OF SLEEP AND SOMNAMBULISM. 719 



give rise to subsequent feelings of discomfort, of whose origin the individual 

 is entirely unconscious. 1 In the first of the phases just referred to, a train 

 of reasoning is often carried out with remarkable clearness and correctness, 

 and its results expressed in appropriate language, or otherwise acted on. 

 Thus, a mathematician may work out a difficult problem, an orator may 

 make a speech appropriate to the occasion on which he supposes himself to 

 be called up, or an author may compose and commit to writing poetry or 

 prose, upon the subject which occupies his thoughts. But it is a frequent de- 

 fect of the intellectual operations carried on in this condition, that through 

 the complete absorption of the attention by one set of considerations, no ac- 

 count is taken of others which ought to modify the conclusion ; and this, 

 although it may be palpably inconsistent with the teachings of ordinary ex- 

 perience, is not felt to be so, unless the latter should happen to present them- 

 selves unbidden to the thoughts. 



586. The second of the phases above mentioned, which is especially seen 

 in the artificial Somnambulism induced by the (so-called) Mesmeric process, 

 or by the fixed gaze at a near object (as practiced by Mr. Braid under the 

 name of Hypnotism), is essentially the same as that of the " biological " 

 condition, save in the different relation which they respectively bear to the 

 waking state; for there is the same readiness to receive new impressions 

 through the senses (the visual sense, however, being generally in abeyance), 

 and the same want of persistence in any one train of ideas, the direction of 

 the thoughts being entirely determined by the suggestions which are intro- 

 duced from without. In either of these extreme forms of Somnambulism, 

 and in the numerous intermediate phases which connect the two, the con- 

 sciousness seems entirely given up to the one impression which is operating 

 upon it at the time; so that whilst the attention is exclusively directed upon 

 any object, whether actually perceived through the senses, or brought sug- 

 gestively before the mind by previous ideas, nothing else is felt. Thus there 

 may be complete insensibility to bodily pain, the somnambulist's whole at- 

 tention being given to what is passing in his mind ; yet in an instant, by 

 directing the attention to the organs of sense, the anaesthesia may be re- 

 placed by ordinary sensibility ; or, by the fixation of the attention on any 

 one class of sensations, these shall be perceived with most extraordinary 

 acuteuess, whilst there may be a state of complete insensibility as regards 

 the rest. Thus, the Author has witnessed a case in which such an exalta- 

 tion of the sense of Smell was manifested, that the subject of it discovered 

 without difficulty the owner of a glove placed in his hand, in an assembly 

 of fifty or sixty persons ; and in the same case, as in many others, there was 

 a similar exaltation of the sense of Temperature. The exaltation of the 

 Muscular Sense, by which various actions that ordinarily require the guidance 

 of vision, are directed independently of it, is a phenomenon common to the 

 "mesmeric" with various other forms of artificial as well as of natural Som- 

 nambulism. The Author has repeatedly seen Mr. Braid's "hypnotized" 

 subjects write with the most perfect regularity, when an opaque screen was 

 interposed between their eyes and the paper, the lines being equidistant and 

 parallel; and it is not uncommon for the writer to carry back his pen or 

 pencil to dot an i or cross a t, or make some other correction in a letter or 

 word. Mr. B. had one patient who would thus go back and correct with 

 accuracy the writing on a whole page of note-paper ; but if the paper was 

 moved from the position it had previously occupied on the table, all the 



1 See a very curious example of this kind, which fell under the Author's own ob- 

 servation, narrated in the article Sleep, in the Cyclop, of Anat. and Phys., vol. iv, 

 p. 693. 



