The mother of my broken bones was the
cause of my passing into the hands of the
mother of my ghost-haunted mind. I passed
many months of my infant life in the
large garret of my father's house which
was called the nursery, with a nurse whose
sleep I disturbed in the night by my
performances in the character of the squalling
brat. Having such an early turn for
theatricals, I was an infant Roscius in the
part. The authorities, who knew much
better than I, decided that I screamed
for nothing at all. Determined to secure
her needful rest at all hazards, my ghostly
mother frightened me into silence by
conjuring up ghosts from the murkiest nooks
of the night and the wildest glances of the
moon. My ghostly mother kept her place a
long time, because she managed me so cleverly.
Trying unconsciously, perhaps, to cure
like by like, long before any fuss had been
made about the principle, she told me frightful
stories to cure frightful sufferings, and
successfully soothed or silenced fits of agony
by deliriums of fear.

The ghostly inheritance abides with me,
and I know I am not the only possessor of
similar heritages. When naturalists enumerate
the vegetal and animal existences which
follow man everywhere, they omit ghosts.
Yet ghosts and sparrows follow men everywhere.
The older individuals and communities
grow, the more do they become haunted
by their ghostly parasites— the comers-back,
the beings seen, the spectres. The proverb
says there is a skeleton in every house, and
I fear there are ghosts in every mind.

Delusions, illusions, and hallucinations, are
stages on the road to insanity, monomania,
mania, lunacy, imbecility, and idiotcy. I may
usefully indicate how far I was driven along
this road by the artful energy and nightly
labours of my ghostly mother. Delusions
are produced by the passions which enthral
the faculties whose business it is to guide the
mind to truth. My sensations and my judgment
were perverted by fear. Illusions are
errors of the senses which the mind corrects.
When we are first seated in a railway carriage,
and it begins to move on, the houses,
banks, fields, cattle, trees, seem to be flying
away, by an illusion of the sense of
sight. An illusion is a perversion of the
perceptive faculties to the extent of deceiving
one of the senses. When the perversion
extends to the brain, the mind, the perceptive
faculty, the perversion is hallucination.
When I was taught to see in the dark the
forms of wild beasts, of tigers, alligators,
and serpents ready to devour me— of black
men and child-stealers coming to take me—
and of aërial forms in white sheets with
corpse-like faces inviting me to the grave;
my eyes, my faculties, my brain and mind,
were trained to serve me falsely and supply
me with hallucination. The mother
who broke my bones was succeeded by a
mother who fractured my mind. Under
the sway of hallucination, the sufferer may
hear voices pursuing him, calling him, and
threatening him, while he is as deaf as a stone.
Under the sway of hallucination, the sufferer
when he is melancholy sees dreadful scenes,
and when he is gay is enraptured with beautiful
objects, and all the while is stone blind.

Hallucination is like a waking dream. "A
dream," says Voltaire, "is a passing madness."
Esquirol says, "The hallucinated
dream awake." M. Flourens says, "The wisest
man is mad in a dream."

Dreaming is not hallucination, and hallucination
is not dreaming, but there are obvious
resemblances between them. In dreaming,
the brain is neither quite awake nor
quite asleep. The mind is a wizard chamber
of dissolving views. In dreams, the picturing
power of the mind is active, whilst
the attention, the judgment, and the will are
dormant. In dreams, the pictures pass of
themselves, the dissolving views roll on, the
images of the imagination shine and mingle
unconnected by the sensations and
uncontrolled by the will. All the pictures
apparently come and go incoherently. The recollections
of dreams are confused and chaotic,
but the recollections are not the dreams.
The incoherence is not real. Proof of this
fact is to be found in the observation that
there is a similar incoherence in the recollections
of the successive pictures of the waking
mind, when the images of the chamber of
imagery are neither dominated by the will
nor observed with attention. There is always
a relation to the order of occurrence of the
sensations in the order of the ideas. The
incoherence of the dreams of the sound mind
is simply imperfect recollection, and the
absence or dormancy of attention and volition.

Dreaming is not hallucination, although
like it. By means of his dreams, the wise
man may be helped to understand hallucination.
Hallucination is dreaming awake.
Hallucination is the state in which the
sensations and the volitions are impotent to
correct and control the pictures of the
imagination. Hallucination is the permanent
impotence of the attention and the will. The
machinery of the panorama runs on of itself,
because the guiding hand has been struck
with paralysis.

My ghostly mother paralysed my will and
my sight. My eyes saw the shadows of the
night, and she, by the empire of her imagination
over mine, made me behold among
them hideous and dangerous creatures. The
sense of sight showed me the moongleams,
and she made them for me the white dead,
who had risen, and who beckoned me away.
She hallucinated me by the power of habit.
The facility of doing a thing, acquired by doing
it, repeatedly establishes the empire of habit.
Preparing the way during the day, by her
conversation, for the apparition of the night,
she daily perverted my reason, and nightly