While in a condition of auto-hypnotization a person may imagine that he is some other personality. Says Dr. Cocke: “A curious thing about those self-hypnotized subjects is that they carry out perfectly their own ideals of the personality with whom they believe themselves to be possessed. If their own ideals of the part they are playing are imperfect, their impersonations are ridiculous in the extreme. One man I remember believed himself to be controlled by the spirit of Charles Sumner. Being uneducated, he used the most wretched English, and his language was utterly devoid of sense. While, on the other hand, a very intelligent lady who believed herself to be controlled by the spirit of Charlotte Cushman personated the part very well.” Dr. Cooke says of himself: “I can hypnotize myself to such an extent that I will become wholly unconscious of events taking place around me, and a long interval of time, say from one-half to two hours, will be a complete blank. During this condition of auto-hypnotization I will obey suggestions made to me by another, talking rationally, and not knowing any event that has occurred after the condition has passed off.” CHAPTER VI. Simulation.—Deception in Hypnotism Very Common.—Examples of Neuropathic Deceit.—Detecting Simulation.—Professional Subjects.—How Dr. Luys of the Charity Hospital at Paris Was Deceived.—Impossibility of Detecting Deception in All Cases.—Confessions of a Professional Hypnotic Subject. It has already been remarked that hypnotism and hysteria are conditions very nearly allied, and that hysterical neuropathic individuals make the best hypnotic subjects. Now persons of this character are in most cases morally as well as physically degenerate, and it is a curious fact that deception seems to be an inherent element in nearly all such characters. Expert doctors have been thoroughly deceived. And again, persons who have been trying to expose frauds have also been deceived by the positive statements of such persons that they were deceiving the doctors when they were not. A diseased vanity seems to operate in such cases and the subjects take any method which promises for the time being to bring them into prominence. Merely to attract attention is a mania with some people. There is also something about the study of hypnotism, and similar subjects in which delusions constitute half the existence, that seems to destroy the faculty for distinguishing between truth and delusion. Undoubtedly we must look on such manifestations as a species of insanity. There is also a point at which the unconscious deceiver, for the sake of gain, passes into the conscious deceiver. At the close of this chapter we will give some cases illustrating the fact that persons may learn by practice to do seemingly impossible things, such as holding themselves perfectly rigid (as in the cataleptic state) while their head rests on one chair and their heels on another, and a heavy person sits upon them.