CHAPTER XIV.
Opium versus Sleep.—Manner of taking Opium.—Different Considerations Relating to the Habit.—A Prophetic Warning.
What three things does opium especially provoke? As to sleep, like drink in a certain respect, it provokes and it unprovokes;—it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance; therefore, much opium may be said to be an equivocator with sleep; it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on (though it does not take him off); it persuades him, and disheartens him; it makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him.—Shakespeare altered.
But, of the three things that drink especially provokes, but one, and that sleep, is concurrently provoked by the extract of poppies. Still, the sleep provoked by opium is not
“Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep,”
but “death’s half-brother, sleep,”—a state in which, with reference to opium eaters, “their drenched natures lie as in a death;” “their breath alone showing that they live;” “while death and nature do contend about them, whether they live or die.”[5]
The three things which opium especially provokes are,—first, sleep; second, loss of sensibility; and third, loss of sublunary happiness.
Opium puts a man under an influence which must pass away before natural sleep, and in consequence rest, can supervene. Of course, if the opium eater takes an exceedingly moderate quantity of the drug, he may get rest that is refreshing,—that is, if he get any sleep at all; taking too little, defeats the whole object. But in general the opium eater arises in the morning in an inconceivably ill state of feeling. It is almost impossible to arise at all. The heart feels much affected,—and no wonder, lying all night in the embrace of poison sufficient to kill half a dozen of the strongest men. It is a most wretched condition, and the most trying. A man gets up in the morning with no sense of rest, feeling that he has been aroused long before he should have been. Before going to bed he does not feel so; it comes on after having slept about seven hours. His sense of want of rest before going to bed is not to be compared with his misery on getting up in the A. M., though he in fact shrinks from going to bed at all, so painful is the anticipation of the misery of the morning. In the case of De Quincey, it may have been that he had all the time he wished to sleep in. He may have been master of his own time to such a degree that he could go to bed when he desired, and get up when he felt like it. If this was true, he no doubt escaped the miseries others are compelled to endure, whose duties require them to arise at an early hour,—that is, at the hour at which the business portion of the world generally arise. It is most probable, not being under the regimen of fixed hours, that he was able to sleep off the effects of opium, and then get all the natural rest his system demanded before arising. If this theory of his case in this regard is the true one, he escaped a great deal of the suffering usually entailed upon the victims of the prince of narcotics. If I could lie two or three hours longer (or rather later) in the morning (which would carry me far beyond the beginning of business hours in the A. M.), I would get up feeling a great deal fresher and better. Going to bed early does not contravene or anticipate the difficulty. It is compulsory upon one to go to bed early, as it is. The proposition, boiled down, is simply this: The effect of opium lasts a specific length of time, and that must be slept by, and passed, before full relaxation sets in, and the overload of opium passes out of the system. Were I master of my own time, I think I could regulate my hours so as to avoid this misery of opium: at least so modify it that it would be much more tolerable than it now is in my own case. But let us pass on to something else.
It was in the year A. D. 1867 that I was misled into the habit of using morphia, and I have continued its use ever since in greater or less degree: assuming that the essential principle or foundation of all nostrums invented to cure the baneful habit is opium in one of its various forms.