DREAMS AND DELUSIONS. 103 



we frequently hear of dogs barking at imaginary sights or 

 sounds. Wood tells us of a terrier that would bark by the 

 hour together at some imaginary sound. 



Delusions of vision may be specially studied in the horse, 

 in whom they are frequent and natural results of defects or 

 disorders of the organ of vision the eye or of the absurd 

 or vicious ways in which man prevents due vision by the 

 animal. We have already seen that, even with perfect sight, 

 in certain lights, certain horses misinterpret the character 

 of harmless objects, they are easily frightened or startled, 

 subject to groundless alarm. Their inordinately vivid or 

 morbid imagination creates ideas of danger where no real 

 peril exists, and a morbid sensitiveness and restiveness are 

 the result. It can readily be understood that this ex- 

 treme timidity, this proneness to take unnecessary alarm, to 

 conjure up imaginary evils, becomes much greater when 

 defective vision of any kind, and from any cause, exists. 

 According to Pierquin, sight and the eye as well as a dis- 

 ordered imagination are more commonly involved than is 

 supposed in the skittishness, or restiveness, of the horse an 

 opinion that cannot be too carefully kept in view by all who 

 are called upon to deal with horses of the higher breeds, 

 especially riding and carriage horses considering the 

 nature and number of the serious accidents to man which 

 spring from such skittishness or restiveness. 



Delusions of sight in animals occasionally take the form, 

 as in man, of phantoms or phantasms, of spectral images, 

 of visions, of ghosts or apparitions, of imaginary persons, 

 animals, or things. And, moreover, it would appear to be 

 the same kind of spectral images that occur in other animals 

 as in man, in canine rabies, for instance, as in human hy- 

 drophobia. Further, the same kind of visual delusions 

 occur to man, and other animals at the same time, and 

 under the same circumstances. Thus impressionable women 

 and their domestic pets have been represented as seeing 

 ghosts at the same, or about the same, moment in the same 

 room or house. 



Wood gives the case of a lady and her cat simultaneously 

 seeing, and being variously affected mentally and physically 



