinge on the so-called "fading ailment" (the Widow's own terminology - so coined in her correspondence to Professort Hauthner). Millicent Blades had a virulent opposition to extreme wintry conditions and to snow in particular. This peculiar aversion had the effect of rendering her momentarily unconscious when exposed to snowfall - a kind of seasonal narcolepsy. She writes that this state would be preceded by "a strange weightlessness as if I was, for a moment, ceasing to exist." In his reply, Professor Hauthner outlines the possibility that she could have been suffering from a psychosomatic malady resulting from the combined stresses of her phobia and the lack of a normal sleeping pattern. Her final bout of unconsciousness, which occurred during a small flurry in the winter of 1977, she timed at exactly four and a half minutes.

These episodes, according to taped conversations posthumously retrieved from the Professor's attic, were coupled with a perplexing vision in which she would find herself in a field in the middle of a fierce snowstorm. Through the blizzard she would see an approaching figure, an elderly woman with outstretched arms. She would always regain consciousness before the woman could reach her. This vision continued throughout her life with one subtle variation: as Millicent Blades grew older the approaching figure in the vision became younger until, as revealed in the final recording, she was no more than eight years old, the same age she'd been when the seizures started.