TRANCE (OF., Fr. trance, extreme fear, Sp., Fort. trance, crisis, hour of death, from Lat. transitus, passage over, from transire, to pass over, cross, from trans, across, through + ire, to go). A general term in psychology de noting various forms of modified consciousness. The nature of the abnormal nervous conditions that constitute the physiological causes of trance is not clear. The psychological symptoms vary from seeming inanimation to a waking condition, though a manifestly abnormal one, of exagger ated suggestibility in respect to some dominating idea. In general there is more or less insensi bility to environment and to ordinary stimuli. What may be termed the waking trance is also eharaeterized by extraordinary concentration or automatic mental action. while the automatic functions of the body are little interrupted. The thoughts of the subject are ordinarily fixed on one kind of idea, frequently religion. In trance sleep, except in its protractedness and the les sened sensibility to external stimuli, there ap pears to be little abnormal. In tranee-eoma these
symptoms are more intense and respiration and circulation are feebler. In death-trance. except sometimes the inner dream-life, all animation ceases. including the action of heart and lungs. The thought. or dream, of trani'e is likely to he more sequential and coherent in character than that of normal sleep. Various pathological and psychopathic conditions are often called trance, such as deep awl unusually protracted sleep, lethargy, suspended animation, the hypnotic state. and altered personality. Consult: Charcot, Lecons stir les maladies du systime nerreux (1883) ; Mantegazza. Estasi imam' (1887) ; Preston, Hysteria and Allied Conditions (1897) ; and for an account of the so-called trance me dium Mrs. Piper, Proceedings of the Society for Psyehical Remarch,