Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/723

Rh and she acted out the dreams I suggested to her with a grace that any actress might envy. I told her there was a plate of strawberries on the table. "Oh," said she, "what beautiful berries! May I have one?" She began eating them, and took the stem off each imaginary berry with a precision that almost made an observer believe that his own eyes were at fault, and that the berries were really there. "Are they sweet?" said I. "Oh, yes." "Rather odd, in February, isn't it?" said I. "I would have thought they would be sour." As she ate the next berry she made a wry face. "Dear me!" she said, "it is as sour as sour can be." At another time I told her I had two bouquets for her, and wished her to choose the one she liked best. I gave her with my right hand a real bouquet—with my left, nothing. She took both, smelled each in turn, exclaimed over their beauty, and finally returned to me the real bouquet, saying the other was much the prettier.

I might cover pages with such illustrations, but one is as instructive as a thousand could be. This child was not "hypnotized," yet she was in a "secondary state" or dream. I was never able to determine precisely how much of the real, visible, tangible world entered into her dreams apart from what I deliberately suggested to her to see, but my impression was she saw and felt as the rest of us do unless my suggestions were inconsistent with the testimony of her senses—in that case the suggestion triumphed. The suggested dreams were remarkably permanent. If she were told there was a parrot or cat in the room, she would continue to see it until it was abolished in the same way. Once or twice she refused suggestions that I gave her. For example, when I told her she was a princess, she acted the part very well; but when I told her she was a horse and was pulling a cart, she said she was not, and no amount of insistence on my part could make her see that cart. Once I tried to "hypnotize" her—i. e., I told her I would put her to sleep—and she went to sleep so soundly that I had great ado to get her awake again. So also after suggesting dreams to her, it was not possible to restore her at once to her normal condition, although if left to herself she slowly returned to it. I always took pains to abolish all the hallucinations I had given her, and she would then seem quite normal, but upon questioning her afterward I always found that her memory did not begin until perhaps a half hour after she had left me, and the attempt to elicit recollections of the forgotten period by leading questions always resulted in throwing her into a similar secondary state. Yet there was no connection between her secondary states; in one she never recollected what had happened in another, and no suggestion could make her remember. Nor was I ever able to produce posthypnotic suggestions, although I frequently tried to do so. I wished very much to relieve her headaches in