Case CXLI

"The first thing which caused me to remark a notable change in myself, was the return of those visions to which childhood alone, or a high state of irritability, is subject. At night, when awake in my bed, long processions in mournful pomp passed before me. I listened to interminable stories, sadder and more solemn than those told to Priam or CEdipus. At the same time I observed a change in my dreams; a theatre seemed suddenly to have opened in my brain, and presented me with spectacles of more than human splendor. The four following facts may be mentioned as remarkable. At the moment when the creations of the faculty of sight seemed to augment, a kind of sympathy was established between my real state and my dream state. Every object which I happened to call up and voluntarily retrace in darkness, was immediately transformed into an apparition. I dreaded to exercise this formidable power; for as soon as anything presented itself to my eyes, I had only to think of it in the dark, when it rose up like a phantom, and, by a consequence apparently inevitable, being once thus traced in imaginary colors, it acquired, like a word written in sympathetic ink, an insupportable effulgence, which overwhelmed me.

"This, like all the other changes, was accompanied by inquietude and deep melancholy, impossible to describe. Every night I appeared to descend, not metaphorically, but literally into fathomless abysses, from whence I had no hope of emerging. Even on awaking, I did not believe that I had risen.

"The feeling of space, and subsequently that of time, were both excessively augmented. Buildings and mountains towered in proportions too vast for sight to measure. The plain spread, and was lost in immensity. This, however, alarmed me less than the prolongation of time; I sometimes thought that I had lived eighty or one hundred years in a single night; I even had one dream of thousands of years, and others which passed the bounds of all that man could calculate.

"The most minute circumstances of childhood, and forgotten scenes of my earliest years, were often revived in my dreams;

I could not recall them, for had they been repeated to me the next day, I should vainly have endeavored to recollect them, as forming part of my experience. But placed before me as they were in dreams and apparitions, and clad in all their surrounding circumstances, I recognized them instantly. One of my relatives told me that having, when a child, fallen into a river, he saw, when on the point of drowning, and the moment before he was unexpectedly rescued, the whole of his life, even his most trivial faults, presented to him as in a mirror, and that he felt the singular power of grasping the whole as well as a single circumstance. I give full credit to this assertion after my own experiences of opium.... I find the same idea carried out in modern books, accompanied by a remark which I believe to be equally true, namely, that the dread book, spoken of in Holy Writ, is the conscience of each individual.*

"Together with the power of enlarging and multiplying, architecture was introduced into my dreams. During the latter part of my disease particularly, I saw cities and palaces such as no eye ever witnessed, but in the clouds. Lakes and immense sheets of water succeeded to my architectural dreams. For two months, I suffered horrible pains in my head. The waters changed their character; they were now seas and oceans. Again, a worse change took place, which threatened distressing consequences, and which, in fact, did not leave me, until my disease was cured. Hitherto, the human countenance had mingled in my dreams, but without exciting any alarm; but now, what I shall call the tyranny of the human countenance began to be developed. It was on the restless waves of the ocean that it first appeared; the sea was as it were paved with innumerable faces, all turned upward, weeping, distracted, enraged, rising by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by ages. My imagination was boundless, my soul flowed on with the waves.

"Having, in my youth, seen a dead body laid on a table for dissection, this old impression gave rise to a dream which recurred very frequently. It appeared to me that I was in bed, and had awakened. In leaning on my hand, in order to adjust my pillow, something soft seemed to give way beneath it. It was a corpse stretched by my side. I was, however, neither alarmed nor astonished. I took it in my arms, and carried it into an adjoining room, saying to myself: ' I will lay it there on the floor; it is impossible that it can come in again, if I take the key out of the door.'

* This idea is expressed in all languages, as is proved by the Arabian proverb, cited by General Daumas.

"Upon that, I slept again, and was again aroused. It was by the noise of an opening door; and this idea filled me with a horrible sensation. Then I saw the same dead body come in which I had carried away. Its action was singular; it was that of a man whose bones had been taken out, and who, in his endeavors to support himself by his pliant and flexible muscles, was ready to fall at each step. However, it succeeded in reaching me, and stretched itself upon me. It then became a horrible nightmare, inexpressibly disgusting; for, besides the weight of the formless mass, a pestilential odor arose from the kisses with which it covered me. At other times it would lean over my shoulder, and read the book which I held in my hand. I felt its disgusting beard scrape my throat and my cheek.

"The terror inspired by such a vision may be imagined; I would remain immovable in my seat, not daring to turn the page, with my eyes fixed on the terrible apparition which I saw in the glass opposite. A cold sweat poured from my whole body; then the door would open, and I saw (still in the mirror) a long frightful procession of horrible skeletons enter, each carrying its head in one hand, and in the other a long taper, which shed a red and quivering flame, and spread a dull and bluish light like the rays of the moon. They moved around the chamber, which, from being warm before, now became chill; some came and seated themselves on the dim and black hearth, and holding out their long and livid hands to warm, turned towards me, saying: 'It is cold.'"

We have already noticed an apparition of this nature, which happened to a celebrated professor. (The dose taken by the opium-eater varied from 50 to 60 grains a day, and sometimes reached 150.)*

* The English Opium-Eater, 1 vol. 12mo. This description, which we read with the liveliest interest, and which is very minute, presents several points of resemblance with hallucination and nightmare, of which it exhibits many of the phenomena. Many of the symptoms also occur in the use of the hascbisch. See an Essay on the Use of Opium, Paris, 1834, by

I have somewhat dilated on this subject, because the class of opium-eaters is considerable in England, and none can tell the number of theriakis in the East. Dr. Pocqueville, in his Travels in the Morea, draws a frightful picture of the effects of opium on individuals who yield to the daily use of this preparation. Such is their passion for it, that not all the certainty of death, and the infirmities which precede it, can check their indulgence in this fatal poison.