Observations on trance Author:James Braid Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: OBSERVATIONS ON TKANCE. In the year I SI.3 I published some observations on the remarkable feats of the Fakeers of India, who had been represented as having a... more »cquired the power of suffering themselves to be buried alive, enclosed in bags, shut up in sealed boxes, or even of being buried for days or for weeks in common graves, and assuming their wonted activity on being released from their temporary confinement or sepulture. Such extraordinary feats were naturally looked upon with suspicion, and believed to be a species of deception, accomplished entirely through collusion, and not at all 1mH A fide transactions, such as alleged. Whilst I think it highly probable that this is the true character of many of these alleged feats, still there are others which admit of no such explanation. The difficulties of eluding detection in several carefully narrated cases, were evidently so great as to have rendered deception impossible; and it therefore becomes the duty of scientific men fairly to meet the difficulty, and to endeavour to arrive at a satisfactory solution of the phenomena on physiological principles. On careful consideration of the whole phenomena narrated in connection with these cases, coupled with my experience of the powers of hypnotism, by which individuals can throw themselves into a state of catalepsy or trance, more or less profound, in which condition, like the hyhernating animals, all the vital functions are reduced to the minimum of what is compatible with continued existence and restoration to their former activity, I arrived at the conclusion, that the individuals referred to accomplished these apparently impossible feats by throwing themselvesinto this state of temporary hybernatiou or trance, through suppressing the respiration and fixing the mind, just as w...« less