TRICKS OUR NERVES PLAY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXVI, Issue 18017, 4 November 1920, Page 3

TRICKS OUR NERVES PLAY

DOES IT WORRY YOU IF SOMEONE WALKS ABOUT THE ROOM? Tricks played by the nerves, sometimes even upon the most stolid of people, are endless. In fact it is difficult to say what they do not enter into. The experienced cyclist, for instance, would expect to be free from them, yet few who have ridden for any time have escaped the unpleasant sensation (especially when tired) of dreading to remount the machine after walking up a hill, for tear of falling.. Encouraged, it grows, repeating itself again and again until cycling practically becomes impossible, but if resolutely ignored it passes off and is forgotten. “Nerves” are responsible for a large percentage of fatal street accidents, the victim having either rushed backwards or forwards under tbeir influence, when if he or she had remained still nothing would have happened. Sea sickness, although not altogether so, is often largely produced in the same way. a conviction that one is certain to be ill having the inevitable result of making one so. If it were not for the nerves small sounds such as a buzzing fly, a rattling door or window, a leaf tapping the pane, and so on, would remain the trifling things they are. As it is, they can assume proportions which render them little short of torment to many people. Few women, at any rate, are proof against the horrid attack of nerves that can be produced by allowing oneself to think there is someone underneath the bed in a lonely room at night. A well-known authoress has told how as a child, night after night for years, she was compelled to take a run across the room and a flying leap into bed as the only means of escaping a firm conviction that otherwise a clutching hand from underneath the latter would seize her by the ankle as she went. A similar unpleasant sensation may be produced by gazing long enough at a closed cupboard or wardrobe (or even a shadowy corner) in a half-darkened room at night. Not the stoutest-hearted or most common-sense of persons can be certain of Quite escaping an uneasy idea that someone or something may be hidden there. One can imagine the feelings of the sick woman who, lying awake at night and indulging her nerves in this manner, saw by the light of her solitary candle the wardrobe door slowly, slowly pushed open , from inside, until after what seemed to her an eternity of dread—the cat walked outl