Braid, the writer who did so much to get at the facts of hypnotism, and Dr. Carpenter who has helped to make known Braid’s careful researches, regard the actions of the hypnotized subject as analogous to ideomotor movements; that is to say, the movements due to the tendency of an idea to act itself out apart from volition.  On the other hand, one of the latest inquirers into the subject, Professor Heidenhain, of Breslau, appears to regard these actions as the outcome of “unconscious perceptions” (Animal Magnetism, English translation, p. 43, etc.).

In the absence of certain knowledge, it seems allowable to argue from the analogy of natural sleep that the actions of the hypnotized patient are accompanied with the lower forms of consciousness, including sensation and perception, and that they involve dream-like hallucinations respecting the external circumstances of the moment.  Regarding them in this light, the points of resemblance between hypnotism and dreaming are numerous and striking.  Thus, Dr. Heidenhain tells us that the threshold or liminal value of stimulation is lowered just as in ordinary sleep sense-activity as a whole is lowered.  According to Professor Weinhold, the hypnotic condition begins in a gradual loss of taste, touch, and the sense of temperature; then sight is gradually impaired, while hearing remains throughout the least interfered with.[102] In this way, the mind of the patient is largely cut off from the external world, as in sleep, and the power of orientation is lost.  Moreover, there are all the conditions present, both positive and negative, for the hallucinatory transformation of mental images into percepts just as in natural sleep.  Thus, the higher centres connected with the operations of reflection and reasoning are thrown hors de combat or, as Dr. Heidenhain has it, “inhibited.”

The condition of hypnotism is marked off from that of natural sleep, first of all, by the fact that the accompanying hallucinations are wholly due to external suggestion (including the effects of bodily posture).  Dreams may, as we have seen, be very faintly modified by external influences, but during sleep there is nothing answering to the perfect control which the operator exercises over the hypnotized subject.  The largest quantity of our “dream-stuff” comes, as we have seen, from within and not from without the organism.  And this fact accounts for the chief characteristic difference between the natural and the hypnotic dream.  The former is complex, consisting of crowds of images, and continually changing:  the latter is simple, limited, and persistent.  As Braid remarks, the peculiarity of hypnotism is that the attention is concentrated on a remarkably narrow field of mental images and ideas.  So long as a particular bodily posture is assumed, so long does the corresponding illusion endure.  One result of this, in connection with that impairing of sensibility already referred to, is the scope for a curious overriding of sense-impressions by the dominant illusory percept, a process that we have seen illustrated in the active sense-illusions of waking life.  Thus, if salt water is tasted and the patient is told that it is beer, he complains that it is sour.