600 P8YCH0L0OT. 



inertly into the background of the mind, and let the incon- 

 gruous images reign alone. These images acquire, more- 

 over, an exceptional vivacity ; they become first ' hypnagogic 

 hallucinations,' and then, as the sleep grows deejDer, dreams. 

 Now the ' mono-ideism,' or else the impotency and failure 

 to ' rally ' on the part of the background-ideas, Avhich thus 

 characterize somnolescence, are unquestionably the result 

 of a special physiological change occurring in the brain at 

 that time. Just so that similar mono-ideism, or dissocia- 

 tion of the reigning fancy from those other thoughts which 

 might possibly act as its 'reductives,' which characterize 

 the hypnotic consciousness, must equally be due to a 

 special cerebral change. The term 'hypnotic trance,' which 

 I employ, tells us nothing of what the change is, but it 

 marks the fact that it exists, and is consequently a useful 

 expression. The great vivacity of the hypnotic images (as 

 gauged by their motor effects), the oblivion of them when 

 normal life is resumed, the abrupt awakening, the recollec- 

 tion of them again in subsequent trances, the anesthesia 

 and hypersaesthesia which are so frequent, all point away 

 from our simple waking credulity and ' suggestibility ' as 

 the type by which the phenomena are to be interpreted, 

 and make us look rather towards sleep and dreaming, or 

 towards those deej)er alterations of the personality known 

 as automatism, double consciousness, or ' second ' person- 

 ality for the true analogues of the hypnotic trance.* Even 

 the best hypnotic subjects pass through life without any 

 one suspecting them to possess such a remarkable suscep- 

 tibility, until by deliberate experiment it is made manifest. 

 The operator fixes their eyes or their attention a short time 

 to develop the proj)itious phase, holds them in it by his 

 talk, and tJie state being there, makes them the puppets of all 

 his suggestions. But no ordinary suggestions of waking life 

 ever took such control of their mind. 



* The state is not identical with sleep, however analogous in certain 

 respects. The lighter stages of it, particularly, differ from sleep and 

 dreaming, inasmuch as they are characterized almost exclusively by imis- 

 cular inabilities and compulsions, which are not noted in ordinary somno- 

 lescence, and the mind, wliich is confused in somnolescence, may be quite 

 clearly conscious, in the liglitcr state of trance, of all that is going on. 



