Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 61.djvu/64

58 sitting position). Muscular incoordination is so considerable that it is very difficult to use a pen, but still easy to write with a pencil.

"I find that it is easily possible to see the visions when lying down in a dark room with open eyes. (Weir Mitchell could not do this.) Sometimes the vision seems to be of a vast hollow vessel into the polished interior of which one gazes while the hue rapidly changes on its mother-of-pearl surface. The objects seen are very often extremely definite; the remarkable point is that they are always novel. There has been all along apparent hyperæsthesia to all sensory impressions.

"9:10. I had to break off as I cannot write for long at a time. The visions continue as brilliantly as ever: I think I see them better in a room lighted by fire than in a dark room. I have seen thick glorious fields of jewels which spring into forms like flowers beneath my view and then seem to turn into gorgeous butterfly-like forms. When I speak my voice seems strange to me and certainly sounds hoarse.

"As I write (by electric light) vague thin color washes seem to lie on the paper, especially a golden yellow, and even the pencil seems to make somewhat golden-tinged marks. My hands seen in indirect vision seem strange, bronzed, scaled, flushed with red. Except for slight nausea I am feeling well, my head perfectly well, though when watching the visions I once noticed slight right frontal pain. The chief inconvenience is decidedly the motor incoordination. It involves inability to fix attention long; but otherwise intellect is perfectly clear.

"9:40. [Written with pen.] I am now going to bed. Visions continue; I feel well, except for slight nausea when I move and the motor weakness. [What follows was written on the next morning.] Before going to bed I drank some hot water with a little wine in it, but took nothing to eat. On undressing I was struck by the red, scaly, bronzed or pigmented appearance of my feet, hands and limbs when I was not directly looking at them. After going to bed the nausea entirely disappeared, not to reappear, and except for thoracic oppression and occasional sighing there was no discomfort. But there was not the slightest drowsiness. I think, however, that the visions might easily have blended into dream visions but that I was kept awake by a certain consciousness of faintness and by auditory hyperæsthesia. I was keenly receptive—as I had been all along—to sounds, and whenever I seemed about to fall asleep I was startled either by the exaggerated reverberation in my head of some distant street sound or else by the mental. image (not hallucination) of a loud sound. At a later stage there was some ringing in the ear. There were also some slight twitchings of the larger muscles of the limbs. Before going to bed I had ascertained that there was marked exaggeration of the knee-jerk, and the pupils were dilated. I felt hot; the skin was dry, the kidneys active.

"Meanwhile the visions continued with but little diminution of