MacNish offers an interesting instance as follows: "In Lodge's 'Historical Portraits' there is a likeness by Sir Peter Lely of Lord Culpepper's brother, so famous as a dreamer. In 1806 he was indicted at Old Bailey for shooting one of the Guards and his horse to boot. He pleaded somnambulism and was acquitted on producing nearly fifty witnesses to prove the extraordinary things he did in his sleep."

Shelley the poet was a somnambulist, which does not seem strange in a man of the poet's many vagaries, but when sober, staid Dr. Franklin comes forward with a sleep-walking experience, there is a hint of the incongruous. Again to quote MacNish: "I went out," said the Doctor, "to bathe in Martin's salt water hot bath in Southampton, and floating on my back fell asleep, and slept nearly an hour by my watch, without sinking or turning, a thing I never did before and should hardly have thought possible!"

Epileptics are peculiarly prone to sleep-walking, and the condition is more usual with children than with grown persons. Havelock Ellis asserts that when children become somnambulistic they cease to be troubled with nightmare. On the whole the state is more nearly allied to mental maladies than that of dreaming.

Nightmare, or the ephialtes of the Greeks and the Incubus of the Romans, is responsible for generations of misconception regarding dreams. Arising from physical causes, nightmare produces physical effects, which have a mental reflex of terror, oppression, a feeling of helplessness and of despair. Physically there are the stertorous breath and twitching limbs of suffering. All are obvious symptoms which have caused the more subtle type of dreams to be thrust into the background. In many instances their basis is the typical dream, but they are distorted by physical conditions, heart disease, epilepsy, etc., until they outdo the horrors of ancestral memories. The instinctive protection of the subconscious is enfeebled in the nightmare, which is probably the foundation of the hell doctrines advocated in the older, sterner creeds. From the time of Galen, the nightmare has been attributed to physical sources; the Romans, replete with food and drink, and the saints with starved cold bodies, paid alike the penalty of maltreated flesh; the Roman with his visions of irate gods, the saint by the appearance of the devil who would try to draw him from his faith with diabolical, physical torture.

Suetonius tells us that Caligula was tormented with nightmare. After his recovery from the illness that came in penalty for his evil habits, it was said that he was never able to sleep for more than two or three hours a night, and that his dreams were so terrific that he feared to close his eyes. On one occasion in a dream the sea rose up and conversed with him and reminded him of the prophecy of his predecessor the Emperor Tiberius, that he, Caligula, was educated for "the destruction of the Roman people."

After the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, Charles IX of France was haunted by nightmare.

It is said that the insanity of the poet Cowper was traceable to nightmare; and in numerous instances neurotic children have become mentally unbalanced from the same cause.

Robert Louis Stevenson describes the nightmares of his own childhood in "A Chapter on Dreams."*

"He was from a child an ardent and uncomfortable dreamer. When he had a touch of fever at night, and the room swelled and shrank, and his clothes hanging on a nail, now loomed up instant to the bigness of a church and now drew away into a horror of infinite distance and infinite littleness, the poor soul was very well aware of what must follow and struggled hard against the approaches of that slumber which was the beginning of sorrows. But his struggles were in vain: sooner or later the night-hag would have him by the throat and pluck him strangling from his sleep. . . . But presently, in the course of his growth, the cries and physical contortions passed away seemingly forever; his visions were still for the most part miserable, but they were more constantly supported and he would awake with no more extreme symptoms than a flying heart, a freezing scalp, cold sweats, and the speechless midnight fear."

A letter to the London Times from H. Rider Haggard relates the following nightmare: "Perhaps you will think with me that the following circumstances are worthy of record. I have made up my mind to publish them over my own name, though I am well aware that by doing so I may expose myself to a certain amount of ridicule and disbelief.

"On the night of Saturday, July 9th, I went to bed about 12.30 and suffered from what I took to be a nightmare. I was awakened by my wife's voice calling me from her own bed upon the other side of the room. As I awoke, the nightmare itself, which had been long and vivid, faded from my brain. All I could remember of it was a sense of awful oppression, and of desperate and terrified struggling for life, such as the act of drowning would probably involve. Between the time that I heard my wife's voice and the time that my consciousness answered to it, I had another dream. I dreamed that a black retriever dog, a most amiable and intelligent beast named Bob, which was the property of my eldest daughter, was lying on its side among brushwood, or rough growth of some sort, by water. My own personality in some mysterious way seemed to be arising from the body of the dog, which I knew quite surely to be Bob, and no other, so much so that my head was against its head, which was lifted up at an unnatural angle. In my vision the dog was trying to speak to me in words, and failing, transmitted to my mind in an undefined fashion, the knowledge that it was dying. Then everything vanished, and I awoke to hear my wife asking me why on earth I was making such horrible, weird noises. I replied that I had had a nightmare about a fearful struggle, and that I had dreamed that old Bob was in a frightful way and was trying to talk to me and tell me about it. Finally, seeing that it was still quite dark, I asked what the time was. She said she did not know, and shortly afterwards I went to sleep again and was disturbed no more. On the Sunday morning Mrs. Rider Haggard told the tale at breakfast, and I repeated my story in a few words. Thinking that the whole thing was nothing more than a disagreeable dream, I made no inquiries about the dog and did not even know that it was missing until that Sunday night when my little girl, who was in the habit of feeding it, told me so. At breakfast time, I may add, nobody knew that it was gone. On the morning of Thursday, the 14th, my servant, Charles Bedingfield, and I, discovered the body of the dog floating in the Waveney against a weir about a mile and a quarter away. Two platelayers informed me that the dog had been killed by a train. The animal must have been killed by an excursion train that left Ditchingham at 10.25 on Saturday night, returning empty from Harleston, a little after 11. This was the last train which ran that night. It appears that the animal was knocked or carried along some yards by the train and fell into the brink of the water, where the reeds grew. Here, if it were still living, it must have suffocated and sunk, undergoing, I should imagine, much the same sensations that I did in my dream, and in very similar circumstances to those that I saw therein - namely, amongst a scrubby growth, at the edge of the water. If the dog's dissolution took place at the moment when I dreamt, this communication must have been a form of telepathy, which is now very generally acknowledged to occur between human beings from time to time and under special circumstances, but which I have never heard of as occurring between a human being and one of the lower animals. If, on the other hand, that dissolution happened, as I believe, over three hours previously, - what am I to say? Then it would seem that it must have been some non-bodily but surviving part of the life or of the spirit of the dog which, so soon as my deep sleep gave it an opportunity, reproduced those things in my mind as they have already occurred, I presume, to advise me of the manner of its end and to bid me farewell."