AND BODILY STATES UPON THE I»IAGINATION. 227 



ing; the nervous system is, in them, so active and so easily excited, 

 particularly in some constitutions, that a day of pleasure with their 

 companions commonly produces sleep-talking, by reviving the 

 events of the day in vivid and unsettling dreams. Days of great 

 excitement are highly injurious to some children, by thus be- 

 coming the causes of disturbed and feverish nights. A youth, 

 about nine years old, had been visited, for several successive morn- 

 ings, with attacks of sleep-talking of rather an extraordinary cha- 

 racter. He would, for half an hour, hunt a pack of hounds, 

 as appeared by his hallooing and calling the dogs by their names, 

 and discoursing with the attendants of the chase; describing 

 exactly a day of hunting, which he had witnessed a year before, 

 going through all the most minute circumstances of it : calling 

 to people who were then present, and lamenting the absence 

 of others who were then also absent. He then sung an English, 

 and then an Italian song, part of them with his eyes open, and 

 part with them closed, but could not be awakened or excited by any 

 violence which it was proper to use. Reasoning metaphysically 

 upon this case, the hunting scene appears to have been rather an act 

 of the Memory than the Imagination, attended with the pleasurable 

 eagerness which was the consequence of those ideas recalled by re- 

 collection. Some occurrences of this nature are most singular, and 

 cannot be well explained by the laws of ontology, as far as they 

 are at present known. A very elegant and ingenious young lady 

 had an attack of sleep-talking on alternate days, which continued 

 nearly the whole day ; and as on her days of disorder she took up the 

 same kind of ideas which she had conversed about, in her sleep, the 

 day but one before, and could recollect nothing of them on the day she 

 was well, she appeared to her friends to possess two minds. Now, it 

 is probable (for Dr. Darwin, who relates this case, does not inform us 

 of the fact) that the subject of this lady's sleep, discourses, and re- 

 velations, were some previous occurrences, of a melancholy or secret 

 nature, which she did not choose to reveal to her friends, but which, 

 constantly preying upon and exciting her mind, produced that ex- 

 cess of sleep-disturbance which characterized her malady. Many 

 examples of this kind are to be found in real life, and in the poets. 

 Great crimes, from precisely similar circumstances, have been re- 

 vealed during sleep. Memory — busy, meddling memory — haunts 

 them by its harrowing dreams; and the disclosure (which involves 

 life itself, and which is guarded when the judgment is awake by- 

 all the watchfulness of suspicion) is made with its attendant cir- 

 cumstances, when the Memory and the Imagination escape in 



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