“Dracula” by Bram Stoker: Dracula hypnotizes Lucy from a distance to sleepwalk to him; high hypnotizability and sleepwalking are seen in multiple personality.

In the first hundred pages of my annotated edition of Dracula (1), the editor helps explain the action in regard to vampire lore, but does not mention that nineteenth-century readers might also associate Lucy’s entranced behavior and sleepwalking to high hypnotizability, hypnosis, and multiple personality.

Before Lucy is ever influenced by Dracula to come to him in her sleep, she is given a past history of sleepwalking; indeed, she is implied to have inherited sleepwalking from her father (1, p. 72). And as her friend Mina remarks, “I fear that she is of too super-sensitive a nature to go through the world without trouble” (1, p. 86). In short, the novel gives reasons that someone like Lucy is one of Dracula’s first victims.

Readers of my past post on Freud, in which I discuss his visit to Paris in the late nineteenth century, will remember that he thought he might have experienced telepathic communications from his fiancée back home (he heard her voice), and also recall that he probably attended the reading of a paper of Dr. Pierre Janet on the subject of hypnotic influence by telepathy from a considerable distance. Belief in, and study of, such things, including multiple personality, were common at the time that Dracula was written.

Sleepwalking in Multiple Personality

“Somnambulism [sleepwalking] was traditionally included on the early lists of dissociative disorders [multiple personality, also called dissociative identity disorder, is a dissociative disorder]. Somnambulists were the focus of many discussions and stories during the late 18th and 19th centuries…

“Somnambilism is common in childhood; it typically disappears about the age of 10 and is rare in adulthood. Sleepwalking that continues into adulthood generally has a later age of onset than sleepwalking that is outgrown. An increased familial incidence of sleepwalking has been reported by some investigators, and a genetic predisposition has been suggested. A major life event [trauma] is frequently associated with the onset of sleepwalking in adult somnambulists…adult somnambulists were more likely to exhibit psychopathology…than were subjects who outgrew the disorder.

“Somnambulistic wanderings may, however, be part of the clinical picture of MPD [multiple personality disorder]. In two cases with which I am familiar, the patients first sought help for and were treated for somnambulism. Only later was it recognized that these patients were suffering form MPD. Their somnambulism was caused by the nocturnal emergence of alters [alternate personalities]…Both of these patients displayed extraordinarily complex behavior during these sleepwalking episodes, including calling their therapists from phone booths, stealing objects, working in the yard, and building complex structures” (2, pp. 17-19).

“The NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] survey study found that the most commonly reported dissociative symptoms in MPD were as follows: amnesias [memory gaps] (98%), fugue episodes (55%), feelings of depersonalization (53%), and sleepwalking (20%)” (2, pp. 59-60).

1. Bram Stoker. Dracula [1897]. Edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York, W. W. Norton, 1997.

2. Frank W. Putnam, MD. Diagnosis and Treatment of Multiple Personality Disorder. New York, The Guilford Press, 1989.