280 STUDIES IN LIFE^AND SENSE. 



tions elsewhere. After a fit of stupor excited by jealousy she really 

 awoke from a sleep of a year's duration, to find herself surrounded 

 by her friends at Shoreham, and in the full possession of her natural 

 faculties, save hearing, but without the slightest remembrance of her 

 acts in her year of mind-abeyance. 



There is little need to pursue these strange but instructive 

 histories further, and we may now profitably turn to consider the 

 parallelism between the automatic patient, the somnambulist, and the 

 victim of commonplace abstraction. The somnambulist has in all ages 

 excited the curiosity, often the fear, and not unfrequently the super- 

 stition of his fellow-men. By Horstius we ar.e told that sleep-walkers 

 were named " the ill-baptized," from an idea or belief that their acts 

 arose from part of the ceremony of baptism having been omitted, 

 and from the consequent misrule of evil spirits. This writer himself, 

 whilst opposing this view of matters, strongly leans to the belief that 

 somnambulists represented prophets and seers who were guided and 

 influenced by angels. In any case, it is by no means strange that 

 the incidents of the sleep-vigil should have impressed the early 

 mind with notions of a connection with an unseen universe. In the 

 study of the sleep-vigil, we meet as before with stages and gradations 

 which carry us from the waking dream or reverie to the more typical 

 form of somnambulism proper. A form of sleep- vigil is known, for 

 instance, in which the subject passes naturally, and without a dis- 

 turbing interval, from the abstraction of the waking state into true 

 somnambulism. Galen himself relates that he fell asleep whilst 

 walking, and was aroused by striking his foot against a stone. Other 

 cases are common enough in medical pages, in which persons have 

 continued to play a musical instrument for some time after falling 

 asleep, and similarly a reader and speaker has continued his recital 

 during the earlier part of a sound nap. Here there is exemplified 

 the passage, without a break, from abstraction to somnambulistic 

 action. It is difficult, indeed, to find adequate grounds for drawing 

 any hard-and-fast line of demarcation between the person who 

 " thinks aloud " in his day dream, and the speaker who, fast asleep, 

 continues his flow of oratory. 



But the more typical cases of sleep-vigil present us with a further 

 development of practical wakefulness amid abstraction from outward 

 affairs of the most complete kind. To the consideration and ex- 

 planation of natural somnambulism we are aptly led by the details 

 of that artificial sleep-vigil which has received the popular name 

 of "mesmerism" or "hypnotism." It is not our intention to say 

 anything in the present 'instance regarding a subject which in itself 

 presents material sufficient for a lengthy and extended investigation : 

 we may, however, briefly glance at the essentials of this curious state in 

 its especial relations to somnambulism and dreams. All physiologists 



