Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/776

756 precisely what happens in hypnotism. These stimuli generally consist in words spoken by the hypnotizer to the sleeping subject, who hears and understands everything that is said to him as though it was said in a dream. In many instances the hypnotized person realizes the existence of every object or person called up to his mind by the words of the hypnotizer. He sees the dog, or the man, or the house, exactly as its presence is affirmed by the speaker. He can be made to taste imaginary fluids or hear imaginary voices at the will of the physician, and, as I have just said, all these impressions are as real to him as actual perceptions. His will is so weakened that he can generally be made to execute the most varied motions at the command of the person who has put him to sleep. He may try to resist commands, but the resistance is feeble, and he eventually obeys automatically. His dreams are formed and guided by an external agency, and his muscles are brought into activity and controlled by the same influence.

The ideas, acts, and sensations which can thus be insinuated, so to speak, into the brain of a person in the hypnotic state, through the agency of speech, or any other external influence, are technically called suggestions. Individuals vary greatly in the readiness with which they react to suggestions when hypnotized, and their suggestibility is said to be high or low as the case may be. In general, persons possessed of a lively imagination in the normal waking state, are highly susceptible to suggestion in the hypnotic condition. Thus the two essential elements of hypnotism are sleep and suggestion. The degree of sleep varies in different cases, from the lightest somnolence imaginable, to a condition of profound lethargy, from which the subject can only be awakened with difficulty.

Suggestibility is by no means peculiar to hypnotized persons. Almost every one is sensitive to suggestion to a certain extent when awake, for in every human being, no matter how skeptical he may consider himself, there exists a certain degree of credulity, and this credulity may be played upon and taken advantage of in a measure. Children can be made to believe the most preposterous statements if they are made with sufficient gravity. The majority of healthy children are, moreover, auto-suggestionists; that is, they create air-castles, in which they soon come to believe firmly as objective realities. Too often such auto-suggestions are regarded by parents and friends as deliberate lies. They are in reality simply the creations of phantasy, which have become established as truths in consequence of being unopposed and uncorrected by reason and experience. In the course of time the reasoning