TRANCE.

Otago Witness, Issue 1866, 26 August 1887, Page 31

jßescued From a Living Tomb— The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus and Other Traditions —Some Remarkable Cases of Inanition, Catalepsy, and Somnambulism.

In JfagderJurg Cathedral is a monument to a Fra yon Asseburg, which tells a curious story. After the If dy^s marriage she one day fell asleep as if she were dead. No signs of life could be found in her, and her body was taken and placed in the vault. Fortunately the door was left unlocked. The lady was only in a trance. She awoke, escaped from her tomb, and lived to bear the large family «f sons and daughters shown on the monument. Had tbe door been fastened there would have been a repetition of the tragic ending of the great Duns Scotus, who was feuried as dead, and escaped from his coffin to perish in a vain attempt to break open the locked gate. Such instances, though rare, are well known, and in many parts of Germany to this day when a corpse lies in a mortuary the bell-pull is put into its hand that the alarm may be given should it ■awake.

In our own country the Duke of Marlborough's sister had a near escape of being buried alive. She went off in a trance, and the physicians all declared that life was «stinct. Fortunately her husband did not believe it, and seven days after her seizure, at the very same time of the day, she awoke;. ao her dying hour she knew not of the danger

she had been in, for Colonel Godfrey wisely kept all knowledge of it from her. There is a case on record where the wife was pronounced to be dead, and put into her coffin, ' and only found to be alive by the perspiration breaking out °on her face. Although ni.able to move or give a sign of life she was conscious of all 1 lint was going on ! Legend has made, full use of the mystery of trance. The soveu .slept at Ephesus for 230 years, and according to some are still sleeping. Sebastian fell' asleep in 1578 to wake and make Brazil t he leading country of the world. Merlin is still asleep in his tree, and Arthur is still asleep, and Gyneth slopt for 500 years to wake with such consequences to the bold De Vaux. Charles the Great sleeps in the Untersberg, Barbarossa in the Kyffhausberg, to wake when their time for victory shall come. Desmond ol'Kiliuallock sleeps beneath the waters of Lough Gur. Brian Boroimhe sleeps in his castle of Kincora ! Boabdil the Moor sleeps near the Alhambra : and Olaf Tryggveson is asleep in the Holy Land, each to wake and restore his kingdom to commanding emmineuce. And modern fiction has made much of trance. But nothing that has been invented is sLranger than what is on the record.

Colonel Towusond could throw himself into voluntary death for hours. His, heart apparently ceased to beat, respiration seemed to fail, his whole frame became rigid and cold, his face grew colourless and shrunk, and his eyes looked fixed and glazed and ghastly, while his mind ceased to act and was as devoid of consciousness as his body of animation. It is such instances as this which have cast suspicion on catalepsy, as the commonest form of trance is called. There is no doubt the disease can be produced at will, but it is not easy to feign. St. Augustine, in his "De Civitate Dei," tells of a presbyter named Restitutus who, when he pleased, had a noise made as of some one crying, and at once conveyed himself out of the influence of sensation, and lay like a corpse, insensible to pricking and pinching, and even burning, suffering no pain, except from the wound afterwards. When Covent Garden Theatre was burnt the blaze lighted up the windows of St. Mary's Hospital. There was a female patient recovering from low fever in bed in the hospital at the time. As soon as she saw the glare she said that the Great Day had come, grew stiff, whispered she was dead, and lay apparently a corpse till the morning. This may have been the result of fear, and not of voluntary effort. If so it is one of the great bulk of the cases which are sudden seizures from apparently slight excitement.

Tissot tells us of a girl of five years old who, when stretching out her hand* to take a dainty morsel held to her by her sister, was struck and remained for an hour with her hand thrust out grasping the spoon. There is another ca.-,e of a soldier quarrelling with a comrade, and seizing a bottle to hit him with, being suddenly rendered hi-lpkss nnd fixed with arm immovable, botiic in hand and eyes open and tlneiitenin- . hi another case a kuly was urMJ-ijj, and si-. Ihe doctor entered the room sh<! w.-is > I ruck when p:i3fling the needle through the nic^h. in that attitude she remained, with s:.-rctie forehead, composed features, and breathinoimperceptibly. In half an hour she bet- fin to sing, and plaintively she sang three songs, then she sighed, her limbs relaxed, and she awoke.

Suddenly, in the middle of a phrase, in the middle of a word, with a gesture unfinished, with even the foot in the air, a seizure may take place, and the patient for a time be lost to the world. A magistrate has been struck on the bench at the moment of being ginsulted by a prisoner, and has remained mute and motionless, with open mouth and threatening eyes. Two Cordelier friars have been struck together in the middle of mass at the moment of elevation, and remained helpless and apparently lifeless. And this attack in the middle of a religious service is but one of many. Most thrilling stories are told of how the nuns of St. Bridget for 10 years were attacked in the choir at one particular point in the service; how the nuns of Uvertet fell, all of them together, during mass, into convulsions and spasms, and, deprived of speech and sense, lay stretched on the floor as dead ; how the Ursulines of Aix would be struck stiff and lifeless as statues; how the .Ursulines ofLoudon would fall suddenly into a deathlike sleep, with their limbs supple as a plate of lead ; how the nuns of St. Elizabeth de Louviers would be struck together, and remain for five or six hours with their limbs in the position they were when the seizure came. And of these stories there is no reason to doubt the truth.

For months in 1881 there lay in Portsmouth Lunatic Asylum, James Greenwood, a coastguardsman, who had been out in the lifeboat in a heavy gale and struck by lightning. He lay with his limbs rigidly extended and firmly pressed together, and closed eyes. Flies settled on his face, and he moved not a muscle. Only once did he speak, and that was when asked what day of the week it was, a ! question he answered correctly, for, though he seemed to be dead, he was conscious. He was taken up and exercised by three attendants, who moved and bent his legs, which would always spring back.to their old positions. To relax the muscles chloroform was tried, but without effect. In true catalepsy the limbs should not spring back, so that this was a peculiar case.

Of typical catalepsy a good example was afforded by Chauffat, the recent sleeper in Soho, whose strange semi-conscious state attracted so much attention, The sleep was profound, and there was a total abeyance of the highest functions of the cerebral cortex. When one eyelid was raised and light, from ' a mirror thrown in, the other eye opened, and the pupils contracted; but when the light was withdrawn the eyes remained open for barely half a minute. No matter in how awkward a posture the arm or leg was placed, it remained there for several minutes, and nothing had any effect on it s except a smart glissade, which brought it ' down' at ' once. This fixed position of the limbs" yielding after a time to gravity " is one^ of the characteristics' of the malady. . By v it impostors have been discovered. -One .case there was in which a weight was attached 1 to a patient's arm. For hours the weight was supported, " The patient is shamming," said th,e doctor; ''had the attack been

' genuine 'the' arm would have dropped hours ago." • Down dropped the arm, ' and the patient, sitting up, confessed that she had beeri endeavouring to impose on the credulity of her friends ?

■ S6me can tell when they are touched, but remember nothing when they awake ; some can see and tell afterwards who has been to lookj at them. Caelius Aurelianus found he could direct a patient's eyes, gives instances of patients who, by attempts at tears and] expression, told him of the impossibility of answering the questions he put to them.

In 1737, at Montpellier, there waa a young lady of 20 years of age who had an attack of catalepsy and somnambulism. • When the doctor came she began to talk with great vivajcity,' though asleep. She' was slapped on the cheek ; her finger was poked, into her face; a lighted taper was brought to her eye; shouts were given close to her ear; tobacco was burnt under her nose ; ammonia was; held there; and she wbs tickled with a feather. All was no use. She was pricked with a needle, and her knuckles were cracked ; still she did not wake. When the experiments were over she got up, walked round the ( room, avoiding the furniture, and then marched off to bed, where she lay in a cataleptic state, rigid and apparently, lifeless, until she awoke as from a deep sldfep 1 There is a case in the medical manuals in which a young lady of 19 went upstairs to change her dress, was suddenly taken in a trance, and remained motionless for a fortnight I There is another in which a girl of 15 did. the strangest things— became, in fact, another personage from the 12th of April to the 22nd of July— and was then brought back to her ordinary self by having a tooth extracted 1

Some people lead a different life when they are asleep to what they do when they are awake. The Countess of Laval lived as a child in Brittany, and being taken elsewhere forgot the language. Years afterwards, though unable to talk a word of Breton when awake, she was found to talk pure Breton in her sleep. And the Breton sentences were all of childish construction, and made up of childish words. And when she was awake she had no consciousness of having used them. There is another instance of a man who had lost all knowledge of the Greek he had learnt at school, and who suddenly in his dreams began to read and repeat the old Greek school exercises, which he was unable to remember or understand when awake. What.then, is trance ; this rare pathological condition of mind and body, not dangerous of itself, but the precursor of dangerous disease ? Wo one knows. It is at present a mystery. The key to it may perhaps found in the sleeping disease of the Congo, which is one of the strangest known. Its symptoms are simple enough. The negroes become sleepier and sleepier, taking ever longer sleeps, until at the end of six months they die.

When Chauffat was taken ill in Soho, a card was found on him stating that he was a patient of Dr Charcot, of Paris. Much .attention has been given by Charcot to such cases. One of his experiments is worth relating. He found that by directing the eyes to a bright point the head would soon droop, the eyelids would close, the limbs would become motionless and limp, though the power of speech remained. The patient could calculate, count, answer, and recite. After a time a cataleptic stage would set in, and the patient's limbs would become like lead, and remain in any position. By raising one eyelid the other half of the brain would become cataleptic. If the left eyelid were raised, the power of speech would continue ; if the right one were raise, it would stop Raise the left eyelid, and the patient would repeat verses; raise the right, the verses would stop ; raise the left again, the patient would go on with the verses from where they had broken off I What can these things mean 1 None can tell us ! " There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."—W. L. Gordon, in the Leisure Hour.