Horst has related an extraordinary incident which took place in the sixteenth century. “A soldier walked in his sleep to a window, and with the help of a rope climbed a high tower, secured a jackdaw’s nest with its young birds, and regained his bed, where he remained asleep until the morning.”[165] Unfortunately there are not sufficiently detailed facts regarding this incident, and for fully described cases we must return to modern times. Dr. Guinon has related one case in ample detail. A man thirty-four years of age, by occupation an interpreter, was taken into hospital for hysterical attacks. “One night soon after he came under the care of the physicians, this patient, towards one o’clock in the morning, suddenly arose from bed, threw open a window and jumped across the sill into the courtyard of the hospital. The attendants on duty ran after him, and saw him hurrying away, undressed and carrying a pillow in his arms. He traversed a series of gardens and walks, with the topography of which he was unacquainted, climbed a ladder and got on the roof of the hydrotherapeutic establishment, up and down which he proceeded to run with the greatest agility. Sometimes he stopped in his flight and rocked the pillow he was carrying, kissing and soothing it as if it were a child. Then he retraced the route he had taken.” On being questioned next morning, he had not the faintest remembrance of his nocturnal exploit. “A similar fit came on him five or six times” (Feinkind, p. 108). The same patient, “after having turned over in bed several times, seized a pillow and held it to his breast. He then got out of bed, and, in his nightgown, ran through the dormitory to a door leading to the lavatories. He opened the door, readily but with violence, and entered one of the closets. Then, still holding the pillow against his chest with one arm, by a gymnastic feat both difficult and dangerous, yet which he performed with the utmost precision, using his feet and the free arm, he got hold of the edge of the frame of an open window, through which he swung himself to the sill, alighting on both feet, after which, preserving the pillow carefully from contact or shocks, he jumped to the ground (the infirmary ward was on the ground floor). He then ran quickly to the opposite corner of the courtyard, passing the whole length of the great building at full speed, holding the pillow carefully. By a path which led round the building, he reached a corner where there was a tower supporting a great water-tank. A kind of metallic ladder, placed almost vertically and with rounded steps, led up the side of the tower to a sort of observation-landing which at one point was adjacent to the edge of the roof of the bath-house.