I. That as the creative state of the eye increased, a sympathy seemed
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.
II. 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 re-ascend. Nor did I, by waking, feel that I had
re-ascended. 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--can not be approached by
words.
III. The sense of space, and in the end the sense of time, were both
powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., 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 seventy or one hundred 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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