ht, 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.

The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years,
were often revived. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no
such thing as _forgetting_ possible to the mind. A thousand accidents
may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the
secret