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Letters on Mesmerism – Harriet Martineau

As the muscular power oozes away under the mesmeric influence, a strange inexplicable feeling ensues of the frame becoming transparent and ductile. My head has often appeared to be drawn out, to change its form, according to the traction of my Mesmerist ; and an indescribable and exceedingly agreeable sensation of transparency and lightness, through a part or the whole of the frame, has followed.

Then begins the moaning, of which so much has been made ...... I have often moaned, and much oftener have been disposed to do so, when the sensations have been the most tranquil and agreeable.

At such times, my Mesmerist has struggled not to disturb me by a laugh, when I have murmured, with a serious tone,

“Here are my hands, but they have no arms to them:"
"O dear! what shall I do? There is none of me left!"

Between this condition and the mesmeric sleep there is a state, transient and rare, of which I have had experience, …… The ideas that I have snatched from it, and now retain, are, of all ideas which ever visited me, the most lucid and impressive. It may be well that they are incommunicable-partly from their nature and relations, and partly from their unfitness for translation into mere words. I will only say that the condition is one of no 'nervous excitement’ as far as experience and outward indications can be taken as a test.

Such a state of repose, of calm translucent intellectuality, I had never conceived of; and no reaction followed, no excitement but that which is natural to everyone who finds himself in possession of a great new idea.