The next case I shall notice is that of a student in medicine, whom I have often heard seriously relating the circumstance, and who could never be persuaded that there was a possibility of his being deceived, till some years afterwards, when another hallucination, equally strong, but inconsistent as to time and place, pointed out to him the fallacy of such visions. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, he described himself as lying awake in the night, when he heard distinctly some one coming up the stairs, and immediately afterwards saw a female figure enter his bed-room, which he supposed to be his mother, who had died while he was in his infancy, but whose person had been frequently described to him. The figure before him answered precisely to the idea he had formed of her person, and excited in him considerable alarm. She beckoned to him to get up and follow her, which, after many ineffectual attempts, he at length accomplished, and followed her to the bottom of the stairs, where he lost sight of her, and returned to bed. This vision was repeated, either the next night, or shortly after, but with this difference, that he found himself unable to get out of bed, and the spectre quitted the room with threatening gestures, and an indignant aspect. This vision made a deep impression on the mind of the young gentleman, and no reasoning upon the subject could convince him of the hallucination of the vision, till a repetition of it several years afterwards, under circumstances equally strong, but impossible in themselves, produced that conviction which reasoning could not effect. I know a gentleman, who is living at this moment, a slave to a needless terror, arising from a circumstance which admits easily of explanation from this cause. He was lying in bed with his wife, and, as he supposed, quite awake; when he felt distinctly the impression of some person’s hand upon his right shoulder, which created such a degree of alarm that he dared not to move himself in bed, and indeed could not if he had possessed the courage. It was some time before he had it in his power to awake his wife, and to communicate to her the subject of his terror. The shoulder which had felt the impression of the hand, continued to feel benumbed and uncomfortable for some time; it had been uncovered, and most probably the cold to which it was exposed, was the sole cause of the phenomenon. This gentleman, I know, was, when at school, very subject to the Night-Mare: this circumstance, however, was productive of the greatest terror, as he never assigned to it any other cause than that of supernatural agency, and considered it as a warning of some impending calamity. More than ten years have elapsed since it occurred, and though the terror it occasioned has been greatly diminished by time, it has not yet subsided entirely.