Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/302

 286 NOTES. stage of an epileptic fit, or as a substitute for it, is well recognised, and Hughlings Jackson has regarded it as a ground to suspect the presence of epilepsy. Not only is this phenomenon found in all these conditions of imperfect waking consciousness ; it is also found in the full dream consciousness of sleep. Thus Kraepelin tells how he dreamed of smoking his fourth or fifth cigar, although he had never smoked in his life, and we are all probably familiar with dreams in which we perform extra- ordinary actions which seem habitual to us. Thus in all these conditions we appear to be in the presence of an en- feebled and impaired state of consciousness approximating to the true confusion of dream consciousness. It seems as if externally excited sensations in such cases are received by the exhausted cerebral centres in so blurred a form that an illusion takes place and they are mistaken for internally excited sensations, for memories. It has been argued by some who admit that there is often an element of fatigue in paramnesia (for instance by Allin, " Recognition," American Journal of Psychology, Jan., 1896) that the real cause of the false memory is an abnormal celerity of perception, perhaps due to hyperaesthesia. The scene would thus be perceived so quickly that the subject concludes that he must have had this experience before. That the subject often has a feeling of unusual rapidity of perception may very well be admitted. But there is no reason whatever to suppose that the perception actually is received with any snch unusual rapidity. The probabilities are hi the other direction. We know that many influences (such as drugs like alcohol) which produce a feeling of heightened and quickened perceptions really have a slowing and dulling effect. In the same way the wise and beautiful things we utter in dreams on awaking are usually found to be commonplace, if not meaningless. There is no evidence to show that paramnesia is accompanied by a real heightening of perception, while, as we have seen, a broad survey of the facts makes it more reasonable to suppose that we have, on the contrary, a sudden fall towards the dream state. In this connexion it is well to bear in mind that, as Tissie has pointed out, there are probably many stages in the dream state. The effects of hypnotic suggestion may help to explain paramnesia. Although hypnosis and sleep are not usually considered to be precisely identical conditions, they are, without doubt, closely allied. In sleep, as in hypnosis, we accept a suggestion, with or without a straggle. In the paramnesic state we seem to find, in a slighter stage of a like condition, the same process in a reversed form. Instead of accepting a representation as an actual present fact, we accept the actual present fact as merely a representation. The sensory centres are in such a state of exhaustion and disorder that they receive an actual external sensation in the feebler shape of a representation. The actual fact becomes merely a suggestion of far distant things. It reaches con- sciousness in the enfeebled shape of an old memory "... like to something I remember A great while since, a long, long tune ago ". Paramnesia is thus an internal hallucination, a reversed hallucination, it is true, but while so reversed, the stream of consciousness is still following the line of least resistance. Such at all events is the explanation I should offer, and it is certainly simpler than the complicated, ingenious theories which have been invented to explain the phenomena of paramnesia, phenomena which are of no little interest since in earlier stages of culture they must have had a real influence on belief, suggesting to primitive man that he somehow had had wider experiences than he knew of, and that, as Wordsworth put it, he trailed clouds of glory behind him.