Then wake the witch . . .

["Karen L. Newcombe" <kln@crl.com>]

"Waking the Witch" was a form of torture used by christian 
interrogators.  A harness was fastened to a suspected witch's head which 
held a sharpened object, sometimes a set of disks or plates, inside her 
or his mouth.  The harness was fastened to a pole above the person's 
reach and they were left there.  When they collapsed from exhaustion or 
tried to lower their head into a different position the inside of their 
mouth was cut.  

Another favourite method of extracting confessions was to dunk people in 
water repeatedly, sometimes until they drowned.  Tying stones around 
their legs kept them from floating.

Sorry for the gory report, but it certainly fits with the idea that the 
person in The Ninth Wave is having out-of-body experiences, visiting past 
incarnations, seeing the loved one at home alone, going to the future to 
say hello old lady to the self that is to be, and then leaving the world 
to see earth from above.  Why did I go?  She regrets leaving and plunges 
back into her body, to be rescued (there's a light in the deep, obviously 
the little light of her life vest bobbing in the waves) and returned to land.

Karen  kln@crl.com  "I kiss the ground . . ."