Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/88

76 "A subconscious dream, in which the movement of a limb is represented, tends to some extent to invade the primary consciousness and deprive it of control over that limb. Le dreams that he is fighting with a thief, and keeps off his assailant with his right hand; the thief puts his knee on his left side and clutches his neck with his hand. Upon awaking, Le has a hyperæthetic point on the left side, pressure upon which is sufficient to bring on the complete hallucination of the scene, and has, further, an anæsthetic spot upon the neck with complete insensibility and almost complete paralysis of the right arm. "Why do we find these two symptoms? Because these sensations of pressure on the neck and movement of the arm form, so to speak, part of the dream, are absorbed by it, and are no longer at the disposal of the self."

Sometimes we meet with cases in which the secondary system is not subconscious, but blends sufficiently with the primary system to be recalled, and at the same time retains its independent character. The experiences of Dr. Cocke and of Anna Katharina Emmerich, to which I allude in my paper on Hypnotic States, Trance, and Ecstasy, are of this type. Similar cases are not infrequent in insanity. One of the best accounts from normal life that I have seen is given by the late Robert Louis Stevenson in a letter to Mr. F. W. H. Myers, dated July 14, 1892:

"During an illness at Nice I lay awake a whole night in extreme pain. From the beginning of the evening one part of my mind became possessed of a notion so grotesque and shapeless that it may best be described as a form of words. I thought the pain was, or was connected with, a wisp or coil of some sort; I knew not of what it consisted, nor yet where it was, and cared not; only I thought if the two ends were brought together the pain would cease. Now all the time, with another part of my mind, which I venture to think was myself, I was fully alive to the absurdity of this idea, knew it to be a mark of impaired sanity, and was engaged with my other self in perpetual conflict. Myself had nothing more at heart than to keep from my wife, who was nursing me, any hint of this ridiculous hallucination; the other was bound that she should be told of it and ordered to effect the cure. I believe it must have been well on in the morning before the fever (or the other fellow) triumphed, and I called my wife to my bedside, seized her savagely by the wrist, and looking on her with a face of fury, cried, 'Why do you not put the two ends together and put me out of pain?' "

In another illness, at Sydney, the other fellow had an