Only a few months ago I experienced a quite extraordinary sensation of pleasure in my sleep. It consisted of a sort of delicious trembling of all the parts that make up my being.

It was a kind of tingling full of enchantment which, starting from the epidermis from my feet to my head, shook me to the marrow of my bones. I seemed to have a violet flame playing around my forehead. Lambire flamma comas et circum tempora pasci [Flames lick the hair and devour the area of the temples]

I estimate that this state, in which I was physically well, lasted at least thirty seconds, and I awoke filled with astonishment, and not without a certain mixture of fear.

EDITOR'S NOTE

I've had this experience too--both in dreams like Spirit Chorus or The Black Wave, and in waking life when undergoing shiatsu, pressure-point massage intended to release bound-up tension--not mechanical tension in muscles so much as stuck chi, or electrical build-up in nerves if you reject the idea of chi. In any case it worked; along with whole-body tingling I trembled visibly for a minute or so, then felt much better, as if something had been cleared out or discharged. In the dreams it felt the same, though sleep paralysis may have blocked visible trembling.

It felt somewhat like the tingle preceding orgasm or a sneeze, but those sensations build up; this was the opposite, a discharge; like draining a long-swollen wound, or grounding static electricity that was impairing a sensitive device.

I wasn't scared. I thought it was abreaction, though that really means the release from old trauma by re-enacting the trauma, not merely trembling. Maybe it was like the shakes leading to miracle cures in some ecstatic/charismatic rituals--but without the ritual or the belief. It shouldn't have worked! Yet it did. I felt healthier and I functioned better afterward--longterm.

Groucho Marx once sang "Whatever it is, I'm against it." My bewildered contrarian song goes: "Whatever it is, I'm for it."

In short: if you dream this wave of shakes, you're not going crazy. You may be... going sane.

--Chris Wayan

Source: Dreams and how to direct them, 2022, pp 100-101; Daniel Bernardo's translation of Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger by Hervey de Saint-Denys, 1867. Hervey's source is Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du gout (Physiology of Taste), Dec. 1825; page unstated.

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