Observations placeholder
Braid, James - Helping the deaf and dumb
Identifier
002292
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Neurypnology: or the Rationale of Nervous Sleep – James Braid
Of all the circumstances connected with the artificial sleep which I induce, nothing so strongly marks the difference between it and natural sleep as the wonderful power the former evinces in curing many diseases of long standing, and which had resisted natural sleep, and every known agency, for years, e.g. patients who have been born deaf and dumb, of various ages, up to 32 years, had continued without the power of hearing sound until the time they were operated on by me, and yet they were enabled to do so by being kept in the hypnotic state for eight, ten, or twelve minutes, and have had their hearing still farther improved by a repetition of similar operations.
Now, supposing these patients to have spent six hours out of twenty-four in sleep, many of them had had four, five, six, or eight years of continuous sleep, but still awoke as they lay down, incapable of hearing sound, and yet they had some degree of it communicated to them by a few minutes of Hypnotism. Can any stronger proof be wanted, or adduced, than this, that it is very different from common sleep?