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; 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 in sympathetic ink,
they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into
insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.
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 in sympathetic ink,
they were drawn out by the fierce chemistry of my dreams into
insufferable splendour that fretted my heart.
De Quincey - Confessions of an Opium Eater
