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"While I was sitting at tea, I felt a strange sensation, totally unlike anything I had ever felt before; a gradual creeping thrill, which in a few minutes occupied every part of my body -- producing a pleasing glow from head to foot, and inducing a sensation of dreamy exhilaration -- similar in nature but not in degree to the drowsiness caused by wine, though not inclining me to sleep; in fact far from it, that I longed to engage in some active exercise; to sing, dance, or leap...so vividly did I feel my vitality -- for in this state of delicious exhilaration even mere excitement seemed absolute elysium -- that I could not resist the tendency to break out in the strangest vagaries, until my companions thought me deranged....
After I had been seated [at the play I was attending] a few minutes, the nature of the excitement changed, and a 'waking sleep' succeeded. The actors on the stage vanished; the stage itself lost its reality; and before my entranced sight magnificent halls stretched out in endless succession with gallery above gallery, while the roof was blazing with gems, like stars whose rays alone illumined the whole building, which was tinged with strange, gigantic figures, like the wild possessors of a lost globe....
William Blair
An Opium-eater in America (1842)
