The most famous clairvoyant visualizer of all time is probably Edgar Cayce (1877-1945). Cayce would go into a light trance and clairvoyantly diagnose illnesses of people he did not know or had not even met. Thousands of people were helped by the man who became known as the "Sleeping Prophet."

One of them was a man we‘ll call Jack Bedford. Bedford, a resident of New York City, was a post-office foreman who, with no history of mental illness, suddenly began to develop severe pains in his head. His behavior became erratic, and he had periods of amnesia or irrationality. He grew ever more depressed and irritable and finally his emotional condition cost him his job.

At last Bedford was declared incurably insane, and he was committed to Rockland State Hospital in Orangeburg, New York.

His family and relatives were devastated by this turn of events. To them the whole affair was a dark and terrible mystery. How could this decent, hard-working man have inexplicably fallen victim to overpowering mental illness? But the doctors just shrugged their questions off. They said there was nothing that could be done, and that Bedford’s family should just get on with their lives.

Then Bedford’s sister remembered something a former employer had told her about a man named Cayce. In some miraculous way, Cayce had helped a young Southern woman recover from mental illness. So Bedford’s sister called her former employer, a businessman named David Kahn, who happened to be a friend of Cayce’s. That night Kahn wrote the psychic, saying only that the man "had a nervous breakdown … He is in Rockville State Hospital …"

A few days later the sister received a typewritten note, dated January 7, 1938. It was from Cayce, who offered this diagnosis:

Through pressures upon nerve energies in the coccyx and the ileum plexus, as well as pressure on the lumbar axis, there has been a deflection of the coordination between the sympathetic and the cerebrospinal nervous system.

The note said that the problem was caused by a fall on the ice Bedford had suffered as he was leaving work one day three years earlier. Cayce accurately described the treatment Bedford was getting at the hospital and went on to say which parts of it were worthwhile for the problem and which were not. Bedford "is not insane," Cayce said. "He does not belong in an institution." He concluded by prescribing certain osteopathic methods of healing Bedford’s affliction.

Cayce arrived at this diagnosis as he arrived at all his diagnoses: "by seeing it psychically."

After he got Kahn’s letter describing Bedford's plight, Cayce retired to his study and lay down on a leather-covered couch. As his wife, secretary and two visitors sat nearby, he closed his eyes and went into a trance. Soon he started to speak, saying, "Yes, we have the body …" Next he related what he visualized??"all of it, including the diagnosis, which was startlingly accurate. The letter Bedford's sister later received was a transcript of his trance remarks.

Kahn secured the services of a sympathetic physician who was willing to employ the unconventional treatment Cayce had proposed. Six months later Jack Bedford was a well man, out of the mental hospital and back to work at the post office.