SLEEP-WAKING. 659 



sexual feelings and functions are establishing themselves and the 

 former not yet gratified s , and the whole young mind is under- 

 going the changes of the adult period; are often attended by 

 pain in the head, and all the common symptoms of deranged dis- 

 tribution of blood and of morbid sensibility in that part ; they 

 have all the same exciting causes as other nervous diseases ; 

 the pre-disposition to them is sometimes hereditary l ; and they 

 require the treatment common to all other nervous diseases. 

 To consider them as examples of the soul acting independently 

 of the body in the disease, is discreditable to an author of the 

 present day. Old authors regarded common dreams in this 

 point of view ; and I formerly quoted the remark, that the soul 

 must work very strangely, when so disencumbered of the activity 

 of the brain, for us to dream " such perilous stuff as dreams are 

 made of." ( Supra, p. 626.) The cases of double consciousness 

 in those affected with the disease (supra^ p. 646.) ought to 

 prove two souls to exist ; and one of them to be able to get 

 drunk alone in the case of the Irish porter, whose second con- 

 sciousness showed itself only in his intoxication. Sleep-waking 

 is neither more nor less than diseased sleep. The torpor far 

 exceeds that of common sleep, and is a coma like that of apo- 

 plexy, hysteria, or epilepsy; though in the first of these the 

 brain generally is prevented by pressure only from performing 

 its functions. In epilepsy we have equal coma: in a moment 

 the patient becomes insensible to mechanical violence, the loud- 

 est noise, and the strongest light : even when the disease is 

 partial, as in two little boys whom I attended, in whose fits 

 the eyelids only were convulsed and the head drawn back, the 

 insensibility came in a minute, and as suddenly ceased, and was 



s Of 50 cases which I have counted, 21 were apparently permanent, and 18 

 such occurred in males ; 1 6 patients were females, and 1 3 of these from 1 3 to 

 25 years of age, and unmarried ; of the 34 males, 16 were from 10 to perhaps 

 a little above 20 years of age, and apparently all unmarried : 7 of the young 

 patients were 16 years old. The chronic cases probably are more rare, but 

 appear so large in proportion from attracting greater attention and therefore be- 

 ing oftener recorded. 



t tt Negretti's son was subject to it from boyhood." Dr. Willis knew a family 

 in which the father and all the sons were sleep-wakers, and " the sons in their 

 nightly discursions ran against and awakened each other." Dr. Fritchard, Trea- 

 tise on Insanity, p, 459. 



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