or head, plainly in connection with ideas passing through the mind. From incipient manifestations of no importance somnambulism reaches frightful intensity and almost inconceivable complications.
Somnambulists in this country have recently perpetrated murders, killed their own children, carried furniture out of houses, wound up clocks, and ignited conflagrations. A carpenter not long since arose in the night, went into his shop, and began to file a saw; but the noise of the operation awoke him. The extraordinary feats of somnambulists in ascending to the roofs of houses, threading dangerous places, and doing many other things which they could not have done while awake, have often been described, and in many cases made the subject of close investigation. Formerly it was believed that if they were not awakened they would in process of time return to their beds, and that there would not be any danger of serious accident happening to them. This was long since proved false. Many have fallen out of windows and been killed; and though some have skirted the brink of danger safely, the number of accidents to sleep-walking persons is great.
Essays have been written by somnambulists. A young lady, anxious about a prize for which she was to compete, involving the writing of a composition, arose from her bed in sleep and wrote about a subject upon which she had not intended to write when awake; and this paper secured the prize. The same person, later in life, while asleep selected an obnoxious document from among several, put it in a cup, and set fire to it, and in the morning was entirely unaware of what she had done.
Intellectual work has sometimes been performed in ordinary dreams not attended by somnambulism. The composition of "Kubla Khan" by Coleridge
