In the morbid condition of hypochondriasis, which is a sort of permanent daymare, similar fancies are excited. Esquirol’s patient at Notre Dame thought the pope held council in her belly;—her intestines were found closely adherent together. Another monomaniac thought the devil had stretched a cord across her stomach;—her heart was adherent to its bag. Another believed that her body was stolen by the devil;—she was in reality paralytic, and insensible to blows or pricking.
To explain some of these illusions, Jason Pratensis very gravely asserts, that “the devil being a slender incomprehensible spirit, can easily insinuate and wind himself into human bodies, and, cunningly couched in our bowels, terrify our souls with fearful dreams.”
I may add that we see, in some, a delirious transmigration of sensation. Parkinson relates these cases. One referred his own sensation to others, telling his nurse that his visitors were hungry, while his own voracity plainly indicated that the hunger was in himself. Another, in a fit of intoxication, insisted on undressing all his family, as they were drunk, and could not do it themselves.
Now we certainly move ourselves unconsciously in our sleep as a relief from painful positions. If, however, these uneasy sensations are increased from stagnant blood about the heart and lungs, the oppression is extreme, and loads the moving powers; producing a transient agony and an intense effort. If this were unsuccessful on the limbs and speech, the result would be often destructive.
The night-mare dreamers are usually lethargic, and their ideas are often wild and visionary.
Polidori, the author of the “Vampire,” was a prey to night-mare; he died with a laudanum bottle in his bed. And Coleridge might have thus left a sad and pointed moral; blazoning his wretched suicide to that world, which unconsciously has pored with a thrill of admiration over those fruits of his delinquency, the romantic and unearthly stories of Christabel and the Ancient Mariner.
The grand feature of night-mare, then, is impediment: but how can I record all its varieties of miserable struggles; of attacks and manglings from wild monsters: of the rolling of mountains on the heart: or the unhallowed embraces of a witch?
The young lady who reads mythology, will fancy herself a syrinx, and struggle to escape from the amorous clutches of Pan. If we have been thinking of Chamouni and her giant peaks of snow, we may be overwhelmed in our sleep by the fall of an avalanche; or we may be dashed off a precipice, and feel ourselves falling into interminable space without a hope of resting.
A lady whom I know, and who is a frequent subject of night-mare, is very uniform in this dreamy occupation. She is shaken to and fro in her bed by fiends, and the process seems to her to occupy considerable time. And there are many who are tortured by the feeling that they are buried alive, and attempt to cry out, and beat against their coffin-lid in vain. Aurelian writes, that the epidemics in Rome were premonished by incubus.
These, and thousands of a similar kind, might be cited; but a vivid imagination, with a hint or two, will readily create them at its pleasure.