Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

6
Thomas De Quincey
with a curiosity mixed with conceit, to the adepts. One might say a
childish impatience of knowledge, such as that of those who have
never left the corner of their fires, when they find themselves face
to face with a man who returns from distant and unknown lands.
They figure to themselves the intoxication of Haschisch as if it were a
prodigious prodigality, a vast theatre of prestidigitation and of jugglery,
where all is miraculous and unexpected. That is a prejudice, a complete
mistake. And, since for the greater part of readers and of questioners,
the word Haschisch gives them the idea of a strange and overthrown
world, and the desire of prodigious dreams (it might be better to say
hallucinations, which are besides less frequent than we suppose), I
shall now remark on the important differences which separate the
effects of Haschisch from the effects of sleep. In sleep, this adventurous
voyage of every night, there is something positively miraculous;
it is a miracle whose punctuality has baffled mystery. Men’s dreams are
divided in two classes. Some, full of his ordinary life, of his preoccupations,
of his desires, of his vices, are combined in a fashion more or less
bizarre with the objects seen during the day, that are indiscriminately
fixed on the vast canvas of his memory. That is the natural dream: it
is the man himself. But the other kind of dream! the dream absurd,
unexpected, without any relation with his character, with his life, with
his passions as a dreamer! This dream, that I shall call hieroglyphical,
represents evidently the supernatural side of his life, and it is justly
so because it is absure that the ancients believed it to be divine. As
it is inexplicable by natural causes, they have attributed to it a cause
exterior to the man; and even to-day, without speaking of the Dream
Interpreters, there exists a philosophical school which sees in dreams
of this kind now a reproach, now an advice; in one word, a pitiless
moral and symbolical picture, engendered in the spirit of the man who
sleeps. It is a dictionary that he ought to study, a language of which
only the Wise can obtain the key.
In the intoxication of Haschisch, nothing of the kind. Our dreams
are natural; our intoxication, however long may be its duration, cannot
be, is not, really, more than an immense dream, thanks to the intensity
of the colours and to the rapidity of conception; but it must always
keep the particular tonality of the individual. Man has desired to
dream, the dream must govern the man; but this dream will soon be
the son of its father. An idle man uses his ingenuity so as to introduce
artificially what is supernatural in his life and in his thought; but he is