"How sweet it were, hearing the downward stream,

With half-shut eyes ever to seem

Falling asleep in a half-dream!

To dream and dream, like yonder amber light,

Which will not leave the myrrh-bush on the height;

To hear each other's whisper'd speech;

Eating the Lotos day by day."

- Tennyson, The Lotos-Eaters.

Since dreams would not always come themselves they could be made to come. The world learned this early, and when the forces of hypnotism, mesmerism and other mysterious faculties were in the hands of the priestly orders, who guarded their secrets so successfully that they frequently lost them beyond recovery, while the few that were rediscovered assumed the aspect of startling newness, the humbler folk whose limited knowledge and inclination have ever held them nearer the homelier and more comfortable element of earth, were studying simples and herbs, especially those that induce sleep and thus serve as a balm for hurt souls.

The hierophantic class, however, did not altogether disdain the use of drugs and narcotics, for while hypnotism and its kindred arts were more mysterious, they were likewise more uncertain, besides which the grottoes emanating natural gases were too few to fill the requirements of a rapidly populating world avid for foreknowledge. Thus when the deadly fumes of carbon monoxide and of carbon dioxide in which to steep the oracular consciousness and to thus open the path for subconsciousness and dreams, were lacking, other means were employed. Ancient lands were misty with smoke wreaths from incense conducive to dreams and visions. Apollo's priestesses after eating the sacred Laurel inhaled its smoke before prophesying, and to-day in the Hindu Koosh Mountains the sibyls breathe deeply of the fumes of the sacred cedar, then drawing a cloth over their heads inhale the aromatic smoke until they fall senseless to the ground.

The burning of sacrificial incense is one of the favorite themes of Egyptian frescoes, the incense was evidently intended to inspire the priest as well as to influence the congregation.

The bacchantes ate ivy and their frenzy was attributed to the influence of the sacred plant.

Anise seed is said by Pliny not only to impart a youthful look to the features, but to have the power "if attached to the pillow so as to be smelt by a person when asleep of preventing all disagreeable dreams."

The seed of Pycnocomen, or Thick Hair, a plant generally, but not always identified with the Leonurus Marru-biastrum of Linnaeus, taken in doses of one drachm of wine, is provocative of unquiet dreams. - Pliny, Natural History, XXVI, 237.

Opium is probably the oldest of the narcotics. Its history trails through unwritten epochs by way of India to China, and its legend during lost ages is confirmed by the poppy, the blossom from which the deadly narcotic is brewed and which is the universal symbol of sleep. It is also the flower of Demeter, tutelary goddess of the harvest.

The Digger tribe of Indians in California, whose nomad traditions have long since been seared out of existence by the white man's scorn, have held to the legend of the tiny crimson poppies that grow on the edge of the desert in the spring. They are called "sleep flowers" and the story goes that he who lies among them even for a little while will be visited forevermore by a spirit who will drag him each night to that same spot, The flame yellow California poppy, or eshscholtzia, bears no legend, whether by reason of the fact that its long, slender capsule contains but little opium, or whether because no legend might survive the blight of the consonants in the hapless flower's cognomen, it is difficult to tell (the unfortunate poppy was called for a German botanist Eshscholtz, whose fame might otherwise have died a natural death).

To opium the world owes Kubla Khan and the gorgeous dream fugues of De Quincey, with their gradual closing in of horror.

"The sense of space," says De Quincey, "and in the end, the sense of time, were powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, etc., were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fit to receive. Space swelled and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the expansion of time. I sometimes lived for seventy or a hundred years in one night: nay, sometimes had feelings of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience."

These dreams, from being gorgeous phantasms of oriental imagery, gradually waxed heavy and oppressive, until at length they distorted to the menace of a nightmare, but in their consistency and continuity more horrifying than any nightmare, other than one drug-ridden, had ever dared to become.

The fancy of the opium dreamer usually riots in oriental imagery and scenes; these scenes may be waked by the dreamer's subconscious association with the history of the drug, or they may be roused by some intrinsic quality of the opium that thus affects the human brain.

Alcohol in various forms, whether as brandy, wine, etc, of the civilized races, or the crude, fermented liquors of barbarous and semi-barbarous people, when taken in sufficient quantity to carry the patient beyond the first exhilarating stage of intoxication, causes dreams.

The alcoholic vision is almost invariably unpleasant. Spiders, reptiles and various other insects are the usual subjects of the dream, so usual in fact that they have been termed typical. These visions invariably begin with the dreamer's sensation of being bitten or stung; this effect is due to a tactile stimulus, for the skin itches from alcohol.

"At first the dream of the alcoholic appears as a passing trouble and ceases on awakening. It is only a nightmare. After a while the dream is prolonged beyond the awakening and exteriorizes itself in a sort of grandiloquized delirium. Finally, auto-intoxication reaches its maximum in that peculiar mental state described by an eminent French physician as Mental Confusion. The recollection of the dream may survive the memory of the dream itself for some time and so become a sort of acute delirium which Baillarger has given the name of fixed ideas." - Bigelow, The Mystery of Sleep.