So much for the technical, psychiatric aspects of the stupor problem. We have frequently spoken of it, however, as a psychobiological reaction. If this be a sound view, similar tendencies should appear in everyday life, the psychotic phenomena being merely the exaggerations of a fundamental type of human and animal behavior. Shamming of death in the face of danger and animal catalepsy come to mind at once, but since we know nothing of the associated affective states we should be chary of using them even as analogies. We are on safer ground in discussing problems of human psychology. It is evident that there are psychological parallels between the stupor reaction and sleep, while future work may show physiological similarities as well. Apathy towards the environment, inactivity and a thinking disorder are common to both. But sleep reactions do not occur in bed alone. Weariness produces indifference, physical sluggishness, inattention and a mild thinking disorder such as are seen in partial stupors. The phenomena of the midday nap are strikingly like those of stupor. The individual who enjoys this faculty has a facility for retiring from the world psychologically and as a result of this psychic release is capable of renewed activity (analogous to post-stuporous hypomania) that cannot be the result of physiological repair, since the whole affair may last for only a few minutes. In everyday life there are more protracted states where the comparison can also be made. When life fails to yield us what we want, we tend to become bored--a condition of apathy and inactivity, forming a nice parallel to stupor inasmuch as external reminders of reality and demands for activity are apt to call out irritability. A form of what is really mental disease, although not called insanity, is permanent boredom, a deterioration of interest, energy and even intelligence by which many troubled souls solve their problems. A sudden withdrawal from the world we call stupor. When the same thing happens insidiously, the condition is labeled according to the financial and social status of the victim. He is a bum, a loafer, a mendicant or, more politely, a disillusioned recluse. Frequently this undiagnosed dement has satisfied himself with a weak, cynical philosophy that life is not worth while. It is but a step from valueless life to death and the same tendency which makes the patient fancy he is dead, leads the tired man to sleep, the poet to sigh in verse for dissolution, and the myth maker to fabricate rebirth. The religions of the world are full of this yearning, which reaches its purest expression in the belief and philosophy of Nirvana. The ideational content of stupor has also its analogue in crime. The desire for perpetuation of relationships unprosperous in this world is not seen only in the delusion of mutual death. One can hardly pick up a newspaper without reading of some unhappy man or woman who has slain a disillusioned lover and then committed suicide.