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The Opium Eater
by
“From that day I have been habitually an opium eater. I am perfectly sensible that the constant use of the pernicious drug has impaired my health; but I cannot relinquish it. Some time since I formed a resolution to abandon it, totally and at once; but had not strength enough to carry it into practice. The very attempt to do so nearly drove me to madness. The great load of mental agony which had been lifted up and held aloof by the daily applied power of opium sank back upon my heart like a crushing weight. Then, too, my physical sufferings were extreme; an indescribable irritation, a general uneasiness tormented me incessantly. I can only think of it as a total disarrangement of the whole nervous system, the jarring of all the thousand chords of sensitiveness, each nerve having its own particular pain.–[ Essay on the Effects of Opium, London, 1763.]
“De Quincey, in his wild, metaphysical, and eloquent, yet, in many respects, fancy sketch, considers the great evil resulting from the use of opium to be the effect produced upon the mind during the hours of sleep, the fearful inquietude of unnatural dreams. My own dreams have been certainly of a different order from those which haunted me previous to my experience in opium eating. But I cannot easily believe that opium necessarily introduces a greater change in the mind’s sleeping operations, than in those of its wakefulness.
“At one period, indeed, while suffering under a general, nervous debility, from which I am even now but partially relieved, my troubled and broken sleep was overshadowed by what I can only express as ‘a horror of thick darkness.’ There was nothing distinct or certain in my visions, all was clouded, vague, hideous; sounds faint and awful, yet unknown; the sweep of heavy wings, the hollow sound of innumerable footsteps, the glimpse of countless apparitions, and darkness falling like a great cloud from heaven.
“I can scarcely give you an adequate idea of my situation in these dreams, without comparing it with that of the ancient Egyptians while suffering under the plague of darkness. I never read the awful description of this curse, without associating many of its horrors with those of my own experience.
“‘But they, sleeping the same sleep that night, which was indeed intolerable, and which came upon them out of the bottoms of inevitable hell,
“‘Were partly vexed with monstrous apparitions, and partly fainted; for a sudden fear and not looked for, came upon them.’
“‘For neither might the corner which held them keep them from fear; but noises, as of waters falling down, sounded about them, and sad visions appeared unto them, with heavy countenances.
“‘Whether it were a whistling wind, or a melodious voice of birds among the spreading branches, or a pleasing fall of water running violently;
“‘Or, a terrible sound of stones cast down, or, a running that could not be seen, of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains: these things made them to swoon for fear.’–[Wisdom of Solomon, chapter xvii.]
“That creative faculty of the eye, upon which Mr. De Quincey dwells so strongly, I have myself experienced. Indeed, it has been the principal cause of suffering which has connected itself with my habit of opium eating. It developed itself at first in a recurrence of the childish faculty of painting upon the darkness whatever suggested itself to the mind; anon, those figures which had before been called up only at will became the cause, instead of the effect, of the mind’s employment; in other words, they came before me in the night-time, like real images, and independent of any previous volition of thought. I have often, after retiring to my bed, seen, looking through the thick wall of darkness round about me, the faces of those whom I had not known for years, nay, since childhood; faces, too, of the dead, called up, as it were, from the church-yard and the wilderness and the deep waters, and betraying nothing of the grave’s terrible secrets. And in the same way, some of the more important personages I had read of, in history and romance, glided often before me, like an assembly of apparitions, each preserving, amidst the multitudinous combinations of my visions, his own individuality and peculiar characteristics.–[Vide Emanuel Count Swedenborg, Nicolai of Berlin’s Account of Spectral Illusion, Edinburgh Phrenological Journal.]