272 STUDIES IN LIFE AND SENSE. 



the understanding of the why and wherefore of dreaming and allied 

 conditions, we may in the next place endeavour to gain some ideas 

 respecting certain curious states which in one way or another may be 

 said to border the " land of Nod." Such are the remarkable cases 

 of producing insensibility or of feigning death at will, and those 

 which relate to the production of unnatural states allied to sleep, 

 and which in some measure aid our understanding of dreams and 

 their causation. As in many other acts and phenomena connected 

 with brain and mind, the phenomena of sleep and dreams do not stand 

 alone or unconnected with other mental states. On the contrary, it 

 is possible to trace well-marked gradations leading from the day- 

 dream to the reverie, and from these common instances of abstraction 

 to the somnolent condition itself. Nay, it may also be said that the 

 full understanding of dreaming, in so far as that is possible at present, 

 can only be arrived at from a knowledge of the facts which a study 

 of the waking dream or the automatic patient teaches us. Through 

 morbid and unwonted conditions, as in so many other instances in 

 the search after knowledge, we arrive at a comprehension of the ill- 

 understood affairs of common life. 



That there exists a power of producing at will conditions allied 

 in nature to sleep, or even extending to deep insensibility with appa- 

 rent cessation of the physical processes of life, is a well-known fact of 

 physiology. A condition approaching that of coma or insensibility thus 

 appears to be occasionally induced in man by an effort of the will. In 

 many animals a prolonged and periodical suspension of the activities of 

 ordinary existence normally occurs and is designated under the term 

 hybernation. The bear, squirrel, dormouse, and bat exemplify this con- 

 dition, in which, however, respiration is unimpeded, although its fre- 

 quency is reduced; and the animal, retiring to its winter quarters fat and 

 well favoured, emerges in spring in a lean condition. The nutritive 

 principal which was accumulated in the preceding summer has, in fact, 

 been converted into an account-current and used in the maintenance 

 of the slumbering organism. In such a case there is simply deep 

 somnolence and suspension of all ordinary activity and of the exer- 

 tions and waste attending the wakeful state. But a step further brings 

 us to the domain of pathology (or the science of disease) with its un- 

 wonted states, depending on disease or on conditions which approach 

 those of abnormal existence. Celsus speaks of a priest who could 

 separate himself from outward existence at will, and lie as one dead. 

 But the case of Colonel Townshend, related by Dr. George Cheyne 

 in his quaint book entitled "The English Malady; or, a Treatise of 

 Nervous Diseases of all kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, 

 Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Distemper, &c., London, 1733" 

 justly exceeds in interest any other known case of the kind, not 

 merely for the abnormal nature of the phenomena, but also from 



