THE DREAMS OF DEQUINCEY.

Evening Star, Issue 12882, 3 August 1906, Page 10

THE DREAMS OF DEQUINCEY.

(From ' The Confessions of an Opium Eater.') .

De Quincey, having told how the opium habit slowly undermined his ; will and reduced him to intellectual impotence, proceeds to tell of his dreams, their insuffera.ble splendor, their awful melancholy, and of their sense of infinity of both space pnd time. He continues :

Many years ago, when I was looking over Piranesi's ' Antiquities of Rome,' Coleridge, then standing by, described to me a set of plates from that artist, called his " Dreams," and which record the scenery of his own visions during the delirium of a fever. Some or these (I describe only from memory of Coleridge's account) represented vast Gothic halls, on the floor of which stood mighty engines and machinery, wheels, cables, catapults, etc., expressive of enormous power put forth, or resistance overcome. Creeping along the sides of the walls, you perceived a staircase, and upon this, groping his way upwards, was Piranesi himself. Follow tho stairs a little farther, and you perceive them reaching an abrupt termination, without any balustrade, and allowing no step onwards to him who should reach the extremity, except into the depths below. Whatever is to become of poor Piranesj, at least you suppose that his labors must now in some way terminate. But raise your eyes and behold a second flight of stairs, still higher, on which again Piranesi is perceived, by this time standing on the very brink of the abyss. Once again elevate your eyes, and a still more aerial P. of stirs is descried, and there, again, is the delirious Piranesi, busy on. his aspiring labors; and so on, until the unfinished stairs and the hopeless Piranesi both are lost in the upper gloom of the . hall. With the same power , of endless growth and self-reproduction did my architecture prooeed in dreams. In the early stag© of the malady., the splendocs of rav dreams were, indeed, chiefly architectural: and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as nevet yet was beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clondk . . . To my architecture succeeded dreams, of lakes and silvery expanses of wateit These haunted me so much that I feared lest,some dronsical state or tendency of the brain might thus be making itßelf (to use a metaphysical word) objective, and that the sentient organ might be projecting itself as its own object. . . The waters gradually changed their character*—. from translucent lakes, shining like mirrors, they became seas and oceans. And now came a tremendous change, which, unfolding itself slowly like a scroll, through many months, promised ari abiding torment, and, in-fa-ct, it never letf

me, though recurring more or less intermittingly. Hitherto the human face had often mixed in my dreams, but not desooticall - nor with any special power of tormenting.. But now that affection, which I have called the tyranny of the human face, began to unfold itself. Perhaps some part of my London life (the searching for Ann amongst fluctuating crowds) might be answerable for this. Be that as it may, how it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to reveal itself; the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces upturned to the heavens; faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing: faces that Burged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations; infinite was my agitation; my mind tossed, as it. seemed, u---" tho billowv ocean, and weltered npon the weltering waves. ' J May. 1818.-/ The Malav has been a fearful enemy for months. Every mVht, :throueh_ his means, I have beeii transported into Asiatic scenerv. ...

"All this, and much more than I can sav. the. reader must enter into before he can comprehend the unimaginable horror which thcse_. dreams of Oriental imapery and aiythblosrical tortures impressed upon me. Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China- or Hindostan, From kindred eelings, I soon brought Egypt and her gods under ;the same law; I was stared at, grinned at, hooted at, chattered at by monkeys, .by. paroquets, by cockatoos. I ran into' pagodas, and was fixed for centuries at the sruruxut, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest: T was worshipped; I was sacrificed. I fled from the wrath-of Brama through all the forests of Asia; Vishnu hated me: Seeva lav in wait for me. I came suddenlv upon Isis and Osiris: I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. Thousands of years, I lived and was buried in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed, with cancerous kisses,, bv crocodiles, and was laid, confounded with all unutterable abortions, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.

Some slight abstraction I thus attempt of my Oriental dreams, which filled me always with much amazement at the monstrous scenery, that horror seemed absorbed for awhile in sheer astonishment. Sooner or later came a rtfrax of feeling that swallowed up the aetonishment, and left me, not so much in terror, as in hatred and abomination of what I saw. Over every form, and threat, and punishment, and dim, sightless incarceration, brooded a-lrilling sense of .eternity and infinity. Into "these dreams only it was, with one or., two slight exceptions, that any circumstances of physical borroi entered. All before had been moral arid spiritual "errors. ,' : "But here the main gents were ugly birds, or snakes, or crocodiles, especially the last. The ctD'sed crocodile became to me the object of more horror than all the rtst* I was compelled to live with him; and, as was always the case in my dreams, for centuries. Sometimes I. escaped, and found myself in Chinese houses. All the feet of the tables, sofas, etc., soon became instinct with life; the abominable head (>f the CTocodile, and his leering eyes, looked out at me, multiplied' into ten- thousand repetitions; and I stood loathing and fascinated. . :• -

Then suddenly would come a dream of fat different character—a tumultuous dream—■ commencing with a music such, as now I often heard in sleep—rausio of preparation and of awakening suspense. The undulations of fast-gathering tumults were like the opening of the Coronation anthem; and, like that, gave the feeling of a multitudinous movement, of infinite cavalcades filing off, and the tread of innumerable armies. The morning was come of a mighty day—a day of crisis and of ultimate hope Jor human nature, then suffering mysterious' eclipse, and laboring ' in some dread extremity. Somewhere, but I knew not where—somehow, but I knew not how—by Vc-mc being*

but I knew not by whom—a battle, a strife, an agony, was travelling through all its Ptagts—was evolving itself, like the' catastrophe of some mighty drama, with which my sympathy was the more insupportable, from deepening confusion as to its loc/J scene, its cause, its nature, and its undecipherable issue. I (as is ustial in-dreams where, of necessity, we make ourselves central to every movement) had the power, and yet had not the power, to decide it. I had the,power, if I could raise myself *o will it; and vet again had not the power, for the weight of twenty Atlantics was upon me, or the oppression of inexpiable guilt. " Deeper than .ever plummet sounded," i lay inactive. Then, like a chorus, the passion deepened. Some greater interest was at stake, some mightier cause, than ever yet the sword had pleaded, or trumpet had proclaimed. Then came sudden alarms ; hurryings to and. fro,, trepidations of innumerable fugitives; I knew not whether from the good caure or the bad; darkness and lights; tempest and human faces; and at last, with the sense that all was lost, female forms, and the features that were worth all the world to me; and but a moment allowed • —., and clasped. hands, with heart-breaking partings, and then—everlasting farewells"; and, with a sigh such as the caves of hell sighed when the incestuous mother uttered the abhorred name of Death, the sound was,, reverberated—everlasting farewells ! and again, and yet again reverberfarewells! And I awoke in struggles, and cried aloud : " I will rfpep no more!"