The philosophy of sleep / [Robert Macnish].

  • Robert Macnish
Date:
1834
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The philosophy of sleep / [Robert Macnish]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    him, lest some dreadful object of alarm should start up before his affrighted vision. Courage and philosophy are frequently opposed in vain to these appalling terrors. The latter dreads what it dis- believes; and spectral forms, sepulchral voices, and all the other horrid superstitions of sleep arise to vindicate their power over that mind, which, under the fancied protection of reason and science, conceived itself shielded from all such attacks, but which, in the hour of trial, often sinks beneath their influence as completely as the ignorant and unreflecting hind, who never employed a thought as to the real nature of these fantastic and illusive sources of terror. The alarm of a frightful dream 1S Sometimes so overpowering, that persons under the impression thus generated, of being pursued by some imminent danger, have actually leaped out of the window to the great danger and even loss of their lives. In the 9th volume of the “ Phi- losophical 'T'ransactions of the Royal Society of London,” a curious case is given by Archdeacon Squire, of a person who, after having been dumb for years, recovered the use of his speech by means of a dream of this description: “One day, in the year 1741, he got very much in liquor, so much so, that on his return home at night to the Devi- zes, he fell from his horse three or four times, and was at last taken up by a neighbor, and put to bed in a house on the road. He soon fell asleep ; when, dreaming that he was falling into a furnace of boiling wort, it put him into so great an agony fe
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