Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/397

Rh The moment of awakening presents curious features; most frequently, somnambulists on waking are in a deep stupefaction; they look at the persons around them without being able to believe the truth of what they are told; they have preserved no recollection of what has passed while they were in sleep; and, since, in a psychological point of view, time is measured only by the remembrance of ideas, they have wholly lost the notion of time. The moment when they were put to sleep is confounded with the moment of waking. It also happens that what took place during sleep returns to their memory when they are newly put to sleep; and this probably furnishes an explanation of the doubling of the personality of which some of the magnetizers speak. It is what we may call the collection of our memories that constitutes the I; and, when we find that certain memories are reserved for a special physical condition, we almost have a right to say that the personality is doubled, because it recalls a whole series of acts in sleep of which it is absolutely ignorant in the waking state.

The hysterical patients of the Salpêtrière can be put to sleep with the greatest ease. Anything that will powerfully excite the senses is sufficient to induce the somnambulic paroxysm—as, for instance, the flash of the electric light, or the metallic, harsh noise produced by suddenly striking the tomtom or the Chinese gong. Sleep comes right on, with such rapidity that the subjects do not even preserve the memory of the shock which has for a time destroyed the consciousness of their existence. If the gong is sounded while the patients are together in one of the courts of the hospital, the greater part of them will stop short with their eyes open and their limbs fixed in an attitude indicating stupefaction mingled with fright. This condition of sleep provoked by a violent shock to the nerves is not at all identical with the somnambulism which is induced by passes. The sleep is deeper, more animal, and, we might say, more pathological; the functions of the nervous system and the muscular system are more gravely disturbed. Insensibility is complete, and the patient, if some one does not wake her up, will remain for hours as if she were annihilated in a sleep without a dream. If the eyes are open, there is catalepsy—that is, the muscles will retain indefinitely the position that has been given them. If, for example, the arm has been lifted into the air and put into an unnatural position, it will continue raised in the attitude that has been imposed upon it. If, on the contrary, the eyes are closed, other phenomena will be brought out. The nerves will have become extremely excitable, so that any muscle may be made to contract by merely placing the finger across the nerve which produces that action. The muscles themselves are also extremely excitable, so that we may make them contract and even draw up by simply touching them. If we insist, we can cause them to draw up closely, and make the fingers double up upon the hand, and the forearm upon the arm. If we waken the patient