An interesting and significant group of cases is furnished by those
dreams in which--as the result of some compression or effort--the tactile
and muscular sensations of our own limbs are split off from sleeping
consciousness and built up into an imaginary personality. Thus a medical
friend, shortly after an attack of influenza, dreamed that in conversation
with a lady patient his hand rested on her knee; she requested him to
remove it, but his efforts to do so were fruitless, and he awoke in horror
from this unprofessional situation to find that his hand was firmly
clasped between his own knees. His body had thus been divided in dreaming
consciousness between himself and an imaginary other person; the knee
had become the other person's, while the hand remained his own, the hand
being claimed in preference to the knee no doubt on account of its greater
tactile sensibility and more complexly intimate association with the
brain. In the hypnagogic (or hypnopompic) state such dream sensations may
almost reach the intensity of hallucination. Thus, after an indigestible
supper, I awake with the vivid feeling that some one is lying on me
and attempting to drag off the bedclothes, and I find myself violently
attempting, but apparently in vain, to articulate: 'Who is there?' In a
dream of similar type, which occurred when lying on my back (and possibly
with slight indigestion due to an unusually late dinner), I awoke making
a kind of inarticulate exclamation which awakened my wife. I had dreamed
that I was lying in bed, and that some unseen creature--more supernatural
than human, it seemed--was violently dragging the bedclothes off me, while
I shouted to it, very distinctly it seemed to me, 'Avaunt, avaunt!'
It is evident that my own sense of oppression, my own unconscious and
involuntary movements in disturbing the bedclothes, were reconstructed by
sleeping consciousness as the actions of an external person, in the second
case, a supernatural creature, which, it is interesting to note, I duly
accepted as such and addressed in the conventionally appropriate manner
of old romance. The illusion may persist for some moments after waking. A
lady, after breathing rather loudly and convulsively for a few seconds,
wakes up, saying 'There is a rat or a mouse on the bed, shaking it up
and down.' 'You were asleep,' her husband replied, 'as I knew by your
breathing.' 'Oh, I was breathing like that,' she said, 'to make it jump
off.' Here we see that, somewhat as in the previous cases, the dreamer's
own muscular activity is, during sleep, reconstructed into the image of an
external force; but when she is in the semi-waking hypnagogic stage, she
recognises that the activity was her own, though still unable to dismiss
the delusion based on the theory formed during sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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