 to fade. Jean Paul recommended the observation of these
phantoms as a good plan for falling asleep.
These are hallucinations of sane
minds. The delusive sensations of flying and falling are known to many persons.
Young girls lying in bed between sleeping and waking, at the epoch of life when
their girlhood is passing into womanhood, are especially apt, like the religious
ecstatics, to fancy they are flying. And nearly every body is familiar with the
hallucinations of falling from personal experience. When lying in bed trying in
vain to fall asleep, or to warm the cold sheets, the patient feels as if sinking
through the floor, and stretches out his arms suddenly to save himself: yet
nothing has happened except the coincidence of a cold shiver with a complete
Physiologists and philosophers of
authority say we are all mad in our dreams; and, if the absence of the control
of reason is a true definition of insanity, there is no gainsaying the
proposition. But madness means something more. In dreams the faculties which
control the picturing or imagining powers are simply inactive; they are neither
absent nor incapable. Far from identifying sleeping dreams with madness, I feel
disposed to contend that voluntary and momentary hallucinations—seeing by the
blind, hearing by the deaf, sensations of smelling, touching, tasting things
which do not exist—are only signs of insanity when the faculties needful for
correcting the errors of sensation are diseased. Persons unaccustomed to railway
traveling are not insane, although for many minutes they often believe the train
is going backward, because they retain the power of correcting the hallucination
by watching the objects they are passing.
The senses are seeing, bearing,
smelling, touching, and tasting instruments. There are between these and the
seat of intelligence nerves performing the functions of carriers. Even after the
instruments have ceased to exist the carriers often continue to carry
messages—false messages. When a man has lost an eye, during the inflammatory
period of recovery the carriers convey horrible images of fiery figures. It is
the carriers who convey the pain of rheumatism from the lost limb.
A man who was recovering from
typhus fever believed he had two bodies, one of which was tossing in pain on an
uneasy bed, and the other lying sweetly on a delicious couch. I am not disposed
to ascribe this hallucination to the duality of the brain, but to a conflict
between the recollection of his sufferings and the experience of his recovery.
If the patient should have been permanently unable to overpower memory by
reality he would have been insane, like the maniacs who believe their legs to be
stalks of straw, or their bodies fragile as glass.
Pictures have produced
hallucinations. Leaving aside the eyes of Madonnas, cases in which the power of
religious ideas come into play, I may mention another instance of their effects
on a mind keenly sensitive to the beauties of the fine arts. A French
physiologist, while studying intensely an English engraving of Landseer's
Horse-shoeing, smelt horn burning, and fixed the idea in his mind for the moment
that the smell came from the foot of the horse in the engraving.