WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF. 283 



rhetorical effects. A card held between his eyes and his manuscript 

 did not interfere with his work. After a page |had been written it 

 was removed, and a blank sheet of paper of the same size laid in its 

 place, as in the experiment on Dr. Mesnet's patient. On this blank 

 sheet the unconscious writer made his corrections in the exact lines 

 in which they would have appeared in his manuscript in this latter 

 respect imitating to the life the sergeant's procedure. In respect of 

 his sensations, the subject of the archbishop's notice evinced a more 

 acute disposition than Sergeant F., for his words bore only upon the 

 subject which was engrossing his thoughts, and he heard and saw 

 only such things as immediately concerned his work ; whilst he 

 detected the difference between brandy and water, when the latter 

 fluid was supplied instead of the former, which he had asked for. 

 The subjects and thoughts of one sleep-vigil were remembered 

 during the next, but he was entirely unconscious in his waking hours 

 of all that had taken place in his acted dreams. 



It may thus be held that an injury of the brain may induce a condi- 

 tion closely allied in every respect to that exhibited in the natural sleep- 

 vigil; the differences between the condition of the priest and Sergeant F. 

 being those of degree and not of kind, and the superiority of intellect, 

 if so we may term it, being, as might naturally have been expected, on 

 the side of the somnambulist. The correlation of the acts of the auto- 

 matic patient with those of the dreamer is too plain to be mistaken. 

 In both cases there would seem on superficial consideration to have 

 been a power of discerning objects and of constructing a written 

 manuscript, well-nigh as wonderful as that of " second sight " itself. 

 But the explanation of such conditions is to be founded upon the 

 consideration that in somnambulism and in the automatic patient, as 

 in abstraction, reverie, and simple dreaming, there exists the power 

 of projecting outwardly from mind and brain a vivid conception of 

 the object engaging the attention of the dreamer a power intensified 

 and accelerated, as we have already seen, by the concentration of the 

 faculties wholly withdrawn from the outer world upon the one 

 and engrossing subject of the vigil. It seems perfectly clear that, as 

 has well been expressed, we meet in the somnambulist the actor of a 

 dream, under conditions of mind produced by some functional 

 disturbance of brain. In the closely allied automatic state, also, we 

 find a condition of mind the result of direct alteration of brain- 

 structure, in which, as in the sleep- vigil, there exists a power of the 

 brain to guide the body in the absence of consciousness, as commonly 

 understood such a power being perchance merely an exaggerated 

 form of that whereby the day-dreamer withdraws his Ego from the 

 outer world and communes with the universe which his fancy builds. 



But we may now profitably study the dream pure and simple, as a 

 conclusion to these chronicles of the abnormal action of brain and 



