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David Owen -  Copies in Seconds: How a lone inventor and an unknown company created the biggest communication breakthrough since Gutenberg—Chester Carlson and the birth of the Xerox Machine

Both Carlsons made substantial contributions to spiritual and parapsychological groups that were of particular interest to Dorris - some of which had become important to him as well.

Dorris had always had a powerful mystical side, which had never been fully engaged by any organized religion. She meditated, studied Eastern philosophers, and pursued her own, idiosyncratic inclinations, with increasing participation from him.

"The spiritual life is the only thing I'm interested in, really," she said in her seventies. "I am not interested in anything else. The rest I do because I have to do it."

She had believed since childhood that she possessed psychic and other paranormal powers. Carlson was skeptical, she felt, but he helped her test her abilities, and she believed that he was psychic, too. ("Many scientists are, you know,” she said once.)

He would make simple drawings and seal them in envelopes before going to work, and after he had left the house Dorris would attempt to visualize what he had drawn. "I would lie down with a box of these drawings beside me," she explained. ”and after exercising a certain discipline of the mind, I would out and with eyes closed take an envelope, hold it in my hand, and demand an answer from myself as to what it was." Her rate of success, she reported, was high.

She also often had premonition and other visions, and she believed that when she was asleep she frequently left what she called her "physical body."