221. We may now pass from the first to the second of the categories of disintegration of personality suggested at the beginning of this chapter. The cases which I have thus far described have been mainly cases of isolation of elements of personality. They have exhibited minor detachments from the main personality, assuming a quasi-independent existence either as recognisable fixed ideas, or as the physical representations or somatic equivalents of obscure fixed ideas, - as, for instance, persistent hallucinations or disturbances of smell or of sight. We have not dealt as yet with secondary personalities as such. There is, however, a close connection between these two classes. We have seen that in Fräulein O.'s case, for example, a kind of secondary state at times intervened - a sort of bewilderment arising from confluent idèes fixes and overrunning her whole personality. This new state was preceded or accompanied by something of somnambulic change. It is this new feature of which we have here a first hint which seems to me of sufficient importance for the diagnosis of my second class of psychical disintegrations.

This second class starts from sleep-wakings of all kinds, and includes all stages of alternation of personality, from brief somnambulisms up to those permanent and thorough changes which deserve the name of dimorphisms.

We are making here a transition somewhat resembling the transition from isolated bodily injuries to those subtler changes of diathesis which change of climate or of nutrition may induce. Something has happened which makes the organism react to all stimuli in a new way. Our best starting-point for the study of these secondary states lies among the phenomena of dream.

We shall in a later chapter discuss certain rare characteristics of dreams; occasional manifestations in sleep of waking faculty heightened, or of faculty altogether new. We have now to consider ordinary dreams in their aspect as indications of the structure of our personality, and as agencies which tend to its modification.

In the first place, it should be borne in mind that the dreaming state, though I will not call it the normal form of mentation, is nevertheless the form which our mentation most readily and habitually assumes. Dreams of a kind are probably going on within us both by night and by day, unchecked by any degree of tension of waking thought. This view - theoretically probable - seems to me to be supported by one's own actual experience in momentary dozes or even momentary lapses of attention. The condition of which one then becomes conscious is that of swarming fragments of thought or imagery, which have apparently been going on continuously, though one may become aware of them and then unaware at momentary intervals; - while one tries, for instance, to listen to a speech or to read a book aloud between sleep and waking.

This, then, is the kind of mentation from which our clearer and more coherent states may be supposed to develop. Waking life implies a fixation of attention on one thread of thought running through a tangled skein. In hysterical patients we see some cases where no such fixation is possible, and other cases where the fixation is involuntary, or follows a thread which it is not desirable to pursue.

There is, moreover, another peculiarity of dreams which has hardly attracted sufficient notice from psychologists, but which it is essential to review when we are dealing with fractionations of personality.1 I allude to their dramatic character. In dream, to begin with, we have an environment, a surrounding scene which we have not wittingly invented, but which we find, as it were, awaiting our entry. And in many cases our dream contains a conversation in which we await with eagerness and hear with surprise the remarks of our interlocutor, who must, of course, all the time represent only another segment or stratum of ourselves. This duplication may become either painful or pleasant. A feverish dream may simulate the confusions of insanity - cases where the patient believes himself to be two persons at once, and the like.2 On the other hand, a relatively coherent dream may agreeably split off visual memories and imagination from the consciousness with which the dreamer identifies himself. One may walk in dream through a picture-gallery criticising pictures which another element of one's personality has hung on the walls. Again, one may be able to identify a division of date between two mental strata; the first stratum being puzzled by a scrap of memory which the second stratum retains.

In other cases one's higher and one's lower moral impulses may be arrayed against each other in dream; the dreamer identifying himself sometimes with his worse, sometimes with his better impulse. These complications rarely cause the dreamer any surprise. One may even say that with the first touch of sleep the superficial unity of consciousness disappears, and that the dream world gives a truer representation than the waking world of the real fractionation or multiplicity existing beneath that delusive simplicity which the glare of waking consciousness imposes upon the mental field of view.

1 On this subject see Du Prel," Philosophy of Mysticism," Eng. trans., vol. i., passim.

2 See R. L. Stevenson's dream (221 A). Note. - The lettering of cases refers to their place in the Appendices.

Bearing these analogies in mind, we shall see that the development of somnambulism out of ordinary dream is no isolated oddity. It is parallel to the development of a secondary state from idees fixes when these have passed a certain pitch of intensity. The sleep-waking states which develop from sleep have the characteristics which we should expect from their largely subliminal origin. They are less coherent than waking secondary personalities, but richer in supernormal faculty. It is in connection with displays of such faculty - hyperæsthesia or telæsthesia - that they have been mainly observed, and that I shall, in a future chapter, have most need to deal with them. But there is also great interest simply in observing what fraction of the sleep-waker's personality is able to hold intercourse with other minds. A trivial instance of such intercourse reduced to its lowest point has often recurred to me. When I was a boy another boy sleeping in the same room began to talk in his sleep. To some slight extent he could answer me; and the names and other words uttered - Harry, the boat, etc. - were appropriate to the day's incidents, and would have been enough to prove to me, had I not otherwise known, who the boy was.

But his few coherent remarks represented not facts but dreaming fancies - the boat is waiting, and so forth. This trivial jumble, I say, has since recurred to me as precisely parallel to many communications professing to come from disembodied spirits. There are other explanations, no doubt, but one explanation of such incoherent utterances would be that the spirit was speaking under conditions resembling those in which this sleeping boy spoke.

There are, of course, many stages above this. Spontaneous somnambulistic states become longer in duration, more coherent in content, and may gradually merge, as in the well-known case of Fé1ida X. (see 231) into a continuous or dimorphic new personality.

222. The transition which has now to be made is a very decided one. We have been dealing with a class of secondary personalities consisting of elements emotionally selected from the total or primary personality. We have seen some special group of feelings grow to morbid intensity, until at last it dominates the sufferer's mental being, either fitfully or continuously, but to such an extent that he is "a changed person," not precisely insane, but quite other than he was when in normal mental health. In such cases the new personality is of course dyed in the morbid emotion. It is a kind of dramatic impersonation, say, of jealousy or of fear, like the case of "demoniacal possession," quoted from Dr. Janet in the Appendix (222 A). In other respects the severance between the new and the old self is not very profound. Dissociations of memory, for instance, are seldom beyond the reach of hypnotic suggestion. The cleavage has not gone down to the depths of the psychical being.