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insufferable splendour’; he saw ‘gorgeous spectacles’.
    De Quincey observed that in the dream world the rules of time and space (those stalwarts of the Newtonian universe) broke down completely: ‘Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity.’ Thus, De Quincey describes walking in impossible buildings, whose colossal architecture was well beyond tbe scope of Christopher Wren’s mathematics. Time became entirely meaningless. ‘I sometimes seemed’, he wrote, ‘to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time …’ He was trapped in pagodas for centuries, walked through narrow chambers in ‘eternal pyramids’, assumed different identities – from sacrificial victim to high priest – spoke with gods and animals, kissed crocodiles, and lay down in the mud of the Nile.
    Confessions of an English Opium Eater
acquired cult status almost immediately after publication; however, De Quincey also wrote a lesser known sequel,
Suspina de Profanáis
(1845), which is in many ways even more fascinating. It is an extremely odd, lyrical work – a piece of preemptive psychedelia – populated by a cast of characters that, again, De Quincey became acquainted with during the course of his opium dreams: Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow, The Daughter of Lebanon, and The Dark Interpreter. All of them archetypal figures roaming the landscape of De Quincey’s unconscious.
    But
Suspiria
is not merely a return journey – more lurid confessions and fantastic characters. In
Suspiria,
De Quincey begins to engage with his subject more analytically. For example, in one of the most poetic and penetrating passages he ever wrote, De Quincey considers the relationship between the brain, dreams, and ‘the shadowy’ (for which the word ‘unconscious’ might be legitimately substituted).
    The machinery for dreaming planted in the human brain was not planted for nothing. That faculty, in alliance with the mystery of darkness, is the one great tube through which man communicates with the shadowy. And the dreaming organ, in connection with the heart, the eye, and the ear, compose the magnificent apparatus which forces the infinite into the chambers of a human brain and throws dark reflections from eternities below all life upon the mirrors of the sleeping mind.
    But why should De Quincey’s
Confessions
and
Suspiria
be regarded as travelogues of the unconscious? In what sense did he really descend – like Orpheus – into a psychic underworld? Why make such an assertion in the first place?
    Although De Quincey did not articulate a specific theory of the unconscious, his experiences (and the experiences of his romantic predecessors) do suggest a particular model of mind. A model of a mind partitioned into two distinct parts: an upper, conscious division and a lower, unconscious division (unconscious insofar as the contents of this lower division are ordinarily not available for conscious inspection). The upper mind was considered rational while the lower mind was considered irrational.
    De Quincey describes descending into his sleeping mind, which conjures an image of his shrunken consciousness sinking like a diving bell into the murky depths of his own unconscious; however, such metaphors can be misleading and fail to reflect how the mechanisms responsible for producing strange experiences (such as De Quincey’s) were eventually understood by nineteenth-century psychologists. The most popular explanation was nothing to do with consciousness shrinking and descending into the unconscious, but rather the contents of the unconscious expanding and rising into awareness. This was an idea with a fine philosophical pedigree, for example, Plato suggested that, in dreams, the will is unable to operate and rational control cannot be exerted over the passions. Subsequently, activities and themes emerge in the dream world that might cause considerable