.

Again adieu. Yours, &c.,
MAC DAVUS.

V.--TRANCE AND SLEEPWALKING.

DEAR ARCHY.--The subjects which remain to complete our brief
correspondence, are Religious Delusions, the Possessed, and Witchcraft.

In order that I may set these fully and distinctly before you, it is
necessary that you should know what is meant by Trance.

You have already had partial glimpses of this comprehensive phenomenon.
Arnod Paole was in a trance, in his grave in the church-yard of
Meduegua: Timarchus was in a trance in the cave of Trophonius.

But we must go still further back. To conceive properly the nature of
trance, it is necessary to form clear ideas of the state of the mind in
ordinary sleeping and waking.

During our ordinary waking state, we are conscious of an uninterrupted
flow of thought, which we may observe to be modified by three
influences--the first, suggestions of our experience and reflections,
impulses of our natural and acquired character; the second, present
impressions on our senses; the third, voluntary exertion of the
attention to detain one class of ideas in preference to others.

Further, we habitually perceive things around us, by or through
sensation. But on some, and for the most part trivial occasions, we seem
endowed with another sort of perception, which is either direct, or
dependent on new modes of sensation.

Again, the balance of the mental machinery may be overthrown. The
suggestions of the imagination may become sensorial illusions; the
judgment may be the subject of parallel hallucinations; the feelings may
be perverted; our ideas may lose connexion and coherence; and
intelligence may sink into fatuity.

So much for our waking state.

During sleep, there are no adequate reasons for doubting that the flow
of our ideas continues as uninterrupted as in a waking state. It is
true, that some persons assert that they never dream; and others that
they dream occasionally only. But there is a third class, to which I
myself belong, who continually dream, and who always, on waking,
distinctly discern the fugitive rearguard of their last sleep thoughts.
The simplest view of these diversified instances, is to suppose that all
persons in sleep are always dreaming, and that the spaces seemingly
vacant of dreams, are only gaps in the memory; that all persons asleep
always dream, but that all persons do not always remember their dreams.

The suggestive influences that modify