CHAPTER V.

NIGHTMARE.

NIGHTMARE may be defined a painful dream, accompanied with difficult respiratory action, and a torpor in the powers of volition. The reflecting organs are generally more or less awake; and, in this respect, nightmare differs from simple dreaming, where they are mostly quiescent.

This affection, the EPHIALTES of the Greeks, and INCUBUS of the Romans, is one of the most distressing to which human nature is subject. Imagination cannot conceive the horrors it frequently gives rise to, or language describe them in adequate terms. They are a thousand times more frightful than the visions conjured up by necromancy or diablere; and far transcend every thing in history or romance, from the fable of the writhing and asp-encircled Laocoon to Dante's appalling picture of Ugolino and his famished offspring, or the hidden tortures of the Spanish Inquisition. The whole mind, during the paroxysm, is wrought up to a pitch of unutterable despair: a spell is laid upon the faculties, which freezes them into inac

tion; and the wretched victim feels as if pent alive in his coffin, or overpowered by resistless and immitigable pressure.

The modifications which nightmare assumes are infinite; but one passion is almost never absent that of utter and incomprehensible dread. Sometimes the sufferer is buried beneath overwhelming rocks, which crush him on all sides, but still leave him with a miserable consciousness of his situation. Sometimes he is involved in the coils of a horrid, slimy monster, whose eyes have the phosphorescent glare of the sepulchre, and whose breath is poisonous as the marsh of Lerna. Every thing horrible, disgusting, or terrific in the physical or moral world, is brought before him in fearful array; he is hissed at by serpents, tortured by demons, stunned by the hollow voices and cold touch of apparitions. A mighty stone is laid upon his breast, and crushes him to the ground in helpless agony: mad bulls and tigers pursue his palsied footsteps: the unearthly shrieks and gibberish of hags, witches, and fiends float around him. In whatever situation he may be placed, he feels superlatively wretched: he is Ixion working for ages at his wheel: he is Sisyphus rolling his eternal stone: he is stretched upon the iron bed of Procrustes he is prostrated by inevitable destiny beneath the approaching wheels of the car of Juggernaut. At one moment, he may have the consciousness of a malignant demon being at his side then to shun the sight of so appalling an

object, he will close his eyes, but still the fearful being makes its presence known; for its icy breath is felt diffusing itself over his visage, and he knows that he is face to face with a fiend. Then, if he look up, he beholds horrid eyes glaring upon him, and an aspect of hell grinning at him with even more than hellish malice. Or, he may have the idea of a monstrous hag squatted upon his breast-mute, motionless, and malignant; an incarnation of the Evil Spirit-whose intolerable weight crushes the breath out of his body, and whose fixed, deadly, incessant stare petrifies him with horror and makes his very existence insufferable.

In every instance, there is a sense of oppression and helplessness; and the extent to which these are carried, varies according to the violence of the paroxysm. The individual never feels himself a free agent; on the contrary he is spell-bound by some enchantment, and remains an unresisting victim for malice to work its will upon. He can neither breathe, nor walk, nor run, with his wonted facility. If pursued by any imminent danger, he can hardly drag one limb after another; if engaged in combat, his blows are utterly ineffective; if involved in the fangs of any animal, or in the grasp of an enemy, extrication is impossible. He struggles, he pants, he toils, but it is all in vain: his muscles are rebels to the will, and refuse to obey its calls. In no case is there a sense of complete freedom: the benumbing

stupor never departs from him; and his whole being is locked up in one mighty spasm. Sometimes he is forcing himself through an aperture too small for the reception of his body, and is there arrested and tortured by the pangs of suffocation produced by the pressure to which he is exposed; or he loses his way in a narrow labyrinth, and gets involved in its contracted and inextricable mazes; or he is entombed alive in a sepulchre, beside the mouldering dead. There is, in most cases, an intense reality in all that he sees, or hears, or feels. The aspects of the hideous phantoms which harass his imagination are bold and defined; the sounds which greet his ear appallingly distinct; and when any dimness or confusion of imagery does prevail, it is of the most fearful kind, leaving nothing but dreary and miserable impressions behind it.

Much of the horror experienced in nightmare will depend upon the natural activity of the imagination, upon the condition of the body, and upon the state of mental exertion before going to sleep. If, for instance, we have been engaged in the perusal of such works as "The Monk," "The Mysteries of Udolpho," or "Satan's Invisible World Discovered;" and if an attack of nightmare should supervene, it will be aggravated into sevenfold horror by the spectral phantoms with which our minds have been thereby filled. We will enter into all the fearful mysteries of these writings, which, instead of being mitigated by slumber, acquire an

intensity which they never could have possessed in the waking state. The apparitions of murdered victims, like the form of Banquo, which wrung the guilty conscience of Macbeth, will stalk before us ; we are surrounded by sheeted ghosts, which glare upon us with their cold sepulchral eyes; our habitation is among the vaults of ancient cathedrals, or among the dungeons of ruined monasteries, and our companions are the dead.

At other times, an association of ludicrous images passes through the mind: every thing becomes incongruous ridiculous, and absurd. But even in the midst of such preposterous fancies, the passion of mirth is never for one moment excited: the same blank despair, the same freezing inertia, the same stifling tortures, still harass us; and so far from being amused by the laughable drama enacting before us, we behold it with sensations of undefined horror and disgust.

In general, during an attack, the person has the consciousness of an utter inability to express his horror by cries. He feels that his voice is half choked by impending suffocation, and that any exertion of it, farther than a deep sigh or groan, is impossible. Sometimes, however, he conceives that he is bellowing with prodigious energy, and wonders that the household are not alarmed by his noise. But this is an illusion: those outcries which he fancies himself uttering, are merely obscure moans, forced with difficulty and pain from the stifled penetralia of his bosom.