conducted Coleridge and De Quincey. As a matter of fact, there are but
few persons who get more out of opium than relief of pain, sense of
comfort, and next day's remorses. The opium dream is not for all. I have
known only four or five cases of habitual and distinct opium dreamers.
There was more of Coleridge than of opium in "Kubla Khan," and more of
De Quincey than of the juice of poppies in the "Vision of Sudden Death."
When it came to the telling of these immortal dreams, we may well
suspect that the narrative gained in the literary appeal from the poet
opium-drunk to the poet sober.

It is, I fancy, well known to physicians that opium may act on an
individual differently at different times. In the case of one well known
to me it usually causes sleep, and no longer gives rise to nausea the
next day, as it once did. Although it leaves him sufficiently wretched,
and he has taken it but rarely, the drug occasionally keeps him wide
awake and delightfully indifferent to the passage of time. The striking
hours are heard, and that is all. There is none of the ennui of
insomnia. This effect of morphia is rare with him. He may have taken
morphia a dozen times in his life to ease acute pain, but only twice has
it made him thus wakeful. On these nights he saw an endless succession
of visions, which he did not forget, as one does common dreams. Nearly
all of the hallucinations were of the most amusing character, and were
often long and connected series of ludicrous situations, over which he
wondered, as he lay next day, a victim to the secondary miseries due to
the soothing dose of the night before. This is one of the tricks which
drugs play, and is not a thing to be anticipated. The drug is the same;
the man varies, and with his variations arise peculiarities in the
effects of remedies.

The excess sometimes attained in the use of opiates is almost past