The Physiology of Taste (37 page)

“The next day I summoned the sleepwalker, and without mincing words asked him straightway of what he had dreamed the night before.

“He seemed disturbed by my question. ‘Father,’ he replied, ‘I had such a strange dream that I am truly ashamed to tell it to you. It may be the work of a devil, and …’

“‘I order you to tell it,’ I said to him. ‘A dream is always involuntary; it is nothing but an illusion. Speak to me frankly.’

“‘Father,’ he said then, ‘I had hardly gone to bed when I dreamed that you had killed my mother, that her bloody ghost had appeared to me to demand vengeance, and that at this sight I was seized with such fury that I ran to your apartment and, finding you in your bed there, I stabbed you three times. A short
time later I awoke, covered with sweat, revolted by my attack on you, and then I thanked God that such a terrible crime had not really been committed …’

“‘It had more nearly been committed than you knew,’ I said to him with a serious but unruffled air.

“Then I told him of the night’s happening, and showed him the traces of the blows which he had dreamed he dealt me.

“At this sight, he threw himself at my feet, weeping helplessly, groaning at the thought of the thing which might have happened, and begging for whatever punishment I felt I must inflict on him.

“‘No, no,’ I exclaimed. ‘I cannot punish you for an involuntary act! But from now on I shall release you from assisting at any of our night-time duties, and I must warn you that your cell will be locked on you from the outside, after the evening meal, and will not be opened until it is time for you to come to low mass at daybreak.’”

If, during this incident from which the prior escaped so miraculously, he had been killed, the sleepwalking monk would not have been punished by law, for it would have been involuntary murder on his part.

83: The general laws imposed on the globe which we inhabit have perforce influenced our own patterns of living. The alternating of night and day, which happens everywhere on earth with certain variations, but in such a way that in the end the two always strike a fair balance, has established a natural time for our activity and for our repose; probably our lives would be quite different if we spent them in an endless day.

However that may be, when man has enjoyed for a certain period the full pleasures of his existence, a moment arrives when he can no longer stand them; his impressionability gradually diminishes; the most skilful attacks directed against each of his senses are futile, his organs resist what they have most ardently coveted until now, and his soul is replete: it is the time for rest.

It is needless to say that we are here considering social man,
surrounded by all the resources and good things of the highest civilization, for this need for repose comes much more quickly and regularly to everyone who is subjected to the fatigue of concentrated labor in his office, in his workroom, or while traveling, at war, hunting, and so on.

Nature, that excellent mother, has added to this rest, as to all her other restorative acts, a definite and deep pleasure.

The man who is resting has a sensation of well-being as general as it is undefinable, as his arms fall to his sides under their own weight, his muscles relax, and his brain grows fresher; his senses are quiet, and his sensations vague; he desires nothing, and thinks not at all; a filmy veil lies over his eyes. A few more instants, and he will be asleep.

84:
IN SPITE OF
the fact that there are a few men so organized that it can almost be said that they never sleep, still it is a general truth that the need for sleep is as imperious as hunger and thirst. Army sentinels in the most advanced positions often fall asleep, even when they have thrown snuff into their eyes to keep them open; and Pichegru,
¹
tracked by Bonaparte’s police, paid 30,000 francs for one night’s sleep, during which he was betrayed and taken.

85: Sleep is that state of torpor in which man, separated from objects outside of himself by the enforced inactivity of his senses, lives only as a mechanical being.

Sleep, like the night, is preceded by its own twilight and followed by its dawn: the first comes before absolute inertia, and the second leads back to active life.

We shall try to examine these different phenomena.

From the moment sleep begins, the organs of the senses fall little by little into inaction: first taste, next sight and smell; hearing still stands guard awhile, and touch is ever there, to warn us by means of pain of the dangers which menace the body.

Sleep is always preceded by a more or less voluptuous sensation: the body falls into it with pleasure, sure of a prompt restoration of its powers, and the mind abandons itself to it without question, confident that its means of activity will soon be refreshed.

It is because this sensation has been misinterpreted, in spite
of its positive nature, that even our greatest scientists have compared sleep to death, which every living creature resists with his whole soul, and which is marked by such special symptoms that even animals are horrified by it.

Like all pleasures, sleep can become a passion: there are people who have slept away three-quarters of their lives; and like all other passions, it will produce nothing but such evil things as laziness, indolence, weakness, stupidity, and death.

The school of Salerno
²
prescribed but seven hours of sleep, without distinction of age or sex. This doctrine is too severe; something more must be allotted to children from necessity and to women from inclination; but it can be considered as certain that whenever more than ten hours are spent in bed, it is excessive.

In the first moments of the twilight of sleep, will power is still present: a man can re-awaken, and his eyes can open and still see.
Non omnibus dormio
, said Maecenas;
³
and in this state more than one husband has verified unpleasant truths. Some ideas still obtrude, but they are incoherent; faint glimmerings of reason come and go; it seems as if indefinite objects swim in the air. This state lasts only a short time; soon everything disappears, all confusion ceases, and complete sleep reigns.

And what happens now to the mind, the soul? It lives on, secretly, alone; it is like the pilot of a becalmed ship, like a mirror in the black of night, like an unplucked lute; it waits for the rebirth of excitement and life.

There are certain psychologists, however, among them Count von Redern,
⁴
who hold that the soul never ceases its activity; von Redern gives as proof the fact that everyone who is rudely awakened from his first sleep has the same feeling he would experience if he had been interrupted at a very serious task.

This observation is not without reason, and deserves to be verified by more attentive study.

For the rest, the state of absolute unconsciousness is fairly short (it almost never lasts more than five or six hours); little by little the bodily losses are made good; an obscure realization of existence begins to re-awaken, and the sleeper passes into the kingdom of dreams.

1.
Charles Pichegru (1761–1804) was a famous French general, a dauntless royalist who was condemned to Cayenne for his plottings. In 1798 he escaped, and made his way by England and Germany to Paris, to plot once more to overthrow Napoleon. He was betrayed by one of his friends, imprisoned again, and like many another dangerously opinionated patriot in the world’s history, was “found strangled” one day in his cell.

2.
The medical college in this Italian town was the most famous in Europe, until the fifteenth century. Its dictum was stricter than that of King George III of England, who used to say, “Six hours are enough sleep for a man, seven for a woman or child, and eight for a fool.” Child and woman, I have always needed the fool’s portion, but I am in noble company: George himself is reported to have snoozed many an hour upon his throne.

3.
Caius Cilnius Maecenas, who died in 8
B.C.
, was a very wealthy and astute patron of the great poets of his time. Horace and Virgil have left loyal proofs of his generosity, and quite unaided he has bequeathed to us an amusing proof of his diplomacy: one day when the Emperor Augustus visited him, he dozed, and the ruler kissed his wife, but then when a courtier in Augustus’ retinue tried to take his amorous turn, Maecenas awoke sharply from his tactful nap, and exclaimed, “I do not sleep for
everybody!
”

4.
Sigismund Ehrenreich, Count von Redern (1755–1845) was a diplomat and man of letters who became a French citizen in 1811. He was highly thought of, and until they quarrelled was the partner of Saint-Simon, the great French social philosopher.

86:
DREAMS ARE UNILATERAL
impressions which come to the mind (that is, the soul) without the aid of exterior objects.

These phenomena, so common and at the same time so extraordinary, are still but little understood.

It is the fault of the scientists, who have not yet presented to us a sufficiently detailed study. Such an essential work is bound to come to us in time, and then man’s double nature will be better understood.

In the present state of science, we can only take as a fact the assumption that there is a fluid as subtle as it is powerful, which transmits to the brain the sensations received by the senses, and that it is from the excitation caused by these impressions that ideas are born.

Absolute sleep is the result of the waste and inertia of this fluid.

It is to be concluded that the labors of digestion and of assimilation, which are far from having ceased during sleep, make up this loss, so that there is a period of time in which the individual, while possessing all that he needs to spring into action again, still is not yet influenced by exterior objects.

Then the fluid, by nature mobile, flows into the brain through the nerve channels; it creeps into the same regions and follows the same paths as in the waking state, since its track is the same; therefore it produces the same effects, but with less intensity.

The reason for this last difference seems obvious enough to me. When a waking man is impressed by an exterior object, the sensation he experiences is precise, abrupt, and inevitable; the whole sensory organ is in action. When, on the contrary, the same impression is transmitted to him while he sleeps, it is only the hindpart of the nerves which is in action; the sensation must
necessarily be less vivid and less positive. To make things even more easily understood, we can say that in a waking man there is a shock from the sensation in every organ, whereas in a sleeping man there is but some slight movement in the parts nearest the brain.

It is well known, however, that in voluptuous dreams Nature attains her end almost as successfully as when man is awake. This is the direct result of differences in the organs themselves, for our genitals need only one stimulus, and each sex possesses within itself everything that is needed to complete the act it has been made for.

87: When the nervous fluid is thus carried to the brain, it always flows through the channels meant to be used by one of our senses, and that is why it awakens in them certain sensations or series of ideas instead of others. So it is that we think we are seeing when the optic nerve is aroused, and are hearing when the auditory nerves are influenced, and so on; and let us remark here as a singular thing the fact that it is very rare that the sensations felt in dreams have anything to do with taste and smell: when we dream of a garden or a meadow, we see flowers without savoring their perfume; when we think we are sitting down to a feast, we see the food without tasting it.

It would be a task worthy of any scientist to try to discover why two of our senses have no influence on the soul during sleep, while the four others flourish there in almost their full power. I know of no psychologist who has bothered with this.

Let us also remark that the more hidden our affections may be which we feel while sleeping, the stronger they are. Thus, the most sensual ideas are nothing compared with the anguish we may experience if we dream of losing a beloved child, or of being condemned to hang. Anyone in a like case can awaken bathed in sweat, or all damp with tears.

88: No matter how fantastic may seem the ideas which come to us in dreams, we must nevertheless admit if we look closely at them that they are nothing but recollections or combinations of them. I am tempted to say that dreams are no more than the memory of the senses.

Their strangeness consists solely in the fact that the association of these ideas is an unusual one, since it is beyond the laws of chronology, of social usages, and of time; the net result, in the last analysis, is that no man has ever dreamed of what was totally unknown to him.

One need not be too astonished at the extraordinary quality of dreams if he remembers that, in a waking man, four senses stand guard and check one another reciprocally: sight, hearing, touch, and memory. In a man who sleeps, each sense stands alone, dependent on its own resources.

I am almost tempted to compare these two states of mind to a piano before which is seated a musician who, letting his fingers stray idly over the keys, draws from them some sort of remembered melody, the while he could add to it a complete harmonization if he concentrated all his forces on it. This comparison could be carried much further, with the added comment that reflection is to ideas what harmony is to sounds, and that certain ideas hold others within them, just as a primary sound contains many others which are secondary to it, etc., etc.

89: In letting myself be led thus easily into a subject which holds many charms for me, I find that I have run straight into the confines of the system of Dr. Gall, who preaches and upholds his doctrine of the multiformity of the brain parts.