ld have been good for me, got into bed again, and blew out the light.
The first sensation I experienced was that of a deliciously gradual
dropping off to sleep, but the keenness of my senses was increased a
hundred-fold. My memory and my imagination bordered on the abnormal.
Every event in my life, from the cradle up to the present moment, rose
before my mind in microscopic detail.

The room was dark; nevertheless, my eye, grown accustomed to the light,
and sharpened by the effects of the opium, enabled me to discover every
object in the room distinctly. There was the bed, the counterpane, every
little tuft worked on it with painful distinctness. There was the
texture of the sheets; every fibre of the blankets, and last, but not
least, the "Phantom Flea" hopping about and around me, and biting me
here and there at his pleasure. The opium in some measure relieved the
severity of the bite, though the latter was still painful enough to
prevent me from going off to sleep altogether. The sensation of delirium
(for I can call it nothing else) caused by the opium seemed to
increase. The room appeared to grow lighter and lighter, till it seemed
to glow with a phosphoric glare.

My sight, hearing, and other senses grew rapidly more and more acute.
Everything around me seemed to swell and dilate into proportions
positively enormous. I felt myself grow larger, the bed grew larger, the
room grew larger, the picture grew larger, and the _flea_ grew larger.
Larger and larger swelled the bed; larger, _larger_, and ever larger
grew the flea, till it attained the proportions of a horse. I noticed
that the larger it grew, the less like a flea and more human it became.
At length it appeared to stop growing, and to decrease, if anything. It
had now assumed the size of a man, and a form almost human. There it
stood at the foot of my bed, with its arms folded on its breast, and its
eye steadily fixed upon mine. How shall I describe the horror of my
situation--feeling my eyes rivetted on that hideous face with a
preternatural fascination? To remove them was impossible. Yet to gaze on
it further was death. I can describe my feelings to nothing else than
the sensation of gradually turning into stone. I felt life fast ebbing
from me. My head whirled, I gasped for breath. I tried to speak, to
implore for mercy, but my voice was gone. I felt my last moment had
come.

The remorseless flea seemed conscious of my agony, and gloated on my
suffering