ements. Hence,
apparently, it is only in very profound sleep that persons will rise,
dress themselves, walk about, &c.; while, in less profound sleep, their
vivid dreams only agitate and make them restless. One of the most
interesting, and indeed affecting, cases on record, is that of Laura
Bridgman, who, at a very early age, was afflicted with an inflammatory
disease, which ended in the disorganization and loss of the contents of
her eyes and ears; in consequence of which calamity she grew up blind,
deaf, and dumb. Now, it is quite certain that persons who have once
enjoyed the use of their senses, and then lost them, have very vivid
dreams, in which they recall the impressions of their earliest infancy.
So was it with the blind poet, Dr. Blacklock; and so also was it with
Laura Bridgman, and it is a very interesting fact that she, being unable
to speak, when asleep used the finger alphabet. This she did sometimes
in a very confused manner, the irregularity of her finger-signs
corresponding with that defective articulation which persons give
utterance to, when they murmur and mutter indistinctly their
dream-impressions. It was, be it observed, when she was disturbed in her
sleep that she ran over her finger alphabet confusedly, like one who,
playing on a stringed instrument, has not the attention sufficiently
fixed to give precision and expression to the performance. The minstrel,
described by Sir Walter Scott, with his fingers wandering wildly through
the strings of his harp, resembles poor Laura giving utterance, thus
imperfectly, to her bewildered dreams.

When the somnambulic state becomes more intense, the voluntary muscles
of the limbs are excited into action; the somnambulist rises; dresses
himself; and in pursuing his dream-imagery, wanders about, or sits down
steadily to execute some task, which, however difficult in his waking
hours, he now accomplishes with facility. The condition of the body in a
physiological point of view becomes now a solemn mystery: the eyes are
open, but insensible to light; the portals of the ears, also, but the
report of a pistol will, in some cases, not rouse the sense of hearing;
the sense of smell, too, is frequently strangely altered, and that of
taste, likewise becomes perverted, or, perhaps, entirely suspended. The
sensibility of the surface of the body is often remarkably impaired;
and, for the time, partially or entirely abolished. In the case of a
female somnambulist describ