AND BODILY STATES UPON THE IMAGINATION. 241 



part of the plienomena of our dreams. Persons who never dream 

 till they grow up are generally visited, soon after their first experi- 

 ence of this kind, by a change in the bodily constitution terminating 

 in acute disease, or death. Of all dreams with whose characters 

 we are acquainted, those which produce sleep-walking are the most 

 vivid, intense, and real, and are excited, in persons predisposed to 

 this affection, by the most trivial occurrences. Under ordinary cir- 

 cumstances, we are hardly led to recur to the events of the day in 

 our dreams, except these have been of an unusually stimulating or 

 impressive character. But the somnambulist dreams from the 

 merest trifle; his Fancy is like the vane, veering towards any 

 point from the faintest idea that strikes it. It is sufficient to de- 

 termine the Imagination of the sleep-walker by impressing his 

 attention with any subject immediately before retiring to rest. If 

 we tell or read to him of a shipwreck, he no sooner closes his eyes 

 in slumber, than he is immediately transported to the foaming 

 billowSj and he manifests, by his attempts at swimming, and the 

 most convulsive movements, his sense of danger, and anxiety to es- 

 cape from it. Devaud was devoted to reading tales of robbers; and 

 dearly did he pay for his indulgence, undergoing a thousand terrors, 

 during the somnambulatory state, from their fancied attacks. Com- 

 monly, however, the sleep-walker's imaginings are limited to the 

 scenes of his home, with which he is most familiar, and its accom- 

 panying or surrounding circumstances and localities ; and it is natu- 

 ral to suppose that the scenes with which he is most conversant 

 when awake, should be most frequently the area of his dreaming 

 fancy. As in ordinary dreams, so in those accompanied by somnam- 

 bulism, evident bodily disorder, as fever, local congestion or deter- 

 mination of blood, particularly towards the head, dyspepsia, or indi- 

 gestion, aggravate, in a great degree, all the phenomena of sleep- 

 walking, and render the attacks longer, and more dangerous. Cir- 

 cumstances which have a tendency to favour the removal of an in- 

 creased quantity of blood determined towards the head, likewise have 

 a tendency to mitigate or prevent attacks of. somnambulism where 

 there is a predisposition to it. Signor Pozzi, physician to Pope 

 Benedict XIV., had an unusual quantity of hair, and it was only 

 by keeping it close cut that he could counteract the tendency to 

 sleep-walking. The bodily affections, however, upon which sleep- 

 walking depends, are extremely variable ; its essential character 

 consisting in a natural irritability of mind, liable to be aggravated 

 by any morbid change in the corporeal constitution with which 

 that mind is so intimately connected. 



VOL. IV. NO. XVI. S 



