Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary StudySadger, J.
Science
Sleep Walking and Moon Walking: A Medico-Literary Study
Sadger, J.
Psychoanalysis; Sleepwalking
More difficult seems to me the answer to the second main question: What
influence does the moon exercise upon the sleeper? It was earlier
discussed, along with the various psychical overdeterminations, that the
moonlight awoke first the infantile pleasure memories, among other
things that that light shining everywhere lighted the way which led to
the house and the dwelling of the earliest childhood. Mention was made
of the infantile comparison of the moon's disk with the childish nates
and perhaps the gazing upon the nightly orb, which seems besides most
like a hypnotic fixation, may be also referred back to the same. Since
we know today that the love transference constitutes the essential
character of hypnotism, that symptom brings us once more to the
eroticism. Beside there was not wanting with our patient a grossly
sensual relationship. Finally there is also the infantile desire to
climb over the houses into the moon, realizing itself in part at least
in the moon-inspired climbing upon the roof.
Yet the second leading problem appears to me, in spite of all this, not
completely exhausted. It might not thus be absolutely ruled out that
more than a mere superstition lurks behind the folk belief which
conceives of a "magnetic" influence by which the moon attracts the
sleeper. Such a relationship is indeed conceivable when we consider the
motor overexcitability of all sleep walkers and the effecting of ebb and
flow through the influence of the moon. Furthermore no one, in an epoch
which brings fresh knowledge each year of known and unknown rays, can
deny without question any influence to the rays of moonlight. Perhaps in
time the physicist and the astronomer will clear up the matter for us.
Meanwhile the question is raised and can be answered only with an
hypothesis.
In conclusion I have in mind a last final connection which the spell of
the moon bears to belief in spirits and ghosts. It is established
through many analyses that the visits of the mother by night form the
basis of the latter, when she comes with the light in her hand and
scantily clothed in white garments, nightgown, or chemise and petticoat,
to see if the children are asleep or, if they are, to set a child upon
the chamber. The so often mentioned "woman in white" may also be the
maiden in her nightgown, who thus exhibits herself in her night garment
to her parents as she climbs into their bed, later also eventually to
her lover. The choice of the hour between twelve and one, which came to
be called the ghostly hour, may perhaps be referred to the fact that at
this time sleep was most profound and therefore there was least danger
of discovery.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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