Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/565

Rh the sensation had succeeded in developing, the least suggestion of torture as an explanation would have been quenched by a mass of inconsistent ideas. In sleep the grotesque notion finds no obstacle to its acceptance. Who has not dreamed of himself as being in some public place and then suddenly become aware that he is naked and exposed to the gaze of the crowd? What is this but the coalescence of the sensations arising from his actual state as he lies in bed with the thought systems representing his imaginary experiences?

If one puts a man asleep and all the while keeps talking to him, touching him and otherwise keeping him aware of one's presence, one gets in many cases a peculiar type of sleep known as a hypnotic state. We may suppose that all the elements composing the man's normal consciousness are disordinated and for the most part extinguished, but the one group which he calls the consciousness of the presence of his friend Smith who is hypnotizing him still remains. That has no chance to go to sleep, as it were, and consequently in his disordinated brain all processes originated by that one still active group tend to work out their normal results with a precision and certainty unknown in waking life. He is either totally dead to all other stimuli, or can be made aware of them only with difficulty. Frequently the attempt to force such a stimulus upon him is followed by great nervous excitement, somewhat like that which usually follows a great shock or surprise. This is, I think, the true character of the suggestibility found in hypnotic states and of the so-called phenomenon of rapport.

Another common form of disordination is that which accompanies a "nerve storm." We know that if a mass of heated and moisture-laden air begins to escape into the upper and colder regions of the atmosphere at any point, the upgoing current, no matter how slender at the outset, may increase in volume and velocity until it develops into a vast storm center hundreds of miles in extent. So also does it appear that a relatively small and localized nerve explosion is capable, under conditions which we do not at all understand, of propagating itself irregularly through the nervous system, ignoring the usual association paths, until the entire nervous mechanism is exhausted. Such a progressive, periodic disturbance is said to be epileptiform. The causes of the various forms of epilepsy are often unknown. Some, however, are due to mechanical irritation of the cortex, as by a depression of the skull, an extravasation of blood, disease of the membranes, or the growth of a tumor on the cortex. Others are produced by some continuous and intense peripheral irritation, as that springing from an unhealed wound, an ingrown nail, etc. Others still are due to the memory of some great shock or fright, and