with the fashioning, or if afterward partially recalled, pass unrecognized for strange, inexplicable impressions. Those that we do remember we shall find are hinged on to our waking life by the continuance of an outer sensation common in part to both states. Were it not for such link, it would be mere haphazard if we struck them again. For their train of association is not one likely to recur under normal conditions.
XI.
But besides the daily running down of the whole brain machinery to sleep, due to the using up of the potential energy of the cells, or its slowing down artificially through the effect of certain drugs, it is possible to bring brain action to a dead point by a simple exercise of will. By shutting one's bodily eyes, or by keeping them fixed upon some uninteresting thing, while at the same time shutting one's mind's eye, or keeping it similarly fixed upon some insipid thought, brain activity may be brought to a strangely sudden stand-still. It is by this portal that the subject passes into the trance state.
Of trances, we may distinguish two kinds:
