Die when I may, I want it said of me by those who knew me best, that I always plucked a thistle and planted a flower, where I thought a flower would grow.
Abraham Lincoln.
Why describe our life-history as a state of waking rather than of sleep? Why assume that sleep is the acquired, vigilance the normal condition? It would not be hard to defend the opposite thesis. The newborn infant might urge with cogency that his habitual state of slumber was primary, as regards the individual, ancestral as regards the race; resembling at least, far more closely than does our adult life, a primitive or protozoic habit. “Mine,” he might say, “is a centrally stable state. It would need only some change in external conditions (as the permanent immersion in a nutritive fluid) to be safely and indefinitely maintained. Your waking state, on the other hand, is centrally unstable. While you talk and bustle around me you are living on your physiological capital, and the mere prolongation of vigilance is torture and death.”
A paradox such as this forms no part of my argument; but it may remind us that physiology at any rate hardly warrants us in speaking of our waking state as if that alone represented our true selves, and every deviation from it must be at best a mere interruption. Vigilance in reality is but one of two co-ordinate phases of our personality, which we have acquired or differentiated from each other during the stages of our long evolution.
F. W. H. Myers (Multiplex Personality).
This is from an article in The Nineteenth Century for November, 1886, in which Myers urged the study of the trance-personalities that exhibit themselves under hypnotism. In his Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death his views on sleep may be very briefly summarized as follows: In the low forms of animal life there is an undifferentiated state, neither sleep nor waking, and this is also seen in our prenatal and earliest infantile life. In life generally the waking time can exist only for brief periods continuously. We cannot continue life without resort to the fuller vitality which sleep brings to us. Again, from the original undifferentiated state, our waking life has been developed by practical needs; the faculties required for our earthly life then become intensified, but by natural selection other faculties and sensations (including those which connect us with the spiritual world) are dropped out of our consciousness. The state of sleep cannot be regarded as the mere absence of waking faculties. In this state we have some faint glimmer of the other faculties and sensations in various forms—dreams, somnambulism, etc. Myers then develops the theory that the relations of hysteria and genius to ordinary life correspond to those of somnambulism and hypnotic trance to sleep; and he arrives at the question of self-suggestion and hypnotism generally.
Thus in sleep there are, first, certain physiological changes (including a greater control of the physical organism, as seen in the muscular powers of somnambulists); no length of time spent lying down awake in darkness and silence will give the recuperative effect that even a few moments of sleep will give. But also, secondly, we find existing in sleep the other faculties withdrawn from use in ordinary waking life. Thus during sleep we find memory revived, problems unexpectedly solved, poems like “Kubla Khan” composed, and many intense sensations and emotions experienced. Beyond these powers again Myers finds in sleep still higher powers which seem to connect us with the spiritual world. Hence the advisability of studying the phenomena of sleep and investigating it experimentally by employing hypnotism.