The opium dream was seen as a kind of waking theater of the imagination. And there is in the fascination with dreams an anticipation of the psychoanalytical methods of Freud and Jung; this fascination is felt throughout the literature of the nineteenth century—in Goethe, in Baudelaire, in Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Heine. It is the sirens’ song of the

... See more

Like any currency of value, the human imagination is a coin with two inseparable sides. It is our faculty of fancy that fills the disquieting gaps of the unknown with the tranquilizing certitudes of myth and superstition, that points to magic and witchcraft when common sense and reason fail to unveil causality. But that selfsame faculty is also... See more