what he believes possible, and
feels to be exacted by duty; but his intellectual apprehension of what is
possible infinitely outruns his power, not of execution only, but even of
power to attempt. He lies under the weight of incubus and nightmare; he
lies in sight of all that he would fain perform, just as a man forcibly
confined to his bed by the mortal languor of a relaxing disease, who is
compelled to witness injury or outrage offered to some object of his
tenderest love: he curses the spells which chain him down from motion; he
would lay down his life if he might but get up and walk; but he is
powerless as an infant, and cannot even attempt to rise.

I now pass to what is the main subject of these latter confessions, to
the history and journal of what took place in my dreams, for these were
the immediate and proximate cause of my acutest suffering.

The first notice I had of any important change going on in this part of
my physical economy was from the reawakening of a state of eye generally
incident to childhood, or exalted states of irritability. I know not
whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most, have a power
of painting, as it were upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms. In
some that power is simply a mechanical affection of the eye; others have
a voluntary or semi-voluntary power to dismiss or to summon them; or, as
a child once said to me when I questioned him on this matter, "I can tell
them to go, and they go ---, but sometimes they come when I don't tell
them to come." Whereupon I told him that he had almost as unlimited a
command over apparitions as a Roman centurion over his soldiers.--In the
middle of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively
distressing to me: at night, when I lay awake in bed, vast processions
passed along in mournful pomp; friezes of never-ending stories, that to
my feelings were as sad and solemn as if they were stories drawn from
times before OEdipus or Priam, before Tyre, before Memphis. And at the
same time a corresponding change took place in my dreams; a theatre
seemed suddenly opened and lighted up within my brain, which presented
nightly spectacles of more than earthly splendour. And the four
following facts may be mentioned as noticeable at this time:

1. 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 c