rail leading
to the Tow River. His wife followed with difficulty, as he picked his
way through the tangled forest, over stones and fallen trees and along
the sides of precipitous cliffs. For more than a mile the sleeper
trudged on until he came to a large poplar tree, which had fallen with
its topmost branches far out in the river. Walking on the log until he
came to a large limb extending over the water, he got down on his hands
and knees and began crawling out on it. The frightened wife screamed,
calling to him to wake up and come back. He was awakened by the cries,
fell into the river, and was drowned. Each night for weeks he had been
taking that perilous trip, crawling out on the limb, leaping from it
into the river, swimming to the shore, and returning home unconscious
of anything having happened.

Dreams, nightmare, and night terrors form too extensive a subject and
one too well known to be discussed at length here, but it might be well
to mention that sometimes dreams are said to be pathognomonic or
prodromal of approaching disease. Cerebral hemorrhage has often been
preceded by dreams of frightful calamities, and intermittent fever is
often announced by persistent and terrifying dreams. Hammond has
collected a large number of these prodromic dreams, seeming to indicate
that before the recognizable symptoms of disease present themselves a
variety of morbid dreams may occur. According to Dana, Albers says:
"Frightful dreams are signs of cerebral congestion. Dreams about fire
are, in women, signs of impending hemorrhage. Dreams about blood and
red objects are signs of inflammatory conditions. Dreams of distorted
forms are frequently a sign of abdominal obstruction and diseases of
the liver."

Catalepsy, trance, and lethargy, lasting for days or weeks, are really
examples of spontaneously developed mesmeric sleep in hysteric patients
or subjects of incipient insanity. If the phenomenon in these cases
takes the form of catalepsy there is a waxy-like rigidity of the
muscles which will allow the limbs to be placed in various positions,
and maintain them so for minutes or even hours. In lethargy or
trance-states the patient may be plunged into a deep and prolonged
unconsciousness lasting from a few hours to several years. It is in
this condition that the lay journals find argument for their stories of
premature burial, and from the same source the fabulous "sleeping
girls" of the newspapers arise. Dana says that som