551 B. Professor Delboeufs experiments, recorded in the paper entitled "De l'Appreciation du Temps par les Somnambules," in the Proceedings S.P.R., vol. viii. pp. 414-421, were directed simply towards testing the power of calculating the lapse of time. His subjects were two sisters, whom he calls M. and J., country girls of twenty and twenty-three, servants in his family, with whom many of his most famous hypnotic experiments had been made (see 534 A and E). He made suggestions to them to perform various trivial actions in a certain number of minutes from the time the suggestion was given. Eleven experiments were made, the suggestions to take effect after intervals varying from 35° to 3300 minutes. Two experiments (with intervals of 900 and 1500 minutes) succeeded completely; in three others the idea of the action suggested occurred to the subject at the right time, but was not carried out; in four cases the action was performed at the wrong time, the errors varying from 25 to 95 minutes; in the two experiments with intervals of 3300 minutes, the impulse to do the action arose, but at the wrong time, and was not carried out. It must be noted that M. and J. were quite uneducated, could hardly tell the time by the clock, and constantly made mistakes in the simplest sums.

Delboeuf also found that J. could apparently calculate no better when hypnotised than when awake.

551 C. The results obtained by Professor Delboeuf led Dr. J. M. Bramwell to try a much longer series of experiments on the appreciation of time by somnambules, which are by far the best observed and most instructive of any yet recorded. The account of them appeared first in Dr. Bramwell's paper on "Personally Observed Hypnotic Phenomena " in the Proceedings S.P.R., vol. xii. pp. 176-203 (1896), and a further account, with additional details and a discussion of cognate mental phenomena - hypnotic and other - was published in Brain, Summer Number, 1900, under the title of "Hypnotic and Post-Hypnotic Appreciation of Time: Secondary and Multiplex Personalities." I give extracts from both these sources. Full details are given in the original papers of the numerous precautions devised to guard against errors or deceptions, and other details, which are omitted here for want of space.

Miss A., the patient in question, aged nineteen, was first hypnotised by me on September 2nd, 1895.... The patient is intelligent and fairly well educated, but possesses no extraordinary calculating powers either in the normal state or in hypnosis. According to her mother, she has always been remarkably truthful and well-conducted, rather grave in disposition, and inclined to take the duties of life seriously. She is a dressmaker.... She never spontaneously recalled in the waking state anything that occurred in hypnosis. .. .

The experiments were all of the same character. On each occasion I suggested to her, during hypnosis, that at the expiration of a varying number of minutes she should feel impelled to make a cross on a piece of paper with a pencil, and also, without looking at clock or watch, write down what time she believed it to be, and then immediately compare this with the actual time and, if possible, obtain corroborative testimony from her friends.

Experiment No. 1

November 5th, 1895, 4 p.m. Suggestion to be realised in five hours and twenty minutes, i.e. at the expiration of that time the patient was to make a cross and put down the time in the manner just described.

Result

Correct.

Remarks

On this occasion I did not say anything to the patient about the experiment, either before or after hypnosis. I told her mother its nature, but not the time at which the suggestion should be fulfilled. At 9.15 the same evening her mother noticed that the patient was restless, and asked her what was the matter. She replied, "I feel I must do something, but cannot tell what." At 9.20 P.M. she rapidly made a cross with a pencil and wrote twenty minutes past nine on apiece of paper, at the same time saying, "It's all silliness." There was no clock in the room, but her mother went into the next room where there was one, and found that the time was 9.20. When I again saw the patient I explained the nature of the experiments I proposed making to her, and instructed her always to carry a pencil and paper with her during the day, and to put one by her bedside at night. I told her I should make these experimental suggestions from time to time, but not on each occasion when she visited me. In many instances I did not calculate when the suggestions fell due, and in others the calculations I made at the time were proved to be erroneous, and the results of the experiments were in these cases only determined when the series was completed....