sees at once the mountains and the lakes, and his mind
provides all the details of his reminiscences, and his imagination
furnishes plenty of additions. His whole mind is awake; the feelings and
emotions and volitions, the memories and judgments and thoughts are
rushing on, and only that is excluded which demands a contrary attitude.
This selective process stands decidedly in the center of the hypnotic
experience and makes it very doubtful whether we are psychophysically on
the right track, if we make much of the slight similarity between
hypnosis and sleep.

This has nothing to do with the fact that hypnosis is best brought about
by suggesting the idea of sleep, that is, the belief that sleep will
set in. This belief is indeed effective in removing all the ideas
which are awake in the mind which would interfere with the willingness
to submit to the suggestions of the hypnotizer. But the fact that
belief in sleep and expectation of sleep bring with them the hypnotic
state is not a proof that the hypnotic state itself is sleep. Even
the mental experiences which can remain in sleep, the dreams, are
characteristically different from the hypnotic experience. Thus the
dreams show that unselective awakening of ideas which is to be expected
from a general decrease of functioning. The hypnotic variation is
characterized just by its selective narrowing of consciousness. For the
same reason, hypnotism is strikingly different from such diseases of the
mind as dementia. Certainly in dementia too, many associations are cut
off, but it is not a selective inhibition, it is a haphazard destruction
resulting from the degeneration in the brain.

The fundamental principle of the hypnotic state lies in its selective
character. Inhibited and cut off are those states which are antagonistic
to the beliefs in the suggested ideas, and as their antagonism consists
in their connection with opposite actions, the whole is again a question
of motor setting. No doubt, such new motor setting can precede the
normal sleep too; thus the sleeper may be insensitive to any surrounding
noises, but perhaps awake at the slightest call from a patient who is
intrusted to his care. In that case, one special feature of hypnotism is
superadded to sleep but the sleep itself is not hypnotic. Again sleep
may go over into a state which shares many characteristic features with
hypnotism, that is, somnambulism, and it may be said with a certain
truth that hypnotism is a