Opium and Dreams in the Romantic Period Essay -- essays research paper

During what is generally delimit as the Romantic period, many poets, scientists and philosophers were greatly intrigued by dreams. Southey kept a dream journal, as did Sir Hymphry Davy, a close friend of Coleridges doubting doubting Thomas Beddoes wrote of dreams from a medical perspective in Hygeia and dreams were often a het topic of conversation at the dinner parties of those who kept company with poets and the the likes of (Ford 19985). There were many contradictory theories on the importance, interpretation and origin of dreams, at this time. Some believed that dreams were a form of divine inspiration, others that they were caused by spirits that temporarily possessed the body of the sleeper, while there were those who thought that dreams were a construction of the bodys physical condition. De Quincey and Coleridge were two writers who both held an exceptional engage in dreams, each with their own ideas on the subject. In this essay I propose to examine De Quinceys and Coler idges ideas on dream and daydream, and to verbalise that opium was a profoundly influencing factor in their lives, works and dreams. I shall pelf by sketchly outlining some of De Quinceys and then Coleridges ideas on dreams I shall then move on to ask what was the centre of opium on their creativity, dreams and imagination, before looking at how dream and daydream are severalise in their ideas. Finally I wish to include a brief section on the anticipation of Freud, and to close with the question of how important opium was to the piece of my chosen authors. Since dreams and opium are so intertwined in both Coleridge and De Quincey I tactile property it is appropriate to consider the two subjects a broadside each other.In Thomas De Quinceys Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, dreams and opium are considered simultaneously because he records the largest effect of his opium-eating to fetch been on his dreams. He first became aware of the effects by a re-awakening of a faculty generally found in childhoodI hunch forward not whether my reader is aware that many children, perhaps most, own a power of painting, as it were, upon the darkness, all sorts of phantoms in some, that power is precisely a mechanic affection of the eye others have a voluntary, or a semi-voluntary power to dismiss or summon themIn the nub of 1817, I think it was, that this faculty became positively distressing to... ...a fashion that had started long before and there has only ever been written the unrivalled Kubla Khan.De Quincey wrote that hands are disguised in sobriety, so opium and dreams serve to break dance the true mind of man and perhaps the unconscious mind. Whatever the effect of opium on Coleridge and De Quincey on their philosophies, on their dreams and on their lives one cannot truly know the depth or extent of it, but to take opium and go finished the experience personally. It is certainly undeniable that it was an influence and an extremely important one that continues beyond the present furthering the exposure of mans psychology through the portal of dreams.BibliographyColeridge, S. T., Poems, Everymans Library, London, 1999.Coleridge, S. T., Biographia Literaria, William Pickering, London, 1847.De Quincey, T., Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writings, Oxford Worlds Classics, Oxford, 1996.Ford, J., Coleridge on Dreaming, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.Hayter, A., Opium and the Romantic Imagination, Faber and Faber, London, 1968.Marcus, T., Opium in Literature and London, Issue 3. Zembla Magazine, London, 2004.