One can apply suggestion successfully in very susceptible persons while they are wide awake, without having recourse to hypnotic sleep. All the phenomena of hypnosis or of posthypnotic suggestion can thus be produced. One may lift an arm and say: "You cannot move it now." The arm remains in the condition of cataleptic rigidity. One can suggest anaesthesia, hallucinations (including negative hallucinations), amnesia, mutacisms, deceptions of memory, and anything else one pleases, in this way, just as surely as one can do it in hypnosis. The waking suggestion can very frequently be achieved even in perfectly healthy persons, and not only in the hysterical.

Waking suggestibility is mostly gained first in people who have been put to sleep hypnotically one or more times previously. Still, it is possible to achieve marked suggestive actions even in "awake" persons who have never been hypnotized before. A "magnetizer" succeeded in fixing the arm of a very intelligent, strong-minded lady of my acquaintance cata-leptically by means of suggestion during the time when she was wide awake; she had never had any previous acquaintance with hypnotism. I succeeded in doing this with two women, who were certainly not hysterical, out of four on whom I tried it. It is much easier than one imagines to obtain suggestive results during the waking condition, without allowing the influenced person to have a suspicion of it, and this takes place more frequently than one supposes. My colleague, Dr. Barth, of Basle, has repeatedly been able to produce complete anaesthesia for minor operations on the fauces and elsewhere by painting the place with a solution of common salt, and telling the patient that it is cocaine, and that the mucous membrane is perfectly insensitive. Many others have had similar experiences. The influence of the red thread wound around the little finger on menstruation, mentioned in a preceding page, belongs to this category.

One can obtain waking suggestibility in cases where it does not exist by giving the suggestion of this waking suggestion during hypnotic sleep. It will then be self-suggested. I am firmly convinced that one only needs a certain amount of practice and boldness to produce waking suggestibility in a large proportion of healthy persons, since, for example, I was able to do this in the nineteen nurses referred to before.

Among those objections which are constantly being raised by people who do not understand anything about the matter, the following is very typical: "Very well; waking suggestion may be all right and free from danger, but it is quite different from hypnosis." It is to be hoped that the reader will be able to see that such assertions could not be possible apart from a complete misunderstanding of suggestion, and apart from a want of practical experience, after what I have said in the foregoing, and in consideration of what I am about to explain. The phenomena of waking suggestion are absolutely identical and equivalent to those of suggestion during hypnosis. Whether a little more subjective feeling of sleep is associated with it or not can neither increase nor diminish the danger or the importance of the psychological sequence of events. So much is certain. Every suggestive result indicates a dissociative effect, and causes thereby a single phenomenon, which is homologous to that of dream life. As soon as multiple suggestions follow one another rapidly in waking condition, this waking condition as a whole only becomes hypnotic - i.e., dreamlike and sleeplike - thereby. In this way one can compare every suggestive result during waking with a partial circumscribed dream taking place in an otherwise "awake" brain.