I never read the awful description of this curse, without associating many of its horrors with those of my own experience.
"'But they, sleeping the same sleep that night, which was indeed intolerable, and which came upon them out of the bottoms of inevitable hell, "'Were partly vexed with monstrous apparitions, and partly fainted; for a sudden fear and not looked for, came upon them.' "'For neither might the corner which held them keep them from fear; but noises, as of waters falling down, sounded about them, and sad visions appeared unto them, with heavy countenances.
"'Whether it were a whistling wind, or a melodious voice of birds among the spreading branches, or a pleasing fall of water running violently; "'Or, a terrible sound of stones cast down, or, a running that could not be seen, of skipping beasts, or a roaring voice of most savage wild beasts, or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains: these things made them to swoon for fear.'-- (Wisdom of Solomon, chapter xvii.) "That creative faculty of the eye, upon which Mr.De Quincey dwells so strongly, I have myself experienced.

Indeed, it has been the principal cause of suffering which has connected itself with my habit of opium eating.

It developed itself at first in a recurrence of the childish faculty of painting upon the darkness whatever suggested itself to the mind; anon, those figures which had before been called up only at will became the cause, instead of the effect, of the mind's employment; in other words, they came before me in the night-time, like real images, and independent of any previous volition of thought.

I have often, after retiring to my bed, seen, looking through the thick wall of darkness round about me, the faces of those whom I had not known for years, nay, since childhood; faces, too, of the dead, called up, as it were, from the church-yard and the wilderness and the deep waters, and betraying nothing of the grave's terrible secrets.

And in the same way, some of the more important personages I had read of, in history and romance, glided often before me, like an assembly of apparitions, each preserving, amidst the multitudinous combinations of my visions, his own individuality and peculiar characteristics .-- (Vide Emanuel Count Swedenborg, Nicolai of Berlin's Account of Spectral Illusion, Edinburgh Phrenological Journal.) "These images were, as you may suppose, sufficiently annoying, yet they came and went without exciting any emotions of terror.