"Cataleptic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in their weird dances, during which extraordinary contortions are performed, and strange positions assumed, the body of the dancer being eventually reduced to a cataleptic state, in which it remains for a great length ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... us, presents a spacious picture of the development of our civilisation during the next two hundred years. The sleeper is a typical liberal-minded man of means of the nineteenth century, and he awakens from a cataleptic trance in the year 2100, to discover that by an ironic combination of circumstances he has become the central figure of an enormous political convulsion. His attempt to rise to the responsibilities of his position, his struggle for power—inspired by an enthusiastic girl—with the ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... writers of all such letters would merely read over what they have written, and ask themselves if they could find pleasure in receiving messages of like manner and matter, perhaps they might begin to do a little thinking, and break the habit of cataleptic unthinkingness that seemingly descends upon them as soon as they are ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... If the conditioning process works for these two tests, you have achieved the lethargic state of hypnosis. This is the first state of hypnosis and is generally referred to as the "light" state. Therapeutic suggestions can work admirably in this state. The next stage of hypnosis is known as the cataleptic state and is referred to as the "medium" state. Generally, hypnosis is divided into three states: the lethargic (light state); the cataleptic (medium state); and the ...
— A Practical Guide to Self-Hypnosis • Melvin Powers
... lady, though not insensible, became paralyzed with horror, and remained in a kind of cataleptic trance, fully conscious, but unable to move or speak, until, at nine o'clock next day, no answer having been given to repeated calls of her maid, the doors were forced open. At the same moment the power of speech returned, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... gloom which thus oppressed me in dreams, I select for record but a solitary vision. Methought I was immersed in a cataleptic trance of more than usual duration and profundity. Suddenly there came an icy hand upon my forehead, and an impatient, gibbering voice whispered the word "Arise!" within ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... grew quite calm, almost cataleptic. Holding his thin hands over the fire, slowly he let them fall, and as he did so the fierce flames ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... still one of you had better bring the Royal Apothecary at once. Be careful to keep it from the Court, as I wish to avoid unnecessary alarm." The others endeavoured to restore the afflicted Fairy, but, though still alive, she was in some kind of cataleptic condition which was beyond the ordinary remedies. The Court Apothecary arrived and applied blisters without result, and finally gave it as his opinion that, while she might survive for some time, she would in all probability never ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... without injury that will kill another, so in hypnosis, one person can be put into a deep sleep by means that would be totally ineffectual in another, and even then the mental states differ in each individual—that which in one induces a gentle slumber may plunge his neighbor into a deep cataleptic state." ...
— Complete Hypnotism: Mesmerism, Mind-Reading and Spiritualism • A. Alpheus
... and loaded for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair- triggers. The two elder detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions that were considered doubly hazardous, and she always established the reputation of such adventures by coming back cataleptic. If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark, we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go about the house, administering ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... his meditations, and to discuss ethnological points also. You see, I am verree small person here nowadays, in comparison with all his charms. By Jove, O'Hara, do you know, he is afflicted with infirmity of fits. Yess, I tell you. Cataleptic, too, if not also epileptic. I found him in such a state under a tree in articulo mortem, and he jumped up and walked into a brook and he was nearly drowned but for ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... cataleptic rigour into which this man had fallen, lasted for an unprecedented length of time, and then he passed slowly to the flaccid state, to a lax attitude suggestive of profound repose. Then it was his ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... that ensued was broken by Mr F.'s Aunt, who had been sitting upright in a cataleptic state since her last public remark. She now underwent a violent twitch, calculated to produce a startling effect on the nerves of the uninitiated, and with the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... minutely the tricks and wonders that we saw, but will proceed at once to the main fact. With the aid of a vaguda, a kind of musical pipe of bamboo, the buni caused all the snakes to fall into a sort of cataleptic sleep. The melody that he played, monotonous, low, and original to the last degree, nearly sent us to sleep ourselves. At all events we all grew extremely sleepy without any apparent cause. We were aroused from this ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... visionaries may be mentioned, who had almost beyond doubt those very nervous seizures with which the tendency to hallucinations is intimately connected. To take a single instance, Socrates, whose daimon was an audible not a visual appearance, was, as has been often pointed out, subject to cataleptic seizure, standing all night ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton
... senses; or that a man in a trance, however he got there, is necessarily omniscient; we do not find that Mr Poe's conjectures on these mysterious topics gather any weight whatever from the authority of the spokesman to whom he has intrusted them. We are not quite persuaded that a cataleptic patient sees very clearly what is going on at the other side of our own world; when this has been made evident to us, we shall be prepared to give him credit for penetrating into the secrets ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... were cases of healing, many of them surprising, of cataleptic rigidity, and of insensibility to pain, among visitors to the tomb of the Abbe Paris (1731). Had the cases been judicially examined (all medical evidence was in their favour), and had they been proved false, the cause of Hume would have profited enormously. A strong presumption ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... His clerk came running in with a telegram, or something of the sort, and Mr. Amidon rushed away with him. What would this man have thought and said, if I had subjected his employer to the treatment necessary to restore him—put him into the cataleptic state, and then into the normal, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... was at the top of Ushigomezaka. His modest pension of a thousand koku by no means represented the extent of his power. Iemon became frightened at the storm gathering against him. He was open to all suggestions of remedy for the cataleptic state into which O'Hana had fallen. The neighbour gossips suggested calling in the Daiho[u]-in of Shiomachi. A service kept part at least of the money in the ward. They had their share in provision and consumption; the fifty ryo[u] necessary were much to them—and to Iemon in ...
— The Yotsuya Kwaidan or O'Iwa Inari - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 1 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... moment Skippy was perfunctorily pecking at the cheek of Miss Clara Bedelle and pretending to be overjoyed at the prospect of parading before the assembled school with six young ladies in tow. Then he looked up and something like a cataleptic fit went through ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... little increase to their mutual savings in order to their marriage; and it was a great delight to him that Sarah did not object to William's occasional presence in their Sunday interviews. It was at this point in their history that Silas's cataleptic fit occurred during the prayer-meeting; and amidst the various queries and expressions of interest addressed to him by his fellow-members, William's suggestion alone jarred with the general sympathy towards ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... bed sat Nurse Kennedy, as my eyes had last seen her, sitting bolt upright in the arm-chair beside the bed. She had placed a pillow behind her, so that her back might be erect; but her neck was fixed as that of one in a cataleptic trance. She was, to all intents and purposes, turned into stone. There was no special expression on her face—no fear, no horror; nothing such as might be expected of one in such a condition. Her open eyes showed neither wonder ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... illness, of a terrifying nature, which I have not as yet been able to identify." To his brother, 3rd September, 1848. Severe disappointment or annoyance always had a great effect upon him; on the occasion of his first marriage he fell into a sort of cataleptic condition as a result of the opposition of his parents and relations, who sought to oppose it. ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... to a chair—Mr. Percy sat down. His lordship recovered gradually from the species of trance into which he had fallen. The cataleptic rigidity of his figure relaxed—the colour of life returned—the body regained its functions—the soul resumed at once her powers. Without seeming sensible of any interruption or intermission of feeling or thought, Lord Oldborough went on ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... alike at the outset of their frenzy, in that they would be destroyers of Church and Law, both use tinkers as their agents of destruction, and both die despised of men. Both are "plunged in trance," but their trances differ. That of Lady Gregory's hero is cataleptic and directly productive of his revolt, from a revelation, as he thinks it is, that comes to him while he is "away." Paul Ruttledge, on the other hand, deliberately gives up his conventional life, and that as largely because of boredom as because of belief in its wrongness. One cannot, as ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Nature, Andrew Carnegie is a good deal of a schemer. Ask a town to start in and raise three thousand dollars a year for library purposes, and the whole Common Council, His Honor the Mayor, and the Board of Education will throw a cataleptic fit. But get them fired with a desire to secure thirty thousand dollars from Mr. Carnegie, and they make the promise to love, honor, obey—and maintain—and strangely enough, they do. An action for ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... changing her position but rarely; her expression was stolid; she retained and drooled saliva, wet and soiled herself. She never answered any questions; showed no interest whatever. At times she was quite stiff and very resistive but never cataleptic. Her extremities were cold and cyanotic. She had to be tube-fed throughout. During this time she lost ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... their sympathy was called forth, certain it is that many adult women, and even children, some of whom were of the male sex, and not more than six years old, began to complain forthwith of palpitation, followed by faintness, which passed into a motionless and apparently cataleptic condition. These symptoms lasted more than an hour, and probably recurred frequently. In the course of time, however, this malady is said to have undergone a modification, such as it exhibits at the present day. Women whom it has ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... could count every throb of my heart, and throat, and temples—my whole frame was transfigured into an anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not move, nor speak, nor weep—no wretchedness was ever more supreme than this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first to break ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... the theologians, law-givers and logicians under whose protection the free city had placed its budding liberties. There they sat, rigid and sumptuous on their Gothic thrones: Origen, Zeno, David, Lycurgus, Aristotle; listening in a kind of cataleptic helplessness to a confession of faith that scattered their doctrines to the winds. As he looked and listened, a weary sense of the reiterance of things came over him. For what were these ancient manipulators of ideas, prestidigitators of a vanished world of thought, but the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... some check—by some deep change in the nervous constitution. Thus a girl suddenly refuses to eat, has visions, shouts, and sings uncontrollably, perhaps speaks in an unknown tongue—she is said to be hysterical. A mother, hearing of the death of her child, begins to laugh, passes at length into a cataleptic state, during which a child's voice sounds from her throat; this, too, is hysteria. A man of forty-five becomes melancholy, professes to hear music inaudible to others, develops automatic writing, and trances in which he is able to hear distant voices, and to ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland |
