DEAR ARCHY.--The subjects which remain to complete our brief
correspondence, are Religious Delusions, the Possessed, and Witchcraft.
In order that I may set these fully and distinctly before you, it is
necessary that you should know what is meant by Trance.
You have already had partial glimpses of this comprehensive phenomenon.
Arnod Paole was in a trance, in his grave in the church-yard of
Meduegua: Timarchus was in a trance in the cave of Trophonius.
But we must go still further back. To conceive properly the nature of
trance, it is necessary to form clear ideas of the state of the mind in
ordinary sleeping and waking.
During our ordinary waking state, we are conscious of an uninterrupted
flow of thought, which we may observe to be modified by three
influences--the first, suggestions of our experience and reflections,
impulses of our natural and acquired character; the second, present
impressions on our senses; the third, voluntary exertion of the
attention to detain one class of ideas in preference to others.
Further, we habitually perceive things around us, by or through
sensation. But on some, and for the most part trivial occasions, we seem
endowed with another sort of perception, which is either direct, or
dependent on new modes of sensation.
Again, the balance of the mental machinery may be overthrown. The
suggestions of the imagination may become sensorial illusions; the
judgment may be the subject of parallel hallucinations; the feelings may
be perverted; our ideas may lose connexion and coherence; and
intelligence may sink into fatuity.
So much for our waking state.
During sleep, there are no adequate reasons for doubting that the flow
of our ideas continues as uninterrupted as in a waking state. It is
true, that some persons assert that they never dream; and others that
they dream occasionally only. But there is a third class, to which I
myself belong, who continually dream, and who always, on waking,
distinctly discern the fugitive rearguard of their last sleep thoughts.
The simplest view of these diversified instances, is to suppose that all
persons in sleep are always dreaming, and that the spaces seemingly
vacant of dreams, are only gaps in the memory; that all persons asleep
always dream, but that all persons do not always remember their dreams.
The suggestive influences that modify the current of ideas in sleep, are
not so numerous as those in operation in our waking state.
The principal, indeed in general the exclusive, impulse to our dreaming
thoughts, is our past experience and existing character, from and in
obedience to which, imagination moulds our dreams.
Not that sensation is suspended in sleep. On the contrary, it appears to
have its usual acuteness; and impressions made upon our senses--the
feelings produced by an uneasy posture, for instance, or the
introduction of sudden light into the room, or a loud and unusual noise,
or even whisperings in the ear--will give a new and corresponding
direction to the dreaming thoughts. Sensation is only commonly not
called into play in sleep: we shut our eyes; we even close the pupils;
we cover up our ears; court darkness and quiet; knowing that the more we
exclude sensible impressions the better we shall sleep.
But the great difference between sleeping and waking, that which indeed
constitutes the essence of the former state, psychically considered, is
the suspension of the attention--all the leading phenomena of sleep are
directly traceable to this cause: for example--
In sleep we cease to support ourselves, and fall, if we were previously
standing or sitting. That is, we cease to attend to the maintenance of
our equilibrium. We forget the majority of our dreams: attention is the
soul of recollection.
Our dreams are often nonsense, or involve absurdities or ideas which we
know to be false. The check of the attention is absent.
Our ideas whirl with unwonted rapidity in our dreams; the fly-wheel of
the attention has been taken off.
When we are being overcome with sleep, we are conscious of not being
able to fix our attention.
When we would encourage sleep, we endeavour to avoid thoughts which
would arouse the attention.
Though the sensibility of our organs is really undiminished, _it seems
to be lowered_ in sleep, because then no attention is given to common
sensation.
Sleep, however, it should be added, may be either profound, or light, or
imperfect; in the two latter cases, the attention seems to be less
completely suspended.
So, in sleep, it is the attention alone that really sleeps; the rest of
the mental powers and impulses are on the contrary in motion, but free
and unchecked, obtaining their refreshment and renovation from
gambolling about and stretching themselves. The inspector only slumbers;
or, to use a closer figure, he retires to a sufficient distance from
them, not to be disturbed by any common noise they may make; any great
disturbance calls him back directly; likewise, he sits with his watch in
his hand, having a turn for noting the flight of time.
In contrast with the above conception of the states of sleeping and
waking, the alternations of which compose our ordinary being, I have now
to hold up another conception, resembling the first, of which it is the
double,--but vaguer, more shadowy, of larger and gigantic proportions,
from its novelty astonishing, like the mocking spectre of the Hartz;
which is yet but your own shadow cast by the level sunbeams on the
morning mist.
All the phenomena embodied in this conception, I propose to denominate
Trance. But let me premise that all do not belong to every instance of
trance. If I undertook to specify the external appearances of the human
species, I must enunciate among other things, as colours of the skin,
white, yellow, brown, black; as qualities of the hair, that it is
flowing, soft, lanky, harsh, frizzled, woolly; but I should not mean
that every human being presented all these features.
Then, as our ordinary being presents an alternation of sleeping and
waking, so does trance-existence. There is a trance-sleep and a
trance-waking to correspond with ordinary sleep and ordinary waking.
As natural sleep has different degrees of profoundness, so has trance
sleep. They present a latitude so extensive, that it is convenient and
allowable to lay down three different degrees or states of trance-sleep.
Then, of trance-sleep first, and of its three degrees.
The deepest grade of trance-sleep extinguishes all the ordinary signs of
animation. It forms the condition in which many are buried alive. It is
the so-called vampyr state in the vampyr superstition. [See Letter II.
of this series.]
The middle grade presents the appearance of profound unconsciousness;
but a gentle breathing and the circulation are distinguishable. The body
is flexible, relaxed, perfectly impassive to ordinary stimuli. The
pupils of the eyes are not contracted, but yet are fixed. This state is
witnessed occasionally in hysteria, after violent fits of hysteric
excitement.
In the lightest degree of trance-sleep, the person can sustain itself
sitting; the pupils are in the same state as above, or natural; the
apparent unconsciousness profound.
Two features characterise trance-sleep in all its grades. One, an
insensibility to all common stimulants, however violently applied; the
other, an inward flow of ideas, a dream or vision. It is as well to
provide all words with a precise meaning. The term vision had better be
restricted to mean a dream during trance-sleep.
The behaviour of Grando, who had been buried in the vampyr state, when
they were clumsily cutting his head off, makes no exception to the first
of the above positions. He had then just emerged out of his
trance-sleep, either through the lapse of time, or from the admission of
fresh air, or what not.
It will not be doubted that the mind may have visions in all the grades
of trance-sleep, if it can be proved capable of them in the deepest;
therefore, one example will suffice for all three cases.
Henry Engelbrecht, as we learn in a pamphlet published by himself in the
year 1639, after a most ascetic life, during which he had experienced
sensorial illusions, was thrown for a brief period into the deepest form
of trance-sleep, which event he thus describes:--
In the year 1623, exhausted by intense mental excitement of a religious
kind, and by abstinence from food, after hearing a sermon which strongly
affected him, he felt as if he could combat no more, so he gave in and
took to his bed. There he lay a week without tasting any thing but the
bread and wine of the sacrament. On the eighth day, he thought he fell
into the death-struggle; death seemed to invade him from below upwards;
his body became rigid; his hands and feet insensible; his tongue and
lips incapable of motion: gradually his sight failed him, but he still
heard the laments and consultations of those around him. This gradual
demise lasted from mid-day till eleven at night, when he heard the
watchmen; then he lost consciousness of outward impressions. But an
elaborate vision of immense detail began; the theme of which was, that
he was first carried down to hell, and looked into the place of torment;
from thence, quicker than an arrow, was he borne to paradise. In these
abodes of suffering and happiness, he saw and heard and smelt things
unspeakable. These scenes, though long in apprehension, were short in
time, for he came enough to himself by twelve o'clock, again to hear the
watchmen. It took him another twelve hours to come round entirely. His
hearing was first restored; then his sight, feeling, and motion
followed; as soon as he could move his limbs, he rose. He felt himself
stronger than before the trance.
Trance-waking presents a great variety of phases; but it is sufficient
for a general outline of the subject to make or specify but two
grades--half-waking and full-waking.
In trance half-waking, the person rises, moves about with facility, will
converse even, but is almost wholly occupied with a dream, which he may
be said to act, and his perceptions and apprehensions are with
difficulty drawn to any thing out of the circle of that dream.
In trance full-waking, the person is completely alive to all or most of
the things passing around him, and would not be known by a stranger to
be otherwise than ordinarily awake.
I propose to occupy the latter half of this letter with details of cases
exemplifying these two states. Those which I shall select, will be
instances either of somnambulism, double consciousness, or catalepsy,
the popular phenomena of which I take this occasion of displaying. By
these details the following features will be proved to belong to
trance-waking.
1. Common feeling, taste, and smell, are generally suspended in
trance-waking. In trance half-waking, sight is equally suspended. In
trance full-waking, every shade of modified sensibility up to perfect
possession of sensation, presents itself in different cases, and
sometimes in successive periods of the same cases.
2. The general diminution or suspension of sensation is, as it were,
made up for, either by an intense acuteness of partial sensation, often
developed in an unaccustomed organ, or by some new mode of perception.