Then the first division of trance is into trance-sleep and trance-waking. In extreme cases it is easy to tell trance-sleep from common sleep, trance-waking from common waking; but there are varieties with less prominent features, in which it is difficult, at first, to say whether the patient is entranced at all.
There is, upon the whole, more alliance between sleep and trance, than between waking and trance. Or, in a large class of cases, the patient falls into trance when asleep. It is a cognate phenomenon to this that the common initiatory stage of trance is a trance-sleep.
Trance is of more frequent occurrence among the young than among the middle-aged or old people. It occurs more frequently among young women than among young men. In other words, the liability to trance is in proportion to delicacy of organization, and higher nervous susceptibility.
But what is trance? The question will be best answered by exhibiting its several phases. In the mean time, it may be laid down that the basis of trance is the supervention of the abnormal relation of the mind and nervous system. In almost all its forms it is easy to show that some of the mental functions are no longer located in their pristine organs. The most ordinary change is the departure of common sensation from the organ of touch. Next, sight leaves the organs of vision. To make up for these desertions, if the patient wake in trance, either the same senses reappear elsewhere, or some unaccountable mode of general perception manifests itself.
A strict alliance exists between trance and the whole family of spasms. Most of them are exclusively developed in connexion with it; all are liable to be combined with it; they are all capable of being excited by the same influences which produce trance; so they often occur vicariously, or alternate with trance. One kind is catalepsy; the body motionless, statue-like, but the tone of spasm maintained low, so that you may arrange the statue in what attitude you will, and it preserves it. A second is catochus, like the preceding, but with a higher power of spasm, so that the joints are rigidly fixed; and if you overcome one for a moment with superior strength, being let go, it flies back to where it was. A third, partial spasm of equal rigidity, arching the body forwards or backwards or laterally, or fixing one limb or more. The fourth, clonic spasm, for instance, the contortions and convulsive struggles of epilepsy. The fifth, an impulse to rapid and varied muscular actions, nearly equalling convulsions in violence, but combined so as to travesty ordinary voluntary motion; this is the dance of St. Veitz, which took its name from an epidemic outbreak in Germany in the thirteenth century, that was supposed to be cured by the interposition of the saint; then persons of all classes were seized in groups in public with a fury of kicking, shuffling, dancing together, till they dropt. Now, the same agency is manifested either in a violent rush, and disposition to climb with inconceivable agility and precision; or alternately to twist the features, roll the neck, and jerk and swing the limbs even to the extent of dislocating them.