Again adieu. Yours, &c.,
Mac Davus.
V.—TRANCE AND SLEEPWALKING.
Dear Archy.—The subjects which remain to complete our brief correspondence, are Religious Delusions, the Possessed, and Witchcraft.
In order that I may set these fully and distinctly before you, it is necessary that you should know what is meant by Trance.
You have already had partial glimpses of this comprehensive phenomenon. Arnod Paole was in a trance, in his grave in the church-yard of Meduegua: Timarchus was in a trance in the cave of Trophonius.
But we must go still further back. To conceive properly the nature of trance, it is necessary to form clear ideas of the state of the mind in ordinary sleeping and waking.
During our ordinary waking state, we are conscious of an uninterrupted flow of thought, which we may observe to be modified by three influences—the first, suggestions of our experience and reflections, impulses of our natural and acquired character; the second, present impressions on our senses; the third, voluntary exertion of the attention to detain one class of ideas in preference to others.
Further, we habitually perceive things around us, by or through sensation. But on some, and for the most part trivial occasions, we seem endowed with another sort of perception, which is either direct, or dependent on new modes of sensation.
Again, the balance of the mental machinery may be overthrown. The suggestions of the imagination may become sensorial illusions; the judgment may be the subject of parallel hallucinations; the feelings may be perverted; our ideas may lose connexion and coherence; and intelligence may sink into fatuity.
So much for our waking state.