It will occur to you to ask, why did I not release myself from the horrors of opium by leaving it off or diminishing it?  The reader may be sure that I made attempts innumerable to reduce the quantity.  It might be supposed that I yielded to the fascinations of opium too easily; it cannot be supposed that any man can be charmed by its terrors.

My studies have now been long interrupted.  I cannot read to myself with any pleasure, hardly with a moment’s endurance.  This intellectual torpor applies more or less to every part of the four years during which I was under the Circean spells of opium.  But for misery and suffering, I might, indeed, be said to have existed in a dormant state.  I seldom could prevail on myself even to write a letter.  The opium-eater loses none of his moral sensibilities or aspirations.  He wishes and longs as earnestly as ever to realise what he believes possible, and feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of power to attempt.

IV.—­The Horrors of Dreamland

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to the history of what took place in my dreams, for these were the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.  I know not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most, have a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness all sorts of phantoms.

In the middle of 1817, I think it was, this faculty became positively distressing to me.  At nights, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from times before Aedipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis.  And at the same time a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour.

All changes in my dreams were accompanied by deep-seated anxiety and gloomy melancholy, such as are wholly incommunicable by words.  I seemed every night to descend, not metaphorically, but literally, to descend into chasms and sunless abysses, depths below depths, from which it seemed hopeless that I should ever re-ascend.  Nor did I, even by waking, feel that I had re-ascended.

The sense of space, and, in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected.  Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to receive.  Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity.  This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived far beyond the limits of any human experience.