POSTHYPNOTIC AND CRIMINAL SUGGESTION. 231 



curred to me that the attitude in which he was lying was one of 

 the stages through which the patient regularly passes in the 

 course of the hystero-epileptic convulsion — it is known as the 

 opisthotonic position — and that the convulsion might be due to 

 the tactile-motor suggestion given by the feeling of the attitude. 

 As soon as we put him in a sitting posture the symptoms of con- 

 vulsion disappeared. 



The mode in which the suggestion is initiated is not essential 

 to the theory, but it is often important in practice. Commands 

 are usually realized more readily than mere suggestions, but the 

 latter are sometimes the more efficacious. In general, the phenom- 

 ena differ in degree only and not in kind from those of normal 

 life, and just as a categorical suggestion may be realized at once, 

 so may a hypothetical suggestion be realized under the circum- 

 stances indicated by the operator. Most of the illustrations which 

 I have been using belonged to the former type ; to the latter be- 

 long the still more curious phenomena of deferred and posthyp- 

 notic suggestion. 



Simple deferred suggestions executed during the state of 

 heightened suggestibility may be dismissed with a mere mention. 

 The really interesting cases are those in which the execution of 

 the suggestion given during a suggestible condition is deferred 

 until the patient has returned to the normal state. As the phe- 

 nomena have been studied chiefly in hypnotic states, artificially 

 produced deferred suggestions of this kind are termed posthyp- 

 notic suggestions. 



Analogous phenomena are found, however, as we would expect, 

 under other circumstances. We are familiar, for example, with 

 the effect sometimes wrought by dreams upon the waking life of 

 the succeeding day. A happy mood or its reverse can often be 

 traced to the effect of some vivid dream, and doubtless many of 

 the mornings on which we " get out of bed on the wrong side " 

 have been preceded by nights filled with disagreeable but forgot- 

 ten dreams. M , of whom I have before spoken, has given me 



an excellent illustration of the possible after-effect of a forgotten 

 dream. He once told me that he had been for some months tor- 

 mented by an apparition. He would wake in the middle of the 

 night to find a hideous man beside him. The man held in his 

 hand a knife, looked at him threateningly, then slowly moved 

 backward, and, when at a considerable distance, vanished. Occa- 

 sionally he saw in the place of the man a young woman with a 

 black shawl wrapped about her head. He knew that these figures 

 were unreal and had no belief in ghosts, yet they always left him 

 terrified and suffering from nervous shock. I questioned him 

 closely, but could get no clew to their origin. He had never had a 

 dream in which they figured, and had never heard any story that 



