In the lightest degree of trance-sleep, the person can sustain itself sitting; the pupils are in the same state as above, or natural; the apparent unconsciousness profound.
Two features characterise trance-sleep in all its grades. One, an insensibility to all common stimulants, however violently applied; the other, an inward flow of ideas, a dream or vision. It is as well to provide all words with a precise meaning. The term vision had better be restricted to mean a dream during trance-sleep.
The behaviour of Grando, who had been buried in the vampyr state, when they were clumsily cutting his head off, makes no exception to the first of the above positions. He had then just emerged out of his trance-sleep, either through the lapse of time, or from the admission of fresh air, or what not.
It will not be doubted that the mind may have visions in all the grades of trance-sleep, if it can be proved capable of them in the deepest; therefore, one example will suffice for all three cases.
Henry Engelbrecht, as we learn in a pamphlet published by himself in the year 1639, after a most ascetic life, during which he had experienced sensorial illusions, was thrown for a brief period into the deepest form of trance-sleep, which event he thus describes:—
In the year 1623, exhausted by intense mental excitement of a religious kind, and by abstinence from food, after hearing a sermon which strongly affected him, he felt as if he could combat no more, so he gave in and took to his bed. There he lay a week without tasting any thing but the bread and wine of the sacrament. On the eighth day, he thought he fell into the death-struggle; death seemed to invade him from below upwards; his body became rigid; his hands and feet insensible; his tongue and lips incapable of motion: gradually his sight failed him, but he still heard the laments and consultations of those around him. This gradual demise lasted from mid-day till eleven at night, when he heard the watchmen; then he lost consciousness of outward impressions. But an elaborate vision of immense detail began; the theme of which was, that he was first carried down to hell, and looked into the place of torment; from thence, quicker than an arrow, was he borne to paradise. In these abodes of suffering and happiness, he saw and heard and smelt things unspeakable. These scenes, though long in apprehension, were short in time, for he came enough to himself by twelve o'clock, again to hear the watchmen. It took him another twelve hours to come round entirely. His hearing was first restored; then his sight, feeling, and motion followed; as soon as he could move his limbs, he rose. He felt himself stronger than before the trance.
Trance-waking presents a great variety of phases; but it is sufficient for a general outline of the subject to make or specify but two grades—half-waking and full-waking.
In trance half-waking, the person rises, moves about with facility, will converse even, but is almost wholly occupied with a dream, which he may be said to act, and his perceptions and apprehensions are with difficulty drawn to any thing out of the circle of that dream.
In trance full-waking, the person is completely alive to all or most of the things passing around him, and would not be known by a stranger to be otherwise than ordinarily awake.
I propose to occupy the latter half of this letter with details of cases exemplifying these two states. Those which I shall select, will be instances either of somnambulism, double consciousness, or catalepsy, the popular phenomena of which I take this occasion of displaying. By these details the following features will be proved to belong to trance-waking.