Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 7 – Quincey · Verses Across
Literature · Gothic Fiction
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 7That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
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Literature · Gothic Fiction
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater 7
That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
QuinceyEnglish
to arise between the waking and the dreaming states of the brain in one point—that whatsoever I happened to call 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.
