My assistant, Dr. Mercier, shook his head at my precaution; the nurse slept very well, and did not awaken during any night. My assistant examined the patient, at eight o'clock in the evening of May 6, found no signs of the beginning of the partus, and said to the nurse that she might go for some time longer. Everyone was in bed at 9 p.m. at the latest, and all slept with the exception of the noisy Mrs. S. Suddenly, at eleven o'clock in the night, the nurse awakened (she had never awakened during the night in all the past days and weeks, and had never disturbed the sister). She went into the room, and, it is true, did not notice much the matter with the patient, but ran off to fetch the sister. She said, "I am sure that it is coining on," and then both returned to the patient. The sister did not quite believe that the labor was beginning, as she did not see anything unusual, and as the patient was still going about. The "waters," which had broken, were mistaken for urine (the patient being dirty); still, the doctor was sent for at once, and arrived just in time to receive the head of the fo?tus. When I arrived, I was able to remove the after-birth, and was then greeted by the patient with curses, blows, and kicks. It re-quired four or five persons to keep her in bed. The nurse acknowledged that she did not know why she awoke. Mrs. S. may have been a little quieter than usual, but complained, as she often did. Both she and the sister agreed that they could scarcely distinguish her cursing, crying, screaming, and complaining from her usual noises. Still, some unusual sound perception or other must have awakened the somnambulist and reminded her of the suggestion. The child was healthy. Mrs. S. remained maniacal and demented until the summer, 1894, when she gradually became quieter and clearer, and later she recovered. Two years had disappeared from her memory. She had not the faintest idea of the conception, pregnancy, labor, and child, and at first she believed that we were telling her a fairy tale when we spoke of what had taken place, especially as the child had died of pertussis in the meantime.

This case, which is of interest from many points of view, proves that good somnambulists react with certainty to suggestion, even during sleep and after the lapse of a long time. And one must allow that I would not have risked such an experiment without having been sure of my grounds. There are enough witnesses to confirm the circumstances. Dr. Walther Inhelder collected my experiences in this direction in the Burghoelzli Asylum for his article on the importance of hypnosis for the night supervision by attendants.1

I thought that these cases would demonstrate the hypocon-ceived associative connections and mutual influencing of the dream activity and the waking activity of the brain better than anything else.

I refer the reader to O. Vogt's views, given later (section 16), and especially to his article, "Spontaneous Somnambulism in Hypnosis." 2 He shows, in opposition to Lowenfeld, by very excellent examples, that spontaneous somnambulism produced in sleep can be transformed into quiet hypnosis, and this in its turn can be terminated in normal awakening or normal sleep. He proves quite conclusively that the mechanism of normal sleep and that of hypnosis are the same. I have always shared these views with Liebeault, but it was O. Vogt who proved them most conclusively. Normal sleep, like hypnosis, is a condition of heightened suggestibility - i.e., a dissociated condition - only, as a rule, the condition of exhaustion of the brain is added, and the connection with the hypnotist is wanting.

1 Zeitschrift for Hypnotismus, 1893, p. 201.

2 Ibid., 1897.

Thus we come to the discussion of amnesia, regarded as one of the most important, and in forensic medicine perhaps the most important, practical phenomenon of sleep and of hypnosis. As a rule, the normally deep sleeper is also a deep sleeper in the hypnotic condition. In this the deep sleeper is mostly more strongly subjected to the influence of the hypnotist. One can produce memory or amnesia in him for any period of his life, or at least for his sleep, at will. Bernheim produced deep sleep in more than half of the patients in his hospital practice. In order to show the very wide distribution of deep hypnotiza-bility among normal people, I may mention that at one time I attempted to produce hypnosis in twenty-three out of twenty-six nurses in the Burghoelzli Asylum, and succeeded in every case. Among these, only one was put merely into a condition of somnambulence, three showed light sleep not associated with amnesia, and the remaining nineteen showed deep sleep with amnesia, post-hypnotic phenomena, and the suggestive condition when awake. Catalepsy and anaesthesia wore attained in two cases, immediately on the first attempt in the waking condition, by means of affirmation. Neither of these nurses had ever been hypnotized before. Dr. O. Vogt has, however, surpassed all that has hitherto been achieved in this respect (see p. 62).