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Quincey, Thomas de - The effects of opium on dreams
Identifier
002008
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Thomas de Quincey – Confessions of an English Opium Eater
....as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point – that whatsoever I happened to call up and to trace by a voluntary act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams; and at length I feared to exercise this faculty; for, as Midas turned all things to gold that yet baffled his hopes and defrauded his human desires, so whatsoever things capable of being visually represented I did but think of in the darkness, immediately shaped themselves into phantoms of the eye; and by a process apparently no less inevitable, when thus once traced in faint and visionary colours, like writings in sympathetic ink, they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams, into insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.
This and all other changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep seated anxiety and funeral melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words.