Morel[91] affirms that many patients before becoming completely insane have frightful dreams, which they regard as evidences that they are about to lose their reason. Sometimes they are afraid to go to sleep on account of the terrifying apparitions which then visit them. The following cases, related by Dr. Forbes Winslow,[92] are interesting in this connection: “A gentleman, who had previously manifested no appreciable symptoms of mental disorder, or even of disturbed and anxious thought, retired to bed apparently in a sane state of mind. Upon arising in the morning, to the intense terror of his wife, he was found to have lost his senses! He exhibited his insanity by asserting that he was going to be tried for an offense which he could not clearly define, and of the nature of which he had no right conception. He declared that the officers of justice were in hot pursuit of him,--in fact, he maintained that they were actually in the house. He begged and implored his wife to protect him. He walked about the bed-room in a state of great agitation, apprehension, and alarm, stamping his feet, and wringing his hands in the wildest agony of despair. Upon inquiring into the history of the case, his wife said that she had not observed any symptoms that excited her suspicions as to the state of her husband’s mind, but upon being questioned very closely, she admitted that during the previous night he appeared to have been under the influence of what she considered to be the nightmare, or a frightful dream. While apparently asleep he cried out several times, evidently in great distress of mind, ‘Don’t come near me!’ ‘Take them away!’ ‘Oh, save me; they are pursuing me!’ It is singular that in this case the insanity which was clearly manifested in the morning appeared like _a continuation of the same character and train of perturbed thought that existed during his troubled sleep_ when, according to the wife’s account, he was evidently dreaming.”