The morbid conditions of sleep have not received the study they deserve. They resemble artificially induced hypnosis. Suggestion plays an important part. Bad dreams may frequently be prevented during sleep by suggestion in an artificially induced hypnotic condition during the day. Patients will obey suggestions made to them while dreaming. Certainly some of these disorders are akin to, if not identical with, auto-hypnosis. Talking in the sleep is a common phenomenon. It is curious that Laura Bridgeman (the deaf, dumb, and blind woman), would converse with herself while sleeping, by putting one hand against the other and spelling the words, using the deaf-and-dumb alphabet, with one hand, and feeling with her other the words spelled with the first hand.

It has been mentioned before that the hypnotic state may be artificially induced on a sleeping person. This is best accomplished when one is half asleep, and the power of the will is for the time withdrawn. There are many disordered states of sleep in which a person will not only obey suggestions after the manner of one upon whom artificial hypnosis has been induced, but in which many elements not found in artificial hypnosis play a part.

Dreams are the fairies which haunt us while we are asleep, but they are under the power of the king of all the fairies, the human will. "When he is asleep another faculty of the mind may exercise his wand and change the persons of these beings that dwell with us in dreamland. They will for the usurper then build a new world, create more fantastic beings, and draw from the depths of the unknown, weird, strange imagery, and construct new palaces of thought for the fancy to dwell in. They know no space. They even soothe old Father Time to sleep, and while he is sleeping, they put into a man's life the experiences of countless ages, in a minute, aye, in a second of time.

The Relation of Hypnotism to Morbid Catalepsy, Epilepsy, and the Insanities.

Hypnotism has been called an artificial neurosis, an induced insanity, an artificial hysteria, a suggestive delirium, etc. It matters very little what a thing is called. It must be judged of solely by its effects. While the state is transitory its results are good or ill according to the use that is made of it. It differs from all these morbid states in two essentials. First, it is induced by the will of the operator or by that of the subject or both, and second, it is broken by him or by the will of the subject.

It is, in either case, the child of intention parented by volition, while the other states are the result of either external or internal causes, acting independently of the will and volition. Hypnotism is, in a sense, the mind, the consciousness, acting in obedience to another mind, another consciousness, and not being in relation and harmonizing with the phenomena of ordinary necessity, the phenomena of life. It is, so to speak, a mimicry of existence. It enacts over again experiences without causality, or, better, it is governed mainly by the circumstances of mental suggestion, rather than by the circumstances of ordinary external environments. All of the healthy mental states may be produced during hypnosis. All of the diseased states of the mind, all of the harsh discordant elements, may be likewise reproduced by suggestion.