all up and to trace by a voluntary
act upon the darkness was very apt to transfer itself to my dreams, so
that 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.

2. For this and all other 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 could ever reascend. Nor
did I, by waking, feel that I _had_ reascended. This I do not dwell
upon; because the state of gloom which attended these gorgeous
spectacles, amounting at last to utter darkness, as of some suicidal
despondency, cannot be approached by words.

3. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c., 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 for 70 or 100 years in one night--nay,
sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that
time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human
experience.

4. The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later
years, were often revived: I could not be said to recollect them, for if
I had been told of them when waking, I should not have been able to
acknowledge them as parts of my past experience. But placed as they were
before me, in dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their evanescent
circumstances and accompanying feelings, I _recognised_ them
instantaneously. I was once told by a near relative of mine, that having
in her childhood fallen into a river, and being on the very verge of
death but for the critical assistance which reached her, she saw in a
moment her whole l