Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 3.djvu/327

Rh duration, and can be less frequently procured by a voluntary effort; for the internal tempest becomes more violent, the torrents of disconnected ideas are so powerful as completely to arrest the attention, and the mind is gradually withdrawn altogether from the contemplation of external realities, being conscious only of its own internal workings. There is always preserved, however, a much greater amount of "self-consciousness" than exists in ordinary Dreaming; the condition rather corresponding with that in which the sleeper knows that he dreams, and, if his dream be agreeable, makes an effort to prolong it, being conscious of a fear lest he should by awaking cause the dissipation of the pleasant illusion.

It is another characteristic of the action of hashish that the succession of ideas has at first less of incoherence than in ordinary Dreaming, and the ideal events do not so far depart from possible realities; the disorder of the mind being at first manifested in errors of sense, in false convictions, or in the predominance of one or more extravagant ideas. These ideas and convictions are generally not altogether of an imaginary character, but are rather suggested by external impressions, these impressions being erroneously interpreted by the perceptive faculties, and giving origin, therefore, to fallacious notions of the objects which excited them. It is in that more advanced stage of the "fantasia' which immediately precedes the complete withdrawal of the mind from external things, and in which the self-consciousness and power of the Will are weakened, that this perverted impressibility becomes most remarkable, more especially as the general excitement of the Feelings causes the erroneous notions to have a powerful effect in arousing them.