f routine, and the association of himself with his study,
explain the bizarre and ghastly dream of M. Gratiolet. A sensation from the
gripe of a cold hand, misinterpreted by the imagination acting without the aid
of the discerning faculties, accounts for the ghastly vision of the other
Every one is conscious of a
perpetual series of pictures, sometimes stationary, sometimes fleeting,
generally shifting; yet occasionally fixed in his mind. Sleep is the period in
which the nerves derive their nourishment from the blood. The picturing nerves,
like those of the senses, are generally inactive in their functions at feeding
times; and thoroughly healthy nervous systems dream very little or not at all.
Dreams betoken troubled brains. The brain of a woman who had lost a portion of
her cranium used to swell up and protrude when she was dreaming, and then
contract and become tranquil again when she was sleeping soundly.
The wakeful senses, the active
judgment, and the will even of the strongest and soundest minds, are not always
able to control the false and perverse
impressions of the nerves. I knew
once a commander in the navy whose left eye was shot clean out by a bullet in a
naval action in the beginning of this century, and whom, forty years afterward,
it was impossible to convince that he did not see all sorts of strange objects
with his lost eye. "It is not impossible," he would quietly say; "I know it too
well." Every body has known men who suffered rheumatism in legs long lost and
replaced by wooden ones.
A nervous, dreamy, imaginative
lad was walking one day with some comrades among rank grass. The place was noted
for adders, and the youths talked about them. Instantly this lad felt something
enter the leg of his pantaloons and twist itself with the swiftness of lightning
round his thigh. He stopped terrified, and a careful examination proved that the
adder was a creature of his imagination. The vividness of the fancy of this
youth made his waking senses and his discerning faculties of no more use to him
for the moment than if they had been asleep.
This condition of the brain is
called by the savans hallucination. Mueller, the physiologist, and Goethe, the
poet, have both described hallucinations to which they were subject, and which
they compared in conversation together. The rarest case, says Mueller, is that
of an individual who, while perfectly healthy in body and mind, has the faculty,
on closing his eyes, of seeing really the objects he wishes to see. History
cites only a very few instances of this phenomenon. Carden and Goethe were
examples of it.
Goethe says: "When I close my
eyes and stoop my head, I figure to myself and see a flower in the middle of my
visual organ. This flower preserves only for an instant its first form. It soon
decomposes itself, and out of it issues other flowers, with colored and
sometimes green petals. They were not natural but fantastic flowers, yet regular
as the roses of the sculptor. I could not look fixedly at that creation, but it
remained as long as I liked without increasing or diminishing. In the same way
when I imagined a disk full of various colors, I saw continually issue from the
centre to the circumference new forms like those of the kaleidoscope."
Mueller talked this subject over
with Goethe in 1828. It was interesting to them both. "Knowing," says Mueller,
"that when I was calmly lying on my bed with my eyes shut, although not asleep,
I often saw figures which I could observe very well, he was very curious to
learn what I then felt. I told him that my will had no influence either upon the
production or upon the changes of these figures, and that I had never seen any
thing symmetrical or of the character of vegetation." Goethe could at will, on
the contrary, choose his theme, which transformed itself forthwith in a manner
apparently involuntary, but always obeying the laws of symmetry and harmony.
Mueller used to get rid of the figures which haunted him by turning his face to
the wall. Although he did not see them change place, they were still before him,
but they soon began